The Daddy Trap

Two updates in one day! There must be something in water here... Either that or I'm slightly bored and there's no-one to talk here :)

Anyway, I found this article pretty interesting. It looks at how the traditional gender roles are changing and the larger effects they're having. It's mainly focusing on the male aspect of it - generally bemoaning the stress that men are suffering from trying to juggle everything in their lives - and parts of it I found pretty surprising. For instance they seemed to think it was exceptional that a guy would be covered while he went to look after his son who had seriously injured his eye. Or that a father would miss a company picnic to go to be at his kid's 5th birthday party

I mean really? Is that so surprising that it needs to be commented on? Surely at the very least this should be expected. After all how many 5th birthdays is a child going to have? And let's face it that's the stage when the child still cares about their birthday.

I remember a couple of years ago Mastercard did one of their standard adverts about a guy travelling. It covered the hiring a taxi to the airport, catching a flight, buying some reading material and I think stopping off at a shop along the way (although I could be getting that bit wrong, it was a while ago). Anyway the last bit was the guy walking through his door and a couple of children running up to him. The tagline was "making it home for Christmas: Priceless".

I assumed that that was much more the norm than anything else. Ok, so it was a sloppily romanticised view (in reality the kids would be too busy fighting amongst themselves), but surely as a whole people aim towards that idea?

Maybe I'm just not looking at the world in the right way.