As a parent, one’s best efforts to present and practise non-stereotyped role-models to one’s children are frustrated or at least contradicted in nursery and in the infants’ classroom, where women are clearly seen as exclusive carers of young children. In particular, my own domestic role as a caring dad is made to appear abnormal.
It therefore seems a compound irony to me that, in seeking out opinion on men teaching infants (“A man about the place”, (TES October 13,) you choose to find out only what the mothers think. Yet again, mums are in charge: dads don’t matter, don’t exist.
Yes, we do need to see more men in childcare - in nurseries, schools, and in homes - but we also need to hear a voice that has long been strangled by stereotype and the non-existence of social provision for hands-on paternity. Believe it or not, some fathers also have opinions on who teaches their children.
PETER MCKENNA 354 Wavertree Nook Road Liverpool.
