More and more men are swapping PowerPoint for potty training and embracing the role of the stay-at-home father, says Casilda Grigg.

By Casilda Grigg
Last Updated: 5:02PM GMT 13 Feb 2009

It's 7.30 on a cold winter's morning and three bleary-eyed children are getting ready for school. Alarm clocks are ringing, eggs are frying and the kitchen table is a sea of cereal packets, chewed pencils and exercise books. It's just another frantic weekday morning in a typical British family home, except for one small detail: there's no mother in sight. She left half an hour ago in a sharp suit and a cloud of Je Reviens. This morning, just like any other day of the week, her jeans-clad spouse – aka house husband – is trying to tie shoelaces, pack lunches, blow noses, and get the children out of the house and off to school, without tears, tantrums or mishaps.

Across the land, more and more men are giving up work to become full-time fathers, putting their children's welfare before their professional ambitions, and bucking the trend for selfish career-driven parenting recently criticised by The Good Childhood Inquiry. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that there are 192,000 house husbands in the UK, compared to 119,000 16 years ago.

Some are doing it through economic necessity, others as a positive lifestyle choice. And as the recession starts to really bite, numbers look set to rise further as thousands of redundant men find themselves marooned at home, reliant on their wives' earning power. So fashionable is this new phenomenon that a film is in development, starring Anna Chancellor and John Hannah, about five stay-at-home fathers.

For many fathers who step off the career ladder, the real challenge is not the childcare itself but the isolation. For others it's the small challenges, whether it's doing up the tiny buttons on a toddler's coat, or getting the neck of a jumper stuck on a child's nose. But such blips are of no consequence to the cherished child of the stay-at-home dad. ''What children need is love and boundaries, as well as structure and routine,'' says Dr Frances Goodhart, a consultant clinical psychologist. ''That can be provided on a day-to-day basis by either parent.''

British mother-of-three Laura Watts, who lives in Holland, believes that men excel at childcare but often flounder when it comes to the minutiae of domestic life. ''My hunch is that men are less good at the day-to-day running of the household. It's all those little extras like remembering to send birthday cards or buying the children new shoes."

True though this may be, for many fathers the struggles of multitasking are amply rewarded by the deep closeness they develop with their offspring. But that isn't to say the picture is entirely rosy. Divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd Platt has warned of the strain such role swapping can place on marriages. And even when such arrangements are happily consensual, the trade-off can dent a man's confidence, particularly if he feels a loss of kudos.

Perhaps the way forward for a happy, healthy society lies in parents sharing the childcare and the breadwinning, rather than exchanging roles. ''In Amsterdam there are lots of men and women who work part-time so they can spend time with their kids,'' says Laura Watts. ''At my children's school, half the parents picking up their kids are men and they do perfectly normal jobs. Part-time work is built into Dutch society. Now isn't that just wonderful?''

Great Works: Leviathan (1651), Abraham Bosse and Thomas Hobbes

British Museum, London

By Tom Lubbock

Friday, 20 February 2009

English illustration is a strong tradition. There are many books that can hardly be imagined without their images. Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes come with his nonsense drawings, and Beatrix Potter's tales are more than half-told by her watercolours. The world of Lewis Carroll's Alice books is partly the creation of John Tenniel's pictures – and ditto Dickens' Oliver Twist and George Cruikshank's.

William Blake is the supreme joiner of text and image. Meanwhile, there are many less graphic artists who have used their talents to visualise Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels. The tradition of English illustration has typically been devoted to the fantastic and visionary.

Yet one of the most fantastical and memorable examples of the tradition isn't connected to a work of imagination. It's found in a famous treatise of political philosophy – on the first page of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. This illustration is an Anglo-French work: drawn by a French artist, Abraham Bosse, but designed in collaboration with the philosopher. It shows a giant which represents Hobbes' idea of the absolute state.

The text along the top quotes the Latin Bible, from the Book of Job, and describes the monster Leviathan: "There is no power on earth that can compare with him." The giant wears a crown. He rises above a landscape, and wields a sword and a crozier, emblems of civil and church authority. But his most striking aspect is the way his torso and arms are made up of numerous densely crowded little figures. He is a swarm-man.

The Leviathan giant embodies the answer to Hobbes' great fear, civil war. (He was writing after the English civil war, in exile in France.) The populace agree to surrender all their individual powers. They are incorporated into an undivided, conflict-free body, the all-governing, all-embracing state.

The mass of people is gathered like a congregation. They face inwards, reverently, towards the head of the mortal god, who gazes out. The figures in the multitude are very similar, wearing the same respectable hats and cloaks. They are all male. In other words, they represent the 17th-century franchise – though within that, no class distinctions are registered. The people are equal in their submission.

But this great archetypal image can be seen in numerous ways. See it as a big body packed with little bodies: maybe it was an inspiration to pictures of the Wicker Man. The first one appeared, published by the eccentric English antiquarian Aylett Sammes, 25 years after Leviathan. Or see how the giant's body arises from behind the horizon, out of nowhere. It's the same way that The Colossus emerges beyond the landscape in the painting now de-attributed to Goya. One way or another, fantasy is this picture's destiny.