Are you a “doesband”? The latest irritating portmanteau refers to a husband who parents his own children. “A doesband has his own hectic job, but still does his fair share at home Without Being Asked,” writes Harriet Walker, the Times journalist who coined the term. “A doesband knows where the Calpol is and when ballet kit is needed … He gets up with the children and does bedtime; he feeds them, bathes them, does the school run; knows when their nails need to be cut and that behind their ears can get gunky.”
I hate the term, but Walker makes a salient point: that men who share childcare equally with their partners, including the mental load, are still rarer than they should be. There are more and more female breadwinners, but according to the Office for National Statistics, women still do 60% more unpaid work than men. Walker writes about staying awkwardly silent during conversations with other women about their useless partners. It can feel like boasting to go into just how much your male partner does (I’m only discussing heterosexual relationships here).
Since having a baby, I’ve been depressed by how little some men seem to get away with doing when it comes to their own children, and how normalised that is. Take the loathsome phrase “Daddy daycare”, or the fact that my husband is frequently congratulated for taking his own son out for a walk – something that has literally never happened to me. I feel lucky to have a partner who took five months of shared parental and annual leave, who feeds (we combi-fed, which set the tone from the start), changes, comforts, plays, cooks, shops, sorts the childcare payments, night-weaned the baby and – the worst task of all – deals with the nappy bins. Yet I shouldn’t feel lucky, it should be normal.
On the bright side, lots more men are what used to be called “involved fathers”, while also trying to hold down full-time work. Seeing how challenging that can be has made me reflect how, in our capitalist system, men can’t have it all either. For many, being able to work from home during the pandemic has been a gamechanger. “I don’t think women are inherently better caregivers than men,” says Alex Marsh, a 39-year-old market researcher with two daughters, aged nine and 12. He tells me that he has always strived to do his share, remembering how the midwife “wrote ‘hands on dad’ on her notes, as though that was remarkable” when he and his wife said they shared the nappy changing. Alex was the “night duty” parent, but was still working in London all week.
Now that he only goes into the office twice a week, he is able to read his kids bedtime stories every night, cook most of their meals and handle their school admin: “And I love it,” he says. Alex says he doesn’t feel that exceptional among his peers, except maybe in terms of the cooking, but he worries that they are a minority. “There are still a lot of relationships out there where the woman is expected to do more, simply because she is a woman.”
A friend who works in tech, a similarly hands-on dad, doesn’t feel rare either. He finds the term “doesband” infantilising. He’s messaging me back at 3.05am while trying to settle his toddler daughter and says the majority of fathers he knows are equal parents. In his industry, it’s considered commonplace: he got four months of paid paternity leave.
“I still notice a huge generational legacy in behaviour,” he says. His grandparents and parents have been surprised by how dedicated he and his partner are to parenting equally. That’s not to say it’s easy: “There’s no getting around that it’s draining and runs you into the ground ,” he says. “In the early stages there’s anger and frustration.”
My friend’s talk of the early stages makes me think that perhaps some couples succeed at equal parenting right off the bat, while others negotiate and learn as they go. Steph Douglas, 42, who runs the thoughtful gift company Don’t Buy Her Flowers and has three children, says: “It’s been a ‘journey’ that has involved me trying to understand why I was so resentful and unhappy after we had kids.” She found the “fair play” method – a system that helps couples share household chores equally – key in making their parenting genuinely more equal rather than simply giving her husband a list of tasks. As well as now sharing much of the parenting, her partner is in the school WhatsApp group – they succeeded in signing up all the dads after she noticed it was only mothers.
Some of us might move in circles where equal parenting is the norm, but the stats tell a different story. There is cause for hope, though. While hands-on dads have always existed, they are becoming more commonplace among younger generations of parents, and policy – especially in terms of paternity leave – needs to catch up. Women seem less inclined to put up with an unfair division of labour and a heavy mental load, which is sexist and in many cases no longer makes financial sense. I enjoy the TV comedy Motherland, and have seen that, sadly, the useless, absent husband in it reflects the reality in some households. But millennial fathers I speak to repeatedly highlight how retrograde and depressing the wimpy stay-at-home dad character Kevin is. He simply does not resonate with younger parents, and though there is still a long way to go, that can only be a cause for hope. As for the term “doesband”, it can get in the bin with the nappies.
What’s working
As well as equal parenting, I owe a lot to YSL’s Touche Eclat concealer for making me look less haggard after all the sleepless nights. (“Why don’t you look like a shoe?” my friend said, suspiciously, when she met me for lunch shortly after I gave birth.) But now I’ve found a new favourite: Beauty Pie’s Superluminous Under-Eye Genius cream. It’s genuinely life-changing.
What’s not
We have unwittingly created a sleep association with Norah Jones’s 2002 blockbuster album Come Away With Me, so our home environment now sounds like a Blairite dinner party.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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