"Mothering may be serious, but that doesn’t mean mothers have to take themselves seriously".

Parenting, like most really important things in life, is both good and bad, both joyful and depressing.

Former Labor Opposition Leader turned Fairfax columnist, Mark Latham loves being a stay-at-home parent, and good for him.

Mind you, as he told us in one of his controversial columns in the AFR on the subject, his life is not entirely domestic. Here he compares his day with that of journalist and mother of two Lisa Pryor.

“I’m sure I’m just as busy as her: looking after a huge native garden at home, cooking gourmet meals for my family, pursuing a few business interests, writing books and The Australian Financial Review columns and, most crucially, preserving time for my children’s homework, conversation and love.”

If that is his experience of being a stay-at-home dad, I’m not surprised he loves it.

Apart from cooking those ‘gourmet meals’ (I have problems boiling an egg) that sounds pretty close to the perfect balance between interesting, fulfilling paid work and caring for home and kids. I take my hat off to him for organising his life so well.

For most of us, however, life both at home and at work is not quite so easy to wrangle into the shape we’d like. Not many of us become stay-at-home parents after being an MP and Leader of the Opposition. Not even those (according to Latham) amazingly content women of Sydney’s Western suburbs.

I doubt many of them are leaping up from penning their next book to cheerfully change a nappy or put a bandaid on a scraped knee, or taking a break from crafting a perfect sentence to add just the right amount of saffron to that gourmet meal.

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Like Latham, my husband would have loved being a stay-at-home dad, but, as it is for many couples, when my kids were little, he earned the higher salary so it was me who got to stay home. I didn’t love it, but watching how the world responded to my husband’s parenting I began to understand why.

If Ralph did anything for the girls, the congratulations rained down on his head. He was a marvel and a wonder, the father of the year. For me, it was the opposite. It was expected that I would do things for my children.

It was when I neglected to do something that I heard about it – and how! We have very high expectations of mothers, expectations that at some point we all fail to reach. We have fairly low expectations of fathers, hence the chorus of praise when they do…well… anything.

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Latham’s determination to do the lion’s share of the parenting piqued my interest so (via his publisher) I asked him the following questions;

1) Why do so many people have such strong opinions about whether it is reasonable or not for mothers to want to return to the paid workforce, not just for the money but because they like their job?

2) What is it that concerns you so much about the decisions these women – most of whom you don’t know personally – make about their lives?

3) Given your wife is in the paid workforce, how do you feel about that?

4) If a mother feels unhappy and unfulfilled by full-time parenting what should she do about it?

5) Do you believe it is feminism that has created this discontent or has it merely given expression to a discontent that always existed among some women (given that it was a marker of class status in previous eras to hand children to others to raise and even breast feed)?

Here, in full, is what I received from Mr Latham in reply.

“I’ve never objected to women returning to the workforce.  Why would I, my wife works while I’m the primary carer of our three children.  This is a falsehood peddled by fantasists such as Mia Freedman.

My objection is to women like Jane Caro who have disparaged the joy of home-parenting, in Caro’s case, describing it as a prison.  There is a pattern among Left-feminists in attacking the enjoyment and value of home-parenting, with Annabel Crabb, Sarah Macdonald, Freedman and Anne Summers having made similar remarks.

I’ve simply been trying to assist these poor deluded fools, in clearing up the contradiction at the heart of their work.

Crabb in her book The Wife Drought, for instance, argues that the key to successful feminism is for more men to stay at home and raise children (i.e. men like me), thereby enabling more women to pursue working careers.  Yet in the book Crabb constantly disparages the joy of home-parenting, such that any man reading her views would stay in the workforce – a self-defeating outcome.

Sometimes, despite my best efforts, it’s not possible to help some people.

Left-feminists should be publicising my positive views on home-parenting to encourage more men to stay at home.  Instead, they attack me as anti their cause.

What more can I do?  It’s one of life’s golden rules: people who are too stupid to help themselves can never see the sense in alternative points of view. They are beyond redemption.

The greatest obstacle to equal opportunities for women in Australia is not necessarily male politicians but the boneheadedness of so called progressives such as Caro, Crabb, Macdonald, Summers and Freedman.

With non-stop ‘prison’ talk the number of home dads will stay anchored at a miserable 2% of the adult population.”

(I don’t want to be picky but I actually called mothering a ‘gilded prison’. By which I meant it was both lovely and restrictive. I stand by those words).

Parenting, like most really important things in life, is both good and bad, both joyful and depressing.

Indeed, most women, regardless of the suburb they live in or whether they identify as feminists or not, love being mothers.What they may not love quite so much is the drudgery that often accompanies staying at home.

What they may object to is the lifetime loss of earnings that they are expected to cop for choosing to give birth to – as Patricia Arquette so pointedly put it – every taxpayer in existence.

How they cope with the very exacting standards we have for mothers, the impossible expectations, the love and the pain that the parenting task entails, is to be honest and often to send themselves up.

Many of the comments Latham objects to so strenuously were meant tongue in cheek. Mothering may be serious, but that doesn’t mean mothers have to take themselves seriously.

Parenting isn’t sweet and endlessly lovely. It is much more interesting than that. It’s hard, demanding, messy, funny, rewarding, painful and exhilarating. And I think most fathers would rather hear the truth than be soft soaped into full time parenting.

I’d love more men to enjoy the delights and difficulties of full-time caring for kids but it isn’t ‘non-stop prison talk’ (I used that phrase once in one not-exactly-deadly-serious article) that’s making them hesitate. It’s the lifetime financial price that full-time parents pay.

Not many of us retire with a Federal MP’s retirement package, after all. The number of older women, many of whom were fulltime parents and carers, who are now facing poverty and homelessness due to lack of marketable skills and superannuation is proof of that.

Jane Caro is a Novelist (Just a Girl), author (The Stupid Country, The F Word), writer, feminist, atheist, Gruen Chick, speaker, media tart, wife, mother and stirrer.

How do we encourage more fathers to be involved as full-time carers for their children?