Sunday,  November 19, 2000		Article

BRIAN Hick is not the sort of fellow you imagine when words like ‘househusband’ are thrown around — and certainly not one you would expect to find changing nappies at a childcare centre.

He is a man of the Valleys — a product of a part of South Wales where a culture of rugged machismo has yet to feel its first breath of feminist air — and at a beefy 1.83 metres and 105 kg this former army recruit, mine worker and rugby player certainly looks the part.

But the 1988 closure of his mining pit at the Lady Windsor Colliery near his hometown of Penrhiwceiber, about 70 km from Cardiff, led to a chain of events where appearance and reality gradually parted company. Like 40,000 other miners from the region, this former stalwart of the National Mineworkers Union found himself jobless and without a sense of purpose at age 38.

"I’d been working seven days a week, first underground and then on the surface, for over 20 years," he said. "It was my whole life, so I was shocked, devastated."

The closures had a profound impact on his village.

"It took the heart out of the community," he said. "Even today I don’t think a lot of the men are happy."

Ex-miners struggled to find work and this often meant their wives became the primary breadwinners. From this despair a glint of hope emerged: The new wave of unemployed men spent more time at home. While some resorted to drink, drugs and crime, others began dipping their toes in the strange waters of childcare.

These are the men the ruling Labour Party’s chief whip, Clive Soley, had in mind when he made a surprising claim in Parliament in 1998 that "close to 50 per cent of main carers of children at home in South Wales in the early 1990s were men."

Soley, the former head of the all party parenting group, said his "astonishing discovery" was drawn from United Nations sponsored research, which linked the trend directly to the rapid rise in unemployment.

Welsh urban studies specialist Teri Rees of Bristol University disputes this statistic, but adds that her research suggests fathers are spending much more time at home with their children.

"We see lots more of them taking children shopping and picking them up from schools, though less so with housework," she said: Jane Hutt, chief executive of the Cardiff-based social welfare group Chwar Fair Play Initiative, says there has been a "huge cultural change because of male unemployment and the growth of women in employment. We see large numbers of children in Wales being cared for by fathers."

This trend has been seen elsewhere in the West. While the number of single mothers is growing rapidly, single fathers are increasing at an even quicker rate, representing more than nine per cent of lone parents in Britain and 19 per cent of the American total. There is also an increase in the amount of time men spend with their children — even in Britain, which has tended to lag behind the rest of Europe in this field.

Jonathan Gershuny of the Economic and Social Research Council collated the results of several national surveys and found that British men in full-time employment had increased time spent with their children from an average of 10 minutes a day to almost an hour over the past 20 years.

"There is no doubt about it," All the surveys show a considerable increase in the time men spend interacting with the children — from a very low base. "The transition from hard hat to soft-soap is not easy. Ex-miner Brian Hick, for one, admits he doubted whether" househusband" was a sufficiently manly vocation. But after a crack at catering faltered, his wife Judith went to work at a local cafe and Hick had little option but to help with his five children, then aged 10 to 15.

"On the mines I hardly saw them, but when the pit closed I started doing more — not much at first because adapting was hard for me — but I began taking them to and from school," he said. "Partly, I was bored but it was more than that: I have always enjoyed children so I took interest and found I wanted to get more involved."

Soon he was helping out with other people’s kids: Managing a junior rugby side, running youth events and babysitting for parents on his housing estate. In 1992, while taking a neighbour’s toddler to a drop-in group, he had a revelation.

"I suddenly decided this was what I wanted to do with my life," he said. "Most of these women were single mothers who needed help. Their children needed a fatherly figure and I get a lot of pleasure seeing their children grow up."

He completed two childcare courses and began to volunteer at a local playgroup. He is now effectively a full-time childworker and has become something of an institution in Penrhiwceiber — the father-figure everyone knows.

Still, it would be a mistake to view Hick as a prototype for the future.

Despite Soley’s claim, it is unlikely a majority of fathers will follow this path. All childworkers interviewed stressed the difficulties fathers face making the transition to the prime carer role.

John Trew, who runs a day-care nursery in a working class area near Cardiff, said that while a handful of unemployed ex-mineworkers became more involved in his group after losing their jobs, this was countered by cultural constraints.

"The further down the social scale you go, the more enternched the traditional sex roles become," he said. "Middle class fathers in the Welsh Valleys still seem more openminded in this regard."

Katrina Williams, spokeswoman of the non-government organisation Children in Wales, expects a gradual shift in attitudes.

"....Because of the mining tradition, fathers find it hard to slot into the househusband role, although it is no longer uncommon to see fathers and grandfathers looking after their children," she said. "Some are embarrassed, so they get someone else to drop the kids off at school, even though they are looking after them at home. Basically, they’re still adapting,"

As Hick puts it: "There are still many fathers who can’t get their heads around changing their ways, or are indisciplined, or their girlfriends don’t want them around. I wish more would get involved because children need positive male role models and lots of them don’t have it.

"But things are changing because so many men are out of work. The majority are spending more time with their children." — Gemini News