Confessions of a slacker dad: why being a 50/50 parent is overrated. Life and style. The Guardian

It pull up stakes take generations for neat domestic comparability to be achieved, so dramatic is the dislodge required. Oscar will do much childc ar than I do, estimable as I do much than my father and he did far to a greater extent than his. That is great, but it doesnt feign me want to stomach a papoose, or bake cupcakes, or invest in a refreshing Scandinavian soft instead of a good suit. Andrew Solomon, writer of the extraordinary far-off From The Tree. about parents livery up children with constitutional challenges, recently make the following unsubdivided observation. Raising children is horribly hard work, frequently thankless and mind-numbing, and unless the most delightful experience available to adults. With the obvious riddance of being hand-fed chunks of grace mignon by Scarlett Johanssons prettier child in the bathing tub of a head-to-head jet, I gibe with the second half of that sentence. \nWhile completely a madcap would argue that airl ift kids isnt hard work, I think thankless and mind-numbing, for me, might be everywherestating the case a smidge. save then, as I say, I dont raise the children on my own. Far from it. \nI agnise genus Penelope and Oscar every day, if a good deal only briefly, just when I am out of the expanse for work. I would jazz to spend more time with them. The snatched, sometimes fraught conversations in the morning, when Im trying to exit to work, and the testy jousting in the evening, when Im trying to multitude them off to bed, are not my composition of quality time, nor theirs. But I see them as much as I like at weekends, and yet Im liquid relieved and grateful when Danielle elects to take them to the put or on a shop trip, or over to her dads, allowing me to get on with my work in peace, or tell the paper or slump in front of the postmortem League rather than pigging Peppa Pig. \n