Australian swimmer Cameron McEvoy just set a new world record for the 50m freestyle.
McEvoy’s record of 20.88 is of special interest to swimmers because he’s been training for his sprints in an unconventional way. Compared with most world-class swimmers, he’s barely swimming. McEvoy has gone from swimming 30km a week to just two. Basically, he believes that explosive sprinting is helped by practising explosive sprinting, not hours and hours lapping the pool.
McEvoy has also voiced excitement about another regimen change: fatherhood. After a win at the World Aquatics Championships last August, he announced he was taking some time away and “entering the newborn trenches”, describing plans to “start to do the night routines” to “help [his wife] Maddi, and just enjoy the bubble really”.
“I have an eight-month-old son, and now my relationship with swimming is very different. I train hard, but I come home, and I’m straight into ‘dad mode.’ Whether I have a good or bad session, it doesn’t matter,” he said after his record-breaking swim last month. “I go home, I play with my son, and that’s brought a lot of balance to my life.” His attitude to training is benefiting from the psychological significance of a home life that puts things into a grander perspective. His disruptive training strategy is supported by incredible results in international competition, but he also hints at a kind of moral buttress – it’s giving him more time at home with his wife and baby.
It’s refreshing to hear this work-life balance discussion framed so positively against such an interesting backdrop – elite competition. And for once, it’s a father talking about the relationship between work and care, and moving between “dad mode” and “work mode”. This is the kind of attitude that is made possible when the right balance is struck between the different segments of life.
This is in stark contrast to what appears to be a designated industry that has emerged online committed to encouraging women to make domestic work the lone business of our lives.
Tradwife influencing is a pernicious and self-refuting kind of grift, encapsulated by a group of people who work (in anti-work promotions), enriching themselves by evangelising complete financial dependency while encouraging women to step into their “divine feminine energy”. See also a new “manosphere” discourse cementing another side of that coin. The message from both is that basically, caring for children is beneath the dignity of “real” men.
One especially frustrating aspect of this kind of discourse is a kind of binary it imposes. A person is either a “working” parent or “stay at home” parent. Obviously, staying at home to provide care is work. It is more demanding work than any professional work I have done, requiring (among other things) a level of physical and emotional capacity that my research career has so far survived without. Really, we’re talking about traditionally paid versus unpaid work.
What is frustrating is how much infrastructure supports this binary. Maternity leave is a full-time business. Part-time childcare is hard to find. Truly flexible childcare, where the amount you avail of can change week to week is basically impossible within the current landscape. We don’t have shared parental leave, so the norm in two-parent families is for one spouse to take an extended period of full-time leave and the other to take some initial leave and maybe some additional intermittent leave later.
In this way, society steers parents towards two options: working full-time outside the home with children in full-time childcare, or looking after children and not working beyond that. Surely, the spectrum in between is where most people would prefer to be?
The phrase “happy mum, happy baby” used to register like an irritating platitude. It has taken on additional depth recently as I unpack the power of the idea that children are best off with fulfilled parents who have balance between the various strands of their life. Care, work and leisure shouldn’t be regarded as a zero-sum battle for supremacy. For me, the happiness that has emerged from a good relationship with work and a return to sports enables me to be a version of myself that I like. That is the energy I am bringing to my children.
On the other side, I remember feeling real imbalance at times in maternity leave, missing work and frustrated that a husband who wanted to do more towards minding the babies didn’t get more space to do so within the leave arrangements then possible.
More flexibility in the system is needed to help us flourish, and more recognition that we should expect to find parents differently distributed across the axis between full-time work outside the home and full-time work within it. This includes parents who want to work minding their children full-time.
Last week, Maria Steen asked in these pages what more can be done for her friend who, for cost of living reasons, has been forced back into the workplace before she is ready. The key is a system that properly recognises caring as work.
What is needed is more flexibility and the pursuit of balance, rather than the reductive vision offered by the tradwife life.
Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland Enterprise Fellow, working at University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland
