Earlier this week, the law changed to enable men to share the leave that women are currently entitled to after the birth of a child. From 5 April next year, men can take up to 50 weeks of paternity leave, while their partners can go straight back to work.
The prospect of shared parental leave hasn’t gone down well with British men, according to a survey in the Daily Mail. Seventy-five per cent of men are opposed to the new law, rising to 80 per cent for the over-45s. Only 10 per cent said they’d like to take full advantage of this new entitlement.
I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s not the prospect of having to compete with women on a level playing field that frightens men, but the thought of having to look after their babies for a year. As a father of four, I still have vivid memories of getting tangled up in nappies and spilling sterilised breast milk on my MacBook Pro. The fact that, until this week, men were only entitled to two weeks of paternal leave was a godsend.
After almost 12 years of family life, it’s hard for me not to conclude that women are more suited to this work than men. My wife took to parenting like a duck to water, whereas I found everything to do with babies endlessly perplexing. Indeed, it all came so naturally to Caroline that she simply couldn’t understand why I found it so hard. Often, she would angrily take over a task I was struggling to perform, such as assembling a collapsible buggy, and then accuse me of deliberately mucking it up in order to avoid doing it again. I went from being the head of the household — at least notionally — to being my wife’s bungling assistant.
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