It’s six-thirty in the evening and my daughter is screaming at me. Her face is red and she can hardly breathe with the exertion of informing me that I’m the ‘worst Mummy in the world.’ Her twin sister has been crying for the last twenty minutes, because I have asked her to tidy up her room, and their brother is slamming doors, for all the world as though he were a decade older than he actually is.
There is the sound of a key in the door.
‘Daddy!’
Three children scamper downstairs, their woes forgotten, to fling their arms around the father they haven’t seen for all of ten hours. By the time I get downstairs he is pretending to be a bear, lolloping around the house with laughing children swinging from his arms and neck.
If familiarity breeds contempt it is clear that the children know me far too well.
The quantity vs quality parenting phenomenon is common to any family in which the mother/father roles are anything other than completely equal. When my husband and I both worked full time, evenly sharing domestic chores and parenting responsibilities, I too received tumultuous applause when I stepped through the door. Nowadays when I come back to the house I am accompanied by three children who are moaning about who has been allowed to sit in the front of the car, or why they have been made to walk. There is no applause.
If the children are not at home – if they’re at school, or at a summer camp, as they are today – I am working. This means that chores such as grocery shopping, paying the bills, cleaning the house, and doing the laundry have to be done while the children are with me. We still go to the park, or out to meet friends, but the times in between are by necessity dull.
In contrast, when their father has a day off, it’s fun, fun, fun. We parent as a pair, and because family weekends are a rare commodity, we make a point of doing something together. Chores are cast aside, and we pile into the car for a Big Day Out.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the children are more enthusiastic about dad coming home, than they are about being with mum. Quality wins over quantity every time.
But what’s the answer?