My wife and I have ended up as stay-at home parents — with a part-time child

Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank, has published a report recommending that mothers should receive a universal childcare allowance which they can then use to pay for part-time help or, if they decide to give up work, compensating themselves for loss of earnings. The idea is to make it more affordable for mothers to spend more time with their children.

As the husband of a stay-at-home mum, I have my doubts about this. I daresay my children reap the benefit from having a fulltime mother — that seems to be the view of child psychologists, at any rate — but it is a disaster for dads. By the time I finish work every evening, Caroline is so fed up with the kids that she dumps them in my lap and then locks herself in the bathroom. Not only that, but I am expected to be the primary care-giver at weekends, too. The upshot is that I never have any time off. I have not read a newspaper in five years.

Friends who are married to working mums, by contrast, are on easy street. Their wives are so wracked with guilt about not spending enough time with the kids that they completely monopolise them whenever they are at home. The role of the fathers in these households is to wave benignly at their children as they walk in the door before uncorking a bottle of wine and collapsing in front of the telly. At the weekends, while I am traipsing round Legoland, they are practising their golf swings in Berkshire.

I am not even sure that my children are better off. I recently gave up my outside office which means that, in effect, my kids have a stay-at-home dad as well as a stay-athome mum. Having to contend with both parents moping around the house all day is proving a little too much for Sasha, our four

Mind your language

‘What’s so super about these superdelegates?’ asked my husband from the other room, while I was washing the Jersey Royals.

I do not intend trying to explain the American political system here. These delegates are not necessarily super at all. I wonder what connections superdelegates suggests in the American mind. If it suggests superman, the reference is likely to be the cartoon hero who first made his appearance in 1938, ‘champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need’. That hardly sounds like a description of the Democrat politicians who may have to devote their existence to deciding whether Hillary Clinton should year-old. We are beginning to get on her nerves.

For instance, the other day she found Caroline and me in the sitting room trying to put a pair of antlers up above the fireplace.

They had once belonged to a ‘royal’, a source of considerable pride to me. ‘Why are you putting those up there?’ she asked.

‘It’s a hunting trophy,’ I said. ‘When you kill a stag it’s customary to display its horns on the wall.’ ‘So did you kill a stag, then?’ I was about to say yes — and launch into one of my favourite anecdotes — when I caught Caroline’s eye over Sasha’s shoulder. She shook her head vigorously.

‘Er, no.’ ‘Why are you putting the horns up on the wall, then? Is it because you want people to think you killed one?’ ‘Er...’ I glanced over at Caroline who was be their presidential candidate.

I was surprised to find that no earlier occurrence of superman in English has been traced than its use by George Bernard Shaw in his play Man and Superman (1903), in which he also included the word superhumanity for good measure.

Superhumanity translates the German Obermenschlichkeit, just as superman translates Friedrich Nietzsche’s Obermensch, who had appeared 20 years earlier than Shaw’s play, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, a book without pictures. In our own time über-, usually without an umlaut, has become an annoying vogue prefix meaning ‘very’, as in uber-trendy. There is an unrelated word, uberate, listed in The English Dictionarie by Henry Cockeram (1623, meaning ‘to fatten with

nodding emphatically. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ s ee,’ said Sasha, looking me up and as if she had never before realised quite how pathetic I am.

Since this incident, Sasha has taken to spending more and more time with our next-door neighbours. They have a son her age and as soon as she gets back from school she hops over the fence and disappears into their house. We usually don’t see her again until 8 p.m. — and even then she only pops back to get her toothbrush. Caroline and I are now in the unusual position of being stay-at-home parents with a part-time child. I fear that if one of us does not go back to work we will soon lose the rest of them.

On the plus side, the Policy Exchange proposal — which looks certain to find itself in the next Conservative party manifesto — may have the unintended consequence of encouraging Caroline to resume her legal career. At the moment her argument for not doing so is that the extra money she would be bringing in would be entirely absorbed by the cost of hiring a full-time nanny. However, if she was given a universal childcare allowance, she could put that towards the nanny’s salary, thereby making the prospect of going out to work more attractive.

She almost certainly won’t bother, though. If the Conservatives win the next general election, I can envisage many a row over whether I am entitled to a share of this weekly benefit cheque.

By my reckoning, I do about one third of the childcare to Caroline’s two thirds, but something tells me she will dispute this.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

the breast’ — from the Latin uber, ‘breast’ or ‘udder’), but the term never caught on; indeed I don’t know any written record of it except in dictionaries. But if ever a prefix was uberated it is uber-.

Shaw also provided a preface to a far more entertaining book, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies, which appeared in 1908. In 1970 a pop group adopted the name Supertramp, apparently with some knowledge of Davies’s book, though it cannot be likely that such knowledge extended far among fans of their successful albums, such as Breakfast in America.

Since they sit above the common progeny of primaries and caucuses, perhaps the so-called superdelegates should be called supernal delegates.

Dot Wordsworth