Four years ago, I stood in the kitchen watching my husband perplexed by a row of multi-coloured containers. He was preparing school lunches. My eight year old barked instructions; “No Dad, no cling wrap, it’s bad for the environment” and “The cut up carrot goes in a different container, it’s Crunch and Sip”. “That’s morning tea, right?” he asked, as a blob of Weetbix, flung by our one year old from his high chair, landed on his shirt, “No morning tea comes later” explained the eight year old. “It goes in this box.”
My husband sighed as he removed the Weetbix. “So you break for a snack at 10, 11 and 12 o’clock. No wonder no-one in this house knows their times tables.” My six year old pulled at his jacket, “Dad! We need to do my reader.” My hubby eyed me wearily “You realise by the time our fourth child finishes year one, we will have done 2560 readers?”
It was at this time the phone rang from Drew Proffitt (co-creator of Househusbands). He’d noticed a growing phenomenon; the number of stay-at-home dads was on the rise.
At my local school, I clocked the same thing, there were actually four househusbands, who’d become mates and well-known figures at the school gate. Looking among my friends, it was clear that even if they weren’t full-time househusbands, all the dads I knew were way more hands-on bringing up their kids than their own dads had been. The story of our generation raising families was new. And it needed to be told.
Working mums are just as important to our show as the hands on dads. I’ve had a bit of first-hand experience here and a number of friends whose lives I can plunder for material. “Do you think mothers have always felt guilty?” mused my friend recently. “In cave man times, do you think they’d lean over a boulder to the cave mum next door, concerned? ‘I should be spending more quality time with the kids, doing educational cave paintings but I’m just can’t find the time, what with having to marinate the wild boar. Cave Dad is useless, it’s all about the kill for him’.”
Our generation can be grateful that most families have evolved to a place where the load of raising kids is shared more equally between parents. But before we get smug, we have to acknowledge that we’ve over-complicated child rearing to the point where we need at least two of us to maintain the ridiculous standards we’ve set ourselves. “I had a cheese sandwich and an apple every day at school for thirteen years” bemoaned another friend and working mother. “Now I’m up at midnight preparing sushi and organic chicken wraps. How did we get here?”
Most of my friends with young children agree that growing up in the 80s, weekends were not about parents being slaves to their kids. Kids fitted in with their parents.
A friend of mine describes his weekends as a child: “Watching my parents play tennis and getting sunburnt. If I was lucky, and was ball boy for hours, I’d get a five minute hit as it got dark. Then there would be another two hours standing around while the grown ups got stuck into the cask wine. You might get a Jatz biscuit if you said please. It wasn’t organic.”
My main memory of childhood is dirt. Digging dirt, throwing dirt, eating dirt. And it was an idyllic childhood.
My week looked nothing like the over-scheduled lives of kids these days. Sport was backyard cricket, at least until high school. No one had maths coaching. My parents never laid eyes on a school reader. My mother could not have been less of a helicopter parent. Her mantra: “Go into the garden, I don’t want to see you until dinner.”
“But I’m bored.”
“Only boring people are bored.”
Or worse: “If you’re bored, unload the dishwasher.”
My friends share similar stories. But they’re also some of the most creative, original thinkers I know, confirming the belief that kids need to be bored to develop imaginations and independence. As I ignore my own kids for hours on end, madly trying to hit script deadlines, I like to tell myself it’s good for them. It’s a relief to be able to justify my negligence.
The lucky thing about raising four kids while writing the show, is the constant source of story material. The plot room is often interrupted by a child-related crisis: the pre-schooler shoving an orange seed up her nose, the toddler locking himself in the bathroom unable to get out, the 5 year old missing in IKEA, the teenager catching the train in the wrong direction, the 10 year old breaking his leg on the trampoline.
Yesterday, I discovered my 10 year old has been blackmailing his sister to give him all her tooth fairy money, so he won’t report her ‘bad’ behaviour. “That’s got to go into Househusbands, Mum,” laughed my eldest.
Househusbands tells the story of parents having a go. It’s audience loves seeing their own school gate on screen; the competitive mother of the ‘gifted’ child, head lice, sausage sizzles, cake stalls and gold coin donations. We want to tell Australians their stories, make them laugh, make them cry, capture a moment in time when everyone seems to have a peanut allergy.
We deal with the big issues too, like surrogacy, gay marriage, gender politics, but we don’t want to tell people what to think, we’d rather they make up their own minds.
Mostly we want to make them smile.
Ellie Beaumont is co-creator, writer and executive producer of Househusbands.
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“I find the idea of ‘taking my husband’s name’ repelling.”
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DEBRIEF DAILY