How are couples coping as more men, due to redundancy, become stay-at-home dads while mothers go back to work?
ED CARROLL and his wife Amy were shocked to hear he was losing his accountancy job, just as she was preparing to go back to work after maternity leave.
He will be left holding the baby when she returns to her IT job in UCD next month – five days a week instead of the four she had hoped for.
There is a significant shift taking place in Irish family life as many more men are becoming stay-at-home dads due to redundancy, while their partners go out to work. How do couples cope with this enforced change in their parenting roles and how does it alter family relationships?
For the Carrolls, after they got over the shock, there were positives. Amy (33) had never wanted their 10-month-old daughter, Lara, to be in a creche before she was one. It also meant Ed (36) had extra time to study for accountancy exams after his contract finished at the end of March.
However, with the exams ending just this week, he has had little time to get his head around what it is going to be like at home with Lara all day. While it is not a lifestyle choice to be a stay-at-home dad, and he will be looking for another job, he says he is not “panicked” at the idea.
“I have taken Lara for . . . ,” he starts, “well, I have never really taken Lara for a day on my own before. But all my experiences have been good so far.” They are planning to do a “dry run” before Amy returns to work – although she might stay in the background.
“I would prefer to be going back on a four-day week,” says Amy, who has had to defer her application for parental leave. “But I am actually looking forward to going back. I am looking forward to having a lunch hour, having a bit of time to myself” – and she looks over at the unsuspecting Ed with an arched eyebrow, as we talk in a Dublin city-centre hotel.
A very cute and patient Lara stands up against the table, enjoying the company of both her parents and making only the occasional foray on all fours towards the main staircase.
Is Amy jealous that Ed is going to be the one at home with their daughter? “Not yet. But I do dread the day Ed becomes the favourite. That’s only natural, and I would like to see it in many ways, but I don’t know how I will cope if it happens.”
She acknowledges it will be a big adjustment for all of them.
“Either Ed will do way more around the house than me, or way less. Ed is pretty good at getting stuff done, but whether he will be able to get it done with Lara in tow is a different ball game.
“I am going to have to learn to bite my tongue if I come home and the place is in an absolute state. I will have to understand it’s been a bad day and that is the way it goes.”
“I hadn’t really thought about that,” muses Ed.
They have talked about putting Lara into a creche one or two mornings a week and/or getting a cleaner if it all gets too much for him. “We just have to see how he manages first,” says Amy.
He worries he does not know enough about Lara’s development and reckons he will have to read up on that. Amy frets that maybe Ed will not pick up on Lara having a high temperature in the way she would.
Before Lara arrived, they were very much equals, both going out to work and sharing the domestic load. It remains to be seen how their new roles might affect their relationship.
Amy is encouraging Ed to get out and about with Lara, as she has done during her maternity leave, and give their daughter a chance to be around other children at parent and toddler groups.
“I am very conscious of the fact that I don’t want Ed getting a job suddenly and she’s, bang, into creche.
“It’s important for Ed as well. I found it very isolating to be a mum at home the first couple of weeks until I got going,” explains Cork-born Amy.
Financially they are “all right”; Amy has always been the bigger earner. They are renting a house in Dublin 8, so have escaped the negative equity trap. They have saved a deposit for a house, but she is not comfortable taking out a mortgage on her salary alone.
“We have plenty for what we want,” says Amy. “The house thing is going to become an issue in a couple of years. We should be there already and we’re not.”
Although they see Ed at home as a short-term situation, if it continues it would be okay, says Amy. “If we had more than one kid, I am not sure it makes sense financially for us both to work anyway. It is good for Ed to have experienced it, for however long.”
“I suppose the main thing is once Lara is happy,” says Ed.
“We all need to be happy though,” points out Amy. “It won’t quite work if she is the only one getting anything out of it!” Lara senses the humour and chuckles loudly.
Stephen McNicholas (41) and his wife, Kathryn O’Sullivan (38), had a lot more time to prepare for the loss of his job – as an engineer with a US multi-national – having been told last October that he would be made redundant at the end of March.
After the initial shock, they were determined to see it as an opportunity – at the same time acknowledging that they are fortunate she has a job, as a placement officer with the homeless section of Dublin City Council
Having both been in employment before and after the arrival of their daughters, Claudia (3) and Dervla (7), their lives have always been very busy.
“It worked for us and we have had very good childcare providers, but it was quite relentless,” says O’Sullivan.
Weekends were for catching up on chores and cramming in children’s activities before returning to work on Monday.
She sees the redundancy as a chance for the family to “get off the hamster wheel, however temporarily”. He is looking for alternative employment and plans to do a master’s course in design engineering by night at Dublin City University, starting next September.
They are winding down Claudia’s full-time creche place, so that the change is not too abrupt for her – or her father.
“The big thing is the mornings – it is much more relaxed,” says O’Sullivan. “It used to be chaos getting out the door.”
Dervla has already observed that “mornings are not rushed any more”. She and her sister used to be dropped at the creche for breakfast before 8am, and staff then took Dervla to school.
