I was an absent father until WFH changed everything

The history of fatherhood is, too often, a history of absence.

Being a dad was something I always aspired to do well, but what that meant in practice was never quite clear. After my son was born, I did what most fathers do: I kept working. Ten-hour days followed by a 50-minute train ride home meant I’d usually arrive just in time to kiss his sleeping forehead and switch off the hallway light. I was a presence, but not present.

Working from home has enabled a generation of men to be better fathers.Credit: Getty Images

It wasn’t for lack of intention. I wanted to be more involved, but the structure and expectations of work often rendered that wish mostly symbolic. Even now, in an era supposedly shaped by gender equity, notions of father-as-provider linger. Workplaces still reward the long-stayer, the late-finisher. Duck out for daycare pick-up? You’ll get a smile that says, must be nice. But stay late? You’re a team player.

That changed, for a time, when the pandemic hit.

Soon after lockdowns began, my daughter was born and for the first three years of her life, she lived in a world where both parents were always within earshot. This was a big upgrade in proximity from my oldest, who spent his early years wandering the sticky astroturf of a CBD daycare, one he despised with a consistency I quite admired. My wife worked part-time. I worked full-time. We followed the script.

Then everything stopped. Offices emptied, commutes vanished, and a strange kind of miracle happened.

Now I have a hybrid arrangement, part-office, part-home, and I get to be there for my children in ways our fathers never could.

Tuesdays, I do school pick-ups and take my son to basketball. Thursdays, I have lunch with my daughter: just a sandwich and her lovely, sideways four-year-old logic. These aren’t “special” moments; they’re unremarkable by design, and that’s the whole point.

At the end of those workdays, I have more patience, possibly because I didn’t just abseil in from the commute, all jangly and depleted. I’m already there. I tell the kids I love them every day, and they’re awake to hear me.

The pandemic created a space for dads to be more involved in family life. But, increasingly, we’re being asked to give it up.

A recent KPMG survey found 83 per cent of CEOs want staff back in the office full-time. In a global domino effect, corporate heavyweights including Amazon, JPMorgan, TikTok and even once-remote work champions like Salesforce are mandating full-time returns.

One of US President Donald Trump’s first acts in office was ordering all federal workers back to their desks. Back home, the Coalition has pledged to enforce the same for Commonwealth public servants if elected. The rationale? Productivity, accountability, and a not-so-subtle suspicion that working from home is a rort. Peter Dutton expressed as much, arguing that taxpayers shouldn’t be “housing public servants in Canberra refusing to go to work”.

It’s a sentiment long on populism and short on nuance, especially as evidence on productivity is mixed. A Stanford study found no widespread performance boost from office returns. For many, the distractions of commutes, meetings, and presenteeism are more draining than productive.

But this isn’t really about productivity. It’s about who benefits from flexibility and who loses when it’s revoked.

So far, the most visible critiques have come from women, and rightly so. Labor Senator Katy Gallagher called the Coalition’s approach “a step in the wrong direction for working women”, while Greens Senator Barbara Pocock called it a “Trumpian” move likely to push women out of stable jobs and into precarious ones.

But missing from the conversation is what men, especially fathers, also stand to lose.

For generations, fatherhood was a side hustle crammed into weekends and hurried bedtimes. But over the past few years, we’ve seen something quite radical: a model of fatherhood grounded not in absence but in presence.

We’ve seen what it means when dads are around, not just for birthdays, but for the countless unspectacular moments that make up a child’s life like lunchbox prep, school pick-ups, negotiating snacks, or panic over Book Week costumes (Dog Man, nailed it).

When men do that, women stop doing it all. With both of us home, my wife appreciated not having to manage every meltdown, meal, and missing shoe. She could tap out, take a breather, say yes to work opportunities. For once, “I have a meeting” worked both ways.

And children benefit, too. They grow up with fathers who are full participants in their lives.

That’s not to romanticise it. Parenting is still hard, with kids oscillating between monosyllabic zombies and agents of chaos. But it’s the quiet, in-between moments that matter most in the end, the “garbage time”, as Jerry Seinfeld put it. In those moments when you’re just sitting together, not even talking: “It’s nothing. It’s everything.”

For me, this version of fatherhood has been profoundly life-giving. The joy, the absurdity, the sacred mess of it all. And while the pandemic was a catastrophe, it also cracked open a window to a different kind of life for fathers like me.

Now, as that window threatens to close, we should ask: what exactly are we rushing back to?

David Halliday is the editor of Eureka Street, a journal of analysis, commentary and reflection that was launched in 1991.