Dad Stuart Heritage, a columnist for The Guardian, is facing backlash this week after branding babies “boring” following a day spent at home, looking after his own son.
Heritage explains how his wife fell ill in the early hours of the morning recently, and he volunteered to stay at home the following day to mind their six-month-old.
Recalling how quickly things went downhill for him, Heritage writes: “It started well. In fact, by midday, I was convinced that she had it easy…This is what my wife did, while I was toiling away for pennies? It hardly seemed fair. But then, in the afternoon, out of absolutely nowhere, time suddenly screeched to a halt.”
“It was just me and him until bedtime, and bedtime was a million years away. What was I supposed to do? We stuck our tongues out at each other until we both got bored. We played with a set of plastic keys, but that got old just as quickly...After all this, I checked the clock. It was still only 2pm. I was outraged,” he added.
Praising his wife and proclaiming that he would be “a permanently undressed alcoholic who subsisted on a diet of chips and biscuits” if he swapped places with her, Heritage added of his son: “I love him and everything but, wow, babies are boring.”
Reaction to Heritage’s piece was far from pleasant, with readers condemning Heritage for his apparently sexist stance on childcare.
“How convenient that women take to the mind-numbingly boring task of childcare ‘naturally’," wrote one irate reader.
@guardian @stuheritage if you find babies boring then there's something wrong with you, not the baby.
— Shahmin Aktar (@saktar20) August 8, 2015
Meanwhile, another commented: “Sorry, this sounds so sarcastic and I love this series and wouldn't put you off, but that "my wife is so amazing, I don't know how she does it" thing is uncomfortably close to "it's actually easier for women, they're good at this sort of stuff". We're not! When it's boring, it's unpleasant for us too.”
What are your thoughts?
