Forget bathtime: working parents can't have it all
We are all enlightened about childcare nowadays - especially our own. Gone are the days when we used to pretend we were leaving early because the carburettor needed fixing. We confess to parents' nights and inconveniently timetabled school concerts (though I draw the line at assemblies).
Yet beyond the polite rules of office intercourse lurk unspoken irritations and resentments. Other people's childcare is the subject that causes more frissons in the workplace than anything else.
So it was with some amusement that I watched Louise Mensch last week, assertively telling James Murdoch and the Culture and Media Select Committee that she would be leaving the session pronto to pick up her kids. No doubt some of her colleagues and a fair few viewers wondered whether, this being one of the great set-piece interrogations of the parliamentary year, Ms Mensch might have thought of getting some help to tide her over the lunchtime. Being an MP is, after all, a full-time job, and as sympathetic as I am to women who do it and have to juggle work with family commitments, that's part of the deal. Staying till 1pm isn't exactly an onerous requirement.
She isn't the only MP to say something daft on this issue: I remember Labour's Kitty Ussher complaining that Westminster hours meant she rarely got back for her children's bathtime in the week. But most women with demanding professional jobs and the associated rewards can't bank on being home for rubber-duck time either.
As the philosopher Kant said (though not of bath times): "The great goods cannot live together." Something has to give, and it is generally contact time in the day and early evening with your little ones, while you make your mark in the world.
The real change since I had my children has been dads taking seriously the stuff that women used to dash around to do alone. This is generally a blessing but it also means that female bosses who rarely took more than a few weeks off for their own children have to smile nicely while male colleagues take lengthy paternity leave and look virtuous about it.
In one highly paced outfit I know, this led to a female senior manager working six days a week to cover for a male deputy on paternity leave, while her own kids wondered why they rarely saw her.
Legislation rarely considers the poor blighters who have to pick up the pieces these days, when there is so little financial scope for casual stand-ins.
Still, this is better than the situation I encountered when first having children and my then boss turned up at our house to ask when I was coming back to do a new job that had become vacant and needed doing pronto (and of course I said "Sure, immediately": it's called Working Woman Syndrome and there is no cure).
By little shoves and shifts of mores in the workplace, we have got closer to a fair balance in the treatment of professionals who are also parents. Yet there's another side to the equation, which is not intruding our own arrangements too much into the lives of the other members of the team. If I were Ms Mensch, I'd add "stand-in nanny" to speed-dial as soon as possible.
