A conversation that I have recurrently found myself having with my five-year-old daughter is on a topic that would easily incense many spirits: that of gender roles and job distribution within a family. Or, to put it more clearly, MY role within OUR family, and her assumption that my being a stay-at-home mother somehow places me on an inferior position to her father.

Whenever the topic of money or work comes up, she has often said things like: ‘But you don’t work… only Daddy works’ and ‘You don’t have anything to do during the day.’ In fact, she seems convinced that I don’t do anything during the day – obviously, what is there to do after dropping her off at school in the mornings, other than to look at the hands of the clock hands, willing them to go faster until they get to 3 pm and it’s time for me to go get her? (The small detail of her baby brother being at home seems not to come onto her radar.)

Of course, this erroneous assumption is unsurprising for a five-year-old, for whom reality extends only as far as whatever she can see at any one given moment. But it is also largely my fault. I have never liked to do much housework when she is around, and the fact that I have kept the menial parts of existence more or less hidden from her have led her to believe they don’t exist. Now, it would be easy to say that I can’t really do much housework now anyway, with an intrepid and curious little toddler who follows me around like a shadow and tries to ‘help’ by getting into everything… But, in all honesty, housework has never been my forte, nor my greatest interest, so I have used the presence of the children as the best excuse for procrastination. This, coupled with the fact that I have been lucky enough to have had the help of a cleaner for a few years now, has just perpetuated the Girl’s impression that I hardly ever lift a finger around the house. This has consequently given rise to two issues: firstly, a sense at times that she undervalues my role (how can I be of any importance given that I don’t DO anything?); and secondly, an utter naivety about the practical necessities of running a household. This second aspect became embarrassingly clear to me a few months ago, while looking together at Nick Sharratt’s wonderful book Just Imagine: when we were discussing the pages about the items one might use to furnish a house, my girl who is often surprisingly eloquent and linguistically advanced for her age could not think of the word for an iron, and then when I asked her what the iron does, she answered, very tentatively: ‘I don’t know… Clean or something?’ (Needless to say, since then I have made a big effort to show her just how much housework I actually do: I have also ensured that she has seen me iron, and she most certainly knows what an iron is now as well!)

And yet, this has highlighted two further issues for me. On the one hand, I don’t want my daughter to grow up believing that housework is unimportant, unnecessary, or even menial. Sure, it might be unpleasant, boring, uninspiring, but it is an unavoidable part of existence, and living in a neat and organised household can only help our feeling of psychological comfort as well.  My mother’s grandmother (whom, sadly, I never met, because she died a few months before I was born, but whom I feel I know because of the many times that my mother used to cite her) had a saying: ‘It doesn’t matter how much of a lady you become, you need to know all the ins and outs of running a household, otherwise you won’t be able to tell your servants what to do’. (Wise words indeed from someone with a very basic education, who lived in a village in the middle of nowhere and who had most certainly not been born with a silver spoon in her hand…). On the other hand, a second issue derives from this, and this seems much more troubling: does the menial nature of housework make the person in charge of it equally menial?

My daughter’s improved understanding of the responsibilities of a homemaker only made matters worse in her understanding of the job distribution in our family. A while ago, we had a conversation which started, once more, with her telling me: ‘Well, you don’t work. Only Daddy works, you don’t do anything’. This hurt my feelings, and I was more vulnerable to it because it happened during the morning school run (I’m generally more tense during the school run than at other times; getting out of the house on time with two small children, having been woken up far earlier than I would have liked, is quite stressful). So I felt I had to answer her back and correct her erroneous assessment. I asked her: ‘So, if I do nothing, then who does all the shopping for the house? Who takes you to school and back, and to your your other activities like choir, piano, karate etc.? Who looks after your clothes? Who washes them and puts them in your wardrobe? Who irons them? Who buys you new clothes and shoes? Who looks after your little brother? Who keeps the house tidy? Who cooks your food and who prepares Daddy’s dinner after you’ve gone to bed? Who puts you to bed and reads with you?’ As expected, after each question, she answered ‘You do’, but I noticed her voice was becoming sadder and more worried every time. After a while, to my amazement, she said: ‘Then, Mummy, I don’t want to be a woman.’ Although I was quite taken aback, I told her: ‘Well, darling, I’m sorry, but you’re a girl, so you will grow up to be a woman, that’s just how things are.’ She surprised me yet again with her answer: ‘I wish there was a way to turn women into men and men into women then…’ (I was SOOO tempted to say ‘Well, actually….’, but I figured the topic wasn’t the most appropriate for a 5-year-old, so I bit my tongue.)

However, her judgement of my role within the family, as well as her reaction to my description of (some of) the things I do really got me thinking… and got me worried as well.

The discussion didn’t finish here either. This kind of remark was not an isolated incident, and she once even told my husband while they were alone: ‘If jobs didn’t exist, we wouldn’t need husbands’ (a damning pronouncement both for women, because it reveals her belief that women don’t have jobs, and also for men, because it seems based on the implication that jobs are all men are good for, and they have no further role). Within our family, this state of affairs has been mitigated by the fact that my husband has been wonderfully supportive in telling the Girl a lot about my previous career in academia, my degrees, my university years in Cambridge, as well as all the things I have deliberately given up in order to be at home with her and her brother.

Although my husband’s support has put paid to the Girl’s dismissiveness about my role as homemaker, the bottom line remains. She is undoubtedly not alone in responding to a perpetuated and hugely unhelpful stereotype, which rests on the assumption that women who stay at home do nothing, or that, however much they do, they are less valuable than their husbands and than other women who work, because they don’t make any money, and no one has thought them sufficiently important to give them a job (This does not even begin to address the reverse side of the coin, of families where the women are providers and the dads stay at home to look after the children, where reconciling stereotypes with the realities of day to day life must be even more complex). Ultimately, like all parents, I’m sure, I want and need my daughter to be proud of me and to grow up viewing me as a good role model alongside her father. Yet, I’m not helped by circumstances or by societal preconceptions. A few months ago, the Girl’s school invited willing parents to come and talk to the children about their jobs: there were all sorts of people there, from the pilot to the office manager, researcher and teacher, media specialist etc… But there was one job notoriously absent: the stay-at-home parent. Now in some ways I fully understand why the school officials didn’t want to promote the ‘unimpressive’ (underachieving?) role of stay-at-home-parent : after all, this is a good, aspirational school which seeks to teach children to aim high and to believe that they can achieve anything they set their mind to. Surely doing something as menial, as available to all (regardless of educational level or skill) is not something that would immediately appeal. And yet, isn’t it a matter of choice? Isn’t being a homemaker, a stay-at-home parent, an equally important role (if not even more, perhaps)?

There is a lot more to be said about this topic, and I’m sure I will come back to it, but I think there is an important lesson to be learned here, both for me as a mother and for the Girl. I made a conscious choice when I decided to become a homemaker, at least for the time being, and there is no shame in that. The job I do might be an unpaid one, but it is extremely important: I am growing people, and the happiness and stability of my family depend on the work I do for them. This is no mean thing, and I need to be better at teaching the Girl (and the Boy as well, when he is able to understand it) that making this choice is perfectly acceptable, and no better or worse than choosing any other path. When her own time comes, the Girl might choose to rise ‘above’ the menial tasks of homemaking, or she might choose to do the same as I have done: whatever she chooses, the choice will be hers to make and she must make it with full knowledge of all its implications. No judgement, no pressures, no unrealistic expectations – just the freedom to simply be, to own who she is and to be proud of it – even if all she is (or what she has become) is a stay-at-home mum, who has to explain all this all over again to her own children.