Mit dieser Frage beschäftigt sich Chris Cleave, selbst aktiver Vater, in einem Beitrag des Guardian. Seine für Großbritannien gewonnenen Erkenntnisse sind auf Deutschland übertragbar. Zwei Eckpunkte gleiche Bezahlung und das Elternzeit System sind neben den Vorstellungen in den Köpfen, die entscheidenden Stellschrauben:

According to the Fatherhood Institute, 82% of full-time, working dads say they’d like to do more childcare. But it’s not easy. …

Suspicion and traditionalist views of fatherhood, it seems, conspire to prevent fathers from getting more involved with their children, at home and at school. On top of these are the economic factors that operate to keep fathers in work and force mothers out. Rob Williams, the chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute, thinks that parental leave is key. “Now maternity leave is so much longer than paternity leave,” he says, “it has led to the woman becoming officially viewed as the child carer, which actually gives women less equality in the workplace.

It’s counter-productive. Before a working couple has children, the woman earns 91% of the man’s salary. After kids, it drops to 67%. The driver is the leave system, which makes a break in women’s careers but not in men’s. The leave system itself is deepening gender inequality. The rational decision for any couple is for the mother to stop work and be the carer. This will be true until maternity leave and paternity leave are more equal.”

The inequality of the leave system is arguably the sign of the government’s failure to make the imaginative leap between its long-held policy of getting more mothers into work with its corollary: getting more fathers involved with childcare. And if that is bad news for fathers who want to look after their children, then surely it is equally bad news for mothers who want or need to work – at over 60%, the substantial majority.

Indeed, the closer one looks at how unfair the system is to fathers, the more one realises how tough it is on mothers. In the eyes of modern Britain, mothers seem able to do no right. A study published to fanfares last week found a very modest statistical correlation between mothers working and their kids imbibing fizzy pop and spending time in front of the TV. Naturally, the media sexed it up into Mammageddon. “Working mothers’ children unfit” was BBC Online’s headline. The same day’s BBC News at Ten delivered a damning verdict on the children of working mums: they were sitting in front of the TV, eating too much and doing too little. …

It seems that the media, the schools, the spectre of paedophilia, the prevalence of absent fathers, the policies of the government and perhaps even our own machismo conspire to prevent dads taking an equal share in bringing up our young children. Meanwhile, working women are demonised as unfit mothers, while full-time mums are made to feel left-out or unfulfilled. Isn’t modern Britain groovy? …

Quelle