Daddy Daycare - Module 7

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Expert Proficiency Resource Book, Pearson Education

You are going to read an article by a man who took a year off work to look after his young daughter. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A-D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

When I'd first told people that I was taking a year off work to look after my daughter, they reacted in one of three ways. Women, and the more enlightened men, were genuinely supportive and interested to know how I'd approach it. Other men were divided into two groups; those who tried to conceal their smugness and pleasure that I was dropping out of the rat race and those who looked jealous because they thought this meant I'd be taking it easy. This doesn't reflect well on the male population. But men are complicated beings and I can't claim to be totally comfortable with what is, however you dress it up, a reversal of traditional gender roles. My own father was very positive about everything but, in offering kind words, described me as a 'house husband'. Is there any bloke so unconcerned with his sense of self that he wouldn't be disquieted by this job description? The alternative, 'stay-at-home dad' didn't sound great to me either. Because, I reasoned, the last thing I'd be doing was that. Taking care of a child, however lovely she is, can be brain-mashingly tedious. I decided that if we didn't get out and find interesting things to do, I'd quickly wish I was back in the relaxing bosom of the office.

Don't get me wrong, I completely adore my daughter and value every minute we spend together. But up till now, my wife had usually been around and, if I'm honest, did more than her fair share. For the first year of my daughter's life I'd mainly provided moral support and heavy lifting – a sort of child-rearing assistant. Yet I hadn't gone into this lightly. When my wife had to go back to work full-time and could no longer be constantly in control, we looked at other options. We decided against nursery because we thought our daughter was too young to spend all day fighting over toys. We knew a few people with nannies and they swore by them. Some of them will continue to employ these essential members of domestic staff as long as the inequities of the global labour market make it relatively affordable, possibly even when their children have grown up. It wasn't for us. And that left me.

Before starting my new life, I set myself a number of rules so that we'd make the most of our time together. First of these was: no television. I was determined that we'd do something different each day. We wouldn't just muddle through our weeks. We'd learn and grow together as we treated every day as a new adventure where anything was possible. And so four months before my daughter's second birthday, I took charge. On day one of our new life together, my wife was working from home. My daughter made it clear who her preferred choice of carer was. At every opportunity I was reminded I was a mere reserve player, brought off the bench because the star striker was needed elsewhere. So we headed for the playground, or at least tried to. When I picked the child up, she wanted to walk. When I put her down, she wanted to be carried. After fifteen minutes, we'd travelled about fifteen metres and I thought, 'What on earth am I doing here when I should be at work?'

Finally reaching the park, however, we relaxed and began the serious business of playing. I pushed her high on the swings, fast on the roundabout and taught her how to scale the netting to reach the high slide. Mother may know best about almost everything but nobody teaches climbing like daddy. Then on day two she was ill; nothing serious but enough to change her character. Normally she chatters away happily but that day she was giving off that awful whinge-cry-shout noise that other people's children inflict upon you in supermarkets. I needed to stop this quickly, so put a laptop in front of her and clicked on the first children's programme offered by the BBC iPlayer. A cartoon with trains seemed promising. The child fell instantly, blissfully silent. Each time a ten-minute episode ended, I'd hear an insistent request for more and I readily complied. I'm sure I wasn't the first to fall into the trap of thinking, 'What harm can it do? She can learn just as much from a talking train as from me.'

Daddy Daycare

What's it like to be a stay-at-home father?

accept his failure to pull his weight as a parent

admit to his own underlying misgivings about a decision

attempt to justify his failure to fulfil his intention

cast doubts on the true motives of those having recourse to an alternative solution

give an analogy to underline his disappointment

insist that he'd thought through the implications of a decision seriously

recall a momentary feeling of regret borne out of frustration

remember feeling relieved when a problem was successfully addressed

report a misinterpretation of his motives by others

supply a term to help us understand a role he performed

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

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