Marco lost his job as a driver in the corona pandemic - and his position as breadwinner for the family.
His wife took over;
she is an office clerk.
Marco looked after the two-year-old son all day;
the child receives early intervention during normal times.
Marco said in an interview that his wife was broken after her hard day at work.
"I was busy with the child until late at night."
Sounds like another of the many corona stress stories. But then the surprise: "In a quiet minute, when nobody sees me, I sometimes jump in the air for joy," reports Marco. The man with square glasses in the gray sweatshirt smiles cautiously, then a little more: "That I achieved what I always wanted - to become a better father than my father was!"
Other fathers, whose Corona experiences were also recently presented in video clips at a conference of the “State Working Group on Father's Work in North Rhine-Westphalia”, are not quite as enthusiastic. But as a result, the men - nurses, civil servants, craftsmen and architects - agreed with Marco: The pandemic had made them more committed, more sensitive fathers. It is the kind of experience the State Working Group on Father Work wants to promote; The LAG is an amalgamation of around a dozen organizations and associations that, with the support of the state, work to ensure that father policy is perceived more strongly as a cross-sectional social task.
"I have really grown as a father," says Heiko, an employed IT specialist and father of two children aged two and five, summarizing his Corona experiences in a video interview. Nicole, mother of an eleven-year-old son with Down's syndrome, who is married to a university professor, confirms: "Parenting has changed for my husband." take care of the boy.
Experts for social trends such as Jan Braukmann, project manager at the analysis and consulting company Prognos, speak of a "change of perspective on children and family" that men have experienced. Even if the pandemic time with its restrictions and uncertainties was perceived as very stressful, at the same time there were opportunities for a more active father role, said Braukmann in his conference presentation. Corona opened the eyes of men who had to stay at home in lockdown with the family or alone with the kids, how stressful and time-consuming childcare and household chores are.
Even for supposedly modern fathers, this realization was not a matter of course: “The men in my circle of friends had to look around quite a bit when their partners said during the lockdown that they couldn't look after the children because they were already the next one Videoconferencing, ”reports Julia, in-house lawyer and mother of two children aged three and five.
Debate about a new generation of fathers
Her husband, David Hanisch, who runs a web agency, speaks of "very borderline experiences".
His wife worked ten hours on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he himself worked on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
“And on Saturdays we did the housekeeping.” Nevertheless, there was always the uncomfortable feeling: “You are not doing anyone justice, including yourself.” To make things as fair as possible, David and Julia have even kept records of who is what in which Time makes.
“That might sound strange,” says the agency manager, “but that's the only way to get a feel for how time-consuming family work is.
It doesn't just happen by the way. "