Let's hear it for stay-at-home fathers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/stay-at-home-fathers

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Finally some good news on the parenting front. The cost of childcare may be soaring and Sure Start's funding reduced, but new Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures show that 10% of the parents who stay at home to look after their children are fathers – a record high.

I have always been a propagandist for fathers, probably because my own was so involved. He worked partly from home and, though I doubt he could boil an egg, he food-shopped, bathed his babies and stayed up (sometimes all night) soothing us when we cried. Not bad for someone born in 1900.

Some of the increase in stay-at-home fathers, of course, is the result of male unemployment, but a lot of it is also because growing numbers of men have woken up to what they've been missing out on in the home while they've been out at work. And because so many of them have seen through the ideological guff about motherhood and realised that hey, they're as good at wiping noses, making playdough giraffes and whipping up a macaroni cheese as any woman.

Or better. When my first child was born her father, whose third child she was, proved to be a much less vexed and more creative parent than me, who didn't feel altogether jubilant about this fact: join in and all that, but please don't make me look incompetent in the process. In our case we shared childcare and both worked part-time, which resulted in two exhausted, under-earning parents rather than one.

For mothers, handing over half or all the childcare to a male partner can require a major adjustment. It's a displacement: you must learn not to take umbrage when your child absentmindedly calls you "Dad", or to prissily try and impose your own way of doing thing as if it were intrinsically better. You are no longer empress of the home, but at best a member of a coalition government.

The rewards are ample: you trade in your control-freak dominance for peace of mind – the person looking after the kids is at least your equal in competence, kindness and (probably) grouchiness. Because, on the whole, men who choose caring for their children over the traditional male breadwinner role, though the decision may be a pragmatic one because their partner earns more, generally really want to do it and haven't fallen into it because it's expected. Somewhere, too, they know that sustained contact with small children vastly reduces the orbit of your daily life – a visit to the corner-shop is a major expedition – but hugely expands you as a human being.

These days it also brings a certain kudos. There's little sexier than a big man attending to a small child. "Aren't you lucky?" women say to me – all because I live with a man who takes active responsibility for his own children. I'm still waiting for someone to call him lucky.

And what of the children? It's gain all the way. There's no better lesson in egalitarianism than learning that your parents are essentially interchangeable. Children of involved fathers are more cognitively competent at six months, have higher IQs at 3, do better academically, are less likely to be obese or have behavioural problems or suffer depression, are less likely to become pregnant as a teenager, accept themselves more, are more empathetic and less likely to divorce.

Jeez. Of course you need to adjust all of this for social class but still … you wonder why governments and states, even if all they care about is the bottom line, don't reorganise everything to enable men to get seriously involved with their kids. The financial, not to mention human, benefits would be incalculable.

In the meantime, those benefits will be showered on the rising number of families with stay-at-home fathers, whom the ONS dubs "economically active". But an American trendspotter had declared 2013 the year of stay-at-home fathers, who she predicts will be the next big demographic target for advertisers. Watch out for the daddy ads.