I am a negative role model

When I’m not being an august commentator on world affairs, I have a secret life. I get up too early, serve Weetabix and then scrape it off the floor, hyperventilate while my daughter gets dressed too slowly, act as a sort of boxing referee for my two boys, brush various people’s teeth including sometimes my own, and finally help my wife push all children out the door. I then go to a café to recover, before I can start my day as an august commentator. In the evenings I rush in and perform the same ritual in reverse. I reckon I spend about 30 hours a week on childcare.

All this is now normal. Countless fathers and mothers in western countries live more or less like this. Yet most of us fathers never expected it. That means we are probably more confused about our current state than mothers are. Modern fatherhood represents much more of a break with the past than does modern motherhood, yet is much less discussed.

Nothing in my childhood prepared me for this life. Admittedly my father, unlike many dads in the 1970s, actually changed diapers and watched our football matches. Yet when I asked him whether raising three children hadn’t driven him insane, he said, “I never really noticed. We had a garden.” No father was then expected to put in 30 hours a week. And we boys received no other training for fatherhood. Girls in my class played with dolls and babysat and went to view new babies. Boys didn’t. We were raised to expect to have time for ourselves.

When experts try to explain how the father’s role changed, they often talk about men’s growing desire to connect with their children. That’s probably part of it, but it’s only the official story. The truth is more Darwinian. Quite simply, almost every man in my generation wanting to succeed in the mating game with thirtysomething women had to include the promise of childcare in his offering.

A European father who never lets childcare interrupt his work is now seen as weird. That’s why the British prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg made an early show of adopting “flexible times” for cabinet meetings so that they could take their children to school.

Only a few men escaped this fate. I witnessed one of these fugitives on holiday in Miami last Christmas. While I was spending my entire “holiday” looking after children, this guy delegated childcare to his wife while he scurried off to “work”. I say “work”, because his “work” included sending me a long e-mail describing his triumphs at his hedge fund and urging me to write an article about him. His offering in the mating game had presumably been: income. Most of the rest of us had to be more diverse.

Today the average resident employed British father has two hours of contact with his children a day, up from a magnificent 15 minutes in the mid-1970s. That change represents a reinvention of the father’s role. True, mothers still do much more childcare, but all in all, contrary to popular opinion, fathers may end up busier because they typically spend more time at work. For instance, Canada’s General Social Survey on Time Use for 2005 showed that the average Canadian father did 9.9 daily hours of paid work and childcare combined. The average mother did half an hour less.

And so after work, fathers plunge into the “second shift”, trying to get the kids tucked in by what the children’s author Mo Willems calls “half-past bedtime”. Sometimes the second shift offers transcendent joy. Often it doesn’t.

In a family there is usually love, but not much in common. Children are from Venus and adults are from Mars. We often find their conversation as boring as they find ours. I know these are clichés of Mom Lit, the manifold reflections on parenthood written by and for women, but childcare is probably more frustrating for men because nobody ever socialised us to look after children. The best way to guarantee yourself frustration during childcare is to think of all the other things you could be doing instead. But I had grown up expecting to be able to do these other things, and so I think of them. That frustration is to fathers what guilt seems to be for many mothers.

Yet men rarely talk about it. Fathers just parent; they rarely debate parenting. There is very little Dad Lit, beyond some wry accounts of how cute kids turn out to be when they aren’t screaming for unexplained reasons at 3.15am. As for Mom Lit, it features fathers chiefly as blundering Homer Simpson-types.

At least my sons will have a role model for the hyper-involved father. Admittedly it will probably be a negative role model, always turning purple with frustration, but I hope it helps them somehow.

simon.kuper@ft.com