I was an absent father until working from home changed everything

At the end of those working days, I have more patience, perhaps because I have not just clung to commuting, all Jangly and depleted. I’m already there. I say to the children who love them every day and are awake to feel.

The pandemic has created a space for dads to be more involved in family life. But, more and more, we are asked to give up.

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A recent KPMG poll Found 83 % of the CEOs want staff in the full -time office. In a global domino effect, the maximum corporate weights including Amazon, JpMorgan, Tiktok and even work samples once remotely like Salesforce are imposing full -time yields.

One of the first acts of the President of the United States Donald Trump in office was to order all federal workers to their desks. At home, the coalition undertook to enforce the same for the Commonwealth public employees if elected. Logic? Productivity, responsibility and a not so thin suspicion that working from home is a rort. Peter Dutton Expressed a lot, claiming that taxpayers should not be “hosting public employees in Canberra who refuse to go to work”.

It is a feeling along populism and abbreviation, above all because the proof of productivity is mixed. A Stanford study He found no increase in services spread by the office returns. For many, the distractions of movements, meetings and presentations are more draining than productive.

But it is not really about productivity. These are those who benefit from flexibility and those who lose when it is revoked.

So far, the most visible criticisms have come from women, and rightly. The work senator Katy Gallagher defined the coalition approach “a step in the wrong direction for women who work”, while Verdi’s senator Barbara Pocock called him a “Trumpian” move that will probably push women out of stable and precarious work.

But the loss of conversation is what men, in particular the fathers, are losing.

For generations, paternity was a lateral overwote crammed on weekends and hastened the bed times. But in recent years, we have seen something quite radical: a model of paternity has not been put in the absence but in presence.

We saw what it means when dads are around, not only for birthdays, but for the countless not spectacular moments that make up the life of a child such as the preparation of lunch, school pick-ups, negotiating snacks or panic for the costumes of the book Week (Dog Man, has nailed).

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When men do it, women stop doing everything. With both at home, my wife appreciated not having to manage every collapse, meal and missing shoe. He could take advantage of, take a break, to say yes to job opportunities. For once, “I have a meeting” worked in both ways.

And the children also benefit. They grow with fathers who are full participants in their lives.

This is not to romantic it. Parenting is still difficult, with children swinging between monosyllabic zombies and chaos agents. But it is the quiet and intermediate moments that count more in the end, the “Garbage Time”, as Jerry Seinfeld said. In those moments when you are only sitting together, you don’t even speak: “It’s nothing. It’s everything.”

For me, this version of paternity has been deeply vital. Joy, absurdity, the sacred mess of everything. And while the pandemic was a catastrophe, it also opened a window to a different type of life for fathers like me.

Now, since that window threatens to close, we should ask: what exactly are we running again?

David Halliday is the publisher of Eureka StreetA diary of analysis, comment and reflection that was launched in 1991.