Ten out of ten for Tom Daley. Not only has he made a splash for modern fatherhood as a high profile gay dad and surrogacy advocate, but Daley also revealed in a Telegraph interview that he and husband Lance Black are now ambassadors for Pampers.
It’s time that men became the face of this mucky business of nappy changing. The 21st Century is meant to be the age of gender equality after all, when more British fathers than ever are at home as the either main or equally responsible caregiver. But when it comes to changing facilities, or the idea that it's only mums who do the dirty work, society’s perception of men, well, stinks.
Men and nappies is a tiresome cliché: an extension of the outdated idea that dads are useless at anything remotely practical, incapable of changing a nappy without burning the house down, or afraid of getting some poo on their finger.
Modern men have been going around in circles trying to figure out and reclaim what it means to be a man. There’s no definitive answer, of course, but I do know one thing: any modern man who doesn’t change nappies – or worse, boasts about not doing it (I’m looking at you, Jacob Rees-Mogg) – is a poor excuse for a man. He’s also a dying breed.
Last year the Office for National Statistics reported 232,000 stay at home fathers in the UK – a figure that had more than doubled over 25 years. Meanwhile, shared parental leave is available to 285,000 couples (the uptake has been slow, but awareness is rising). The ONS also reported that the number of dads working part time has nearly doubled in two decades. The number of working mothers has increased by a million in that time.
In other words, there are more dads mucking in (and mucking out) with the day-to-day baby business. They’re not hard to spot, with their check shirts, big beards, and lightning-quick pram skills. In some ways, they are the personification of 21st Century parenting – yet when it comes to baby changing facilities, we’re woefully behind the times.
Most dads will know all about it. Hardly any men’s toilets are decked out with a baby changing table. Go to any pub, restaurant, or service station and you’ll usually find at best a unisex facility for changing babies. Or at worst, mums-only facilities.
There’s a branch of a well known family restaurant chain in my native Bristol where the only baby changing table is in the women’s toilets, leaving me with an impossible choice: nip into the ladies and risk being branded a pervert forever; change the nappy on the floor of the gents (no one needs reminding that the gents are amongst the foulest places in the known universe); or change the nappy out on the restaurant seats, putting some poor diners off their reasonably priced mixed grills.
It’s hard enough for us dads on the 9 to 5 shift: marginalised and ignored by the motherland mafia in parks and playgroups, forcing us to stand on the fringes like right daddy no-mates; too repressed in that very British way to make other dad friends; and sick of being told we’re “good hands on dads” by condescending passersby, as if it’s a surprise that we’re up to the job.
And there’s the marketing. For decades the classic image used to sell nappies and other baby gear is of some blissed-out mum cradling a similarly blissed-out baby (far more serene than any actual mother and baby combo I’ve ever seen in real life).
Where are the pictures of dads elbows-deep in piles of browned wet wipes? Or dads all bloodshot and glassy, more tired than they ever imagined humanly possible? Or pictures of dads searching desperately for a male-friendly baby changing facility, with a screaming, stinking child clamped to the shoulder? Or struggling to change a nappy on the sink area of their local boozer?
So well done to Pampers for making Tom Daley and Lance Black ambassadors. It’s a baby step in the right direction. Now is time for a change.
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