The older girl is also enjoying not having to go back to the creche after school.
It means she is able to play with neighbouring children on the green outside their home in Clonee, on the Dublin side of the Meath border, and can take part in after-school activities.
O’Sullivan says there are more stay-at-home dads at the gate of their daughter’s Educate Together school now and her husband, who she describes as “quiet enough”, is starting to get to know other parents.
She does not think he will become isolated. “He is naturally a very active person and keeps busy – he doesn’t miss work, which is interesting. There was a fear around that, but it is early days yet.”
Does she feel a shift in the dynamics of their relationship? “I thought I would but actually I haven’t,” she says. “It is a change definitely, and we have all had to adjust family wise, but it seems to be quite a positive thing at the moment.
“We have been working so hard, running to stand still, I think we almost needed a phase like this. You do think, ‘Oh God, I am the main breadwinner and all this responsibility’, but it hasn’t affected me.”
Is she jealous that he is the one who gets to stay at home with their children?
“The odd time, when I am facing a busy day – thinking wouldn’t it be nice to be lingering there over breakfast!” she says.
ROLE REVERSAL?
Biologically, psychologically and socially men are predisposed to be providers to their family, while women are hardwired to be nurturers, says Lisa O’Hara, a counsellor with the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service (MRCS). Even when both have jobs, the woman tends to be the one who oversees things at home.
“When the roles are switched, it introduces confusion as each struggles to adjust,” she says. It requires careful negotiation, so that feelings are not hurt and their relationship adversely affected.
For example, if she comes in from work and gives out because a certain job hasnt been done or done differently to how she would have done it, he may hear that as a criticism and get annoyed or become withdrawn. She may be sad that shes not the one in the home and he may be upset that he is not able to provide financially.
The MRCS helps couples who are having trouble adjusting to new circumstances after redundancy by acknowledging the loss for them both and focusing on their current lives – what works well enough, identifying the flashpoints and how to minimise the tension.
“Often,” O’Hara adds, “when we are experiencing loss we only feel our own pain, not realising that our partner too may be suffering.”
For more information, see mrcs.ie or tel: 1890-380380
HOME TRUTHS: 'THERE ARE TIMES WHEN SHE WILL COME IN AND ASK, 'WHAT DID YOU DO ALL DAY?' I FIND IT HARD TO ANSWER THAT POLITELY'
Ian Mott (36) was made redundant from his job as a plasterer just before his twin daughters, Kate and Farrah, were born in August 2008.
He and his partner had thought that he would be the main earner once they started their family and she would work part-time. But they did not get that choice.
He was not unduly apprehensive about becoming the main carer when she went to back to work, as the two of them had been at home together with the girls for six months.
“It is not as if I was thrown in at the deep end,” he says.
“I was worried before they were born – could I handle being a dad and that kind of thing.”
He says it took a while to get used to the fact that it was his responsibility to mind the kids, make their dinners and do other chores around the house.
“At the start, all I wanted to do was sit down and watch telly – because I was at home like!”
It is stressful when the twins are “killing each other”, he says. “You get days when they are crying constantly and that can be hard as well.
“It is little things – like I was in the bank and they decided to pull over the leaflet stand. There are two of them and they egg each other on.”
If he has had a really difficult day, he will try to get out for half an hour to clear the head as soon as his partner comes home.
“There are times when she will come in and ask, ‘What did you do all day?’ I find it hard to answer that politely.”
However, the hardest thing was not having his own income. He thinks it is a male thing: “You don’t want to be dependent on anybody else.”
So he started a part-time business, using the Ford Transit van that
was sitting outside the door from his time in the construction industry.
The Mottly Crew (themottlycrew.ie) is an IKEA shopping and delivery service aimed at people who do not have the time, or live too far away, to get to the giant Swedish retailer’s only store in the Republic – in Ballymun, Dublin, close to Mott’s home in Finglas.
He delivers to Cork every weekend and works a few evenings too, enjoying the break from being at home with the girls and the fact that he can pay some bills with his earnings.
Although times are tough, he is glad to have this chance to be with his daughters.
He and his partner had always agreed that they would prefer if it was one of them who saw them take their first steps, heard their first words and took them to school on their first day – “rather than some stranger getting that privilege. You don’t want somebody else bringing up your kids.”
The girls regard him as the boss, he explains, “I would be the one who rules with the iron hand.”
Although they see less of their mother, “their mammy is still number one, it doesn’t change anything there”, he stresses.
Mott does not know any other stay-at-home fathers nearby with whom he could socialise.
It is easier, he suggests, for women to go along to toddler and parent groups because they are surrounded by other women. If he knew there would be other dads at a playgroup, he would feel more comfortable going along.
Maybe if there was a dads’ group, he says, they could go out and talk about day-to-day life, as well as the children.
However, he has noticed that when he meets up with friends in his native Cork, they tend to talk more about children these days.
“Before it was cars, football and whatever.”
