Peter Stanford: I'm a dad. I stay at home, but I'm too proud to be a domestic god

I used to like taking my daughter to the zoo before her recent graduation to "big school". It was a good way of spending the afternoons after her nursery ended and before we picked up her older brother. We were sitting in the café there one day, playing with a doughnut. Two well-dressed mums at a nearby table, pushchairs and children all around them, looked over. One nodded in my direction and whispered to the other, slightly louder than she had intended, "Access visit." It was the only possible explanation they could come up with as to why a dad could be out with his child at 2pm on a weekday afternoon.

They were wrong, but their assumption reveals something of the prejudice faced by that new breed of men: the stay-at-home dads. We were in the news again last week – albeit obliquely. It has been revealed that Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, is to leave Gordon Brown's Cabinet at the next reshuffle – possibly as early as next Friday – to spend more time with her family. When Kelly, who has four small children, entered government in 2001, her husband, Derek Gadd, changed jobs to take on more of the domestic responsibilities. Her decision now to hand back her ministerial red boxes has been taken by some as signalling the end of a high-profile house-husband experiment.

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Surveys show that an increasing number of men have of late been taking the so-called "daddy track" and shouldering a greater share of the childcare and domestic responsibilities, while wives and partners go out into the workplace to smash those glass ceilings. One in 10 men has asked their employers for flexible working to support their families, the TUC reports. But can we chaps really stand the heat in the kitchen?

Kelly, of course, is otherwise a notorious traditionalist in family matters. She is closely linked with the secretive Catholic sect, Opus Dei, which houses men and women members and associates who live in its properties in separate buildings, and only lets females into the male domain to do the cleaning. That, it believes, is a woman's place. Kelly may then simply be doing what her priests tell her is appropriate for any self-respecting woman.

But it's not only Opus Dei and the mums at the zoo who regard childcare and domestic duties as somehow beneath men. One of the big City financial institutions recently introduced what was widely hailed as the best paternity-leave package on the market. The work-life balance lobby lavished the initiative with praise and held it up as an example to others. Then a member of the human resources team let slip the hidden agenda in one of those in-a-lift Miliband moments of candour. Next time redundancies had to be made, she confided, those who took advantage of the package would be marking their own card as "wimps".

Am I a wimp, a failure as a man, because I do the washing and peg out football kits and school jumpers? I hope not, but I do have enough residual gender stereotyping (from my own stay-at-home mum and out-to-work dad) for me occasionally to wonder, in my darker moments, why my wife isn't here doing it. Unreconstructed maybe – like my refusal to do the mending piling up, on the grounds that men don't sew – but somehow instinctive.

The domestic round doesn't give you much time to confront your prejudices, but each time I hear myself saying to the children, "I can't do that but Mummy can", be it sewing, pulling out splinters, making a French plait in our daughter's hair, or choosing the right colour to paint the spare-room wall, I try to summon up the self-knowledge to recognise that I am just erecting false boundaries between "blue" and "pink" jobs to make myself feel slightly more macho.

Perhaps I should be clear here. I haven't entirely opted out of bringing home the bacon in order to be a domestic god. There are an estimated 100,000 men who have voluntarily chosen this route in recent years, according to research. They are the true stay-at-home dads, but their numbers are going up only slowly. Where there is phenomenal growth – one estimate puts the current figure at close on a million – is with what we might call "juggling dads", those who curtail their working week to spend more time at home with the kids, and so give their wives more freedom in the jobs market. I still work (as indeed will Ruth Kelly, when she leaves the Cabinet, despite most of the coverage somehow assuming that being a backbench MP is something you can do while changing nappies) but three days out of five during term-time I start at 9.30am and stop at 3pm, in order to get to the school gates. My wife does it the other two. And I cover the holidays.

She tells me how privileged I am, and some of the time I'm generous enough to agree. I'm fortunate in that being a writer is a flexible sort of career whereas my wife is a lawyer, which isn't. Her three days in the office are long and prohibitive, at least in terms of being there at hastily arranged school concerts, emergency doctor's appointments and when the teacher calls to say one of our children is poorly and wants to come home. And her holiday allowance is fixed.

However flexible my freelance life is, though, there are the assignments you have to say no to because it would involve an overnight stay that would bugger up the school-run rota, the networking occasions you don't get to because they clash with the ballet class, and the half-decent ideas for books or articles that go begging because they slip through a mind cluttered with details of the school run, shopping and new school shoes.

Recently I interviewed a grand old man of literature who leaves the family home at 8.30am each morning for the garden shed where he writes, reads and contemplates. He returns at 7pm and woe betide anyone who disturbs him in between. If I'm honest, however much I love being there for my children, I felt jealous.

But then, as countless generations of women would tell me in such moments of pathetic self-pity, parenthood is a joy, a blessing, but most of all a compromise. All that has changed of late is that men are now just as available to make real compromises (ie not the trade-in-your-prized-two-seater-MG-for-an-estate-car variety) as women. There is no longer a natural order that says men go out to work because they are cleverer and more able to earn a living, while women stay at home because they are good at cooking and looking after children. My wife can earn more than me, and, most of the time, I am happy to be a maternal male. As indeed I should probably have told those mums at the zoo, if I hadn't been afraid they would think I was protesting too loudly and had probably been made redundant. Male pride, again.

The hardest thing to negotiate about modern parenthood is not the extended range of choices we now have, thanks to the dawn of an age of (almost) equal opportunities, but instead what has come in its wake – a terrible insecurity and dissatisfaction with our own choices. Most couples have to make compromises in sorting out childcare and most end up feeling cheated, constrained and competitive with each other, and others, as a result. Even stay-at-home mums complain about being pale and uninteresting next to working mothers. And full-time dads tease me about wearing the apron and being a "kept man", but five minutes later lament missing out on their children growing up.

One way to ease this angst might be if we all stopped endlessly comparing our choices with those made by others, the Kellys included. However natural, it is doing us no favours.

Peter Stanford is a broadcaster and writer (some of the time)

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