Parenting, like most really important things in life, is both good and bad, both joyful and depressing.

Former Labor Opposition Leader turned Fairfax columnist, Mark Latham loves being a stay-at-home parent, and good for him.

Mind you, as he told us in one of his controversial columns in the AFR on the subject, his life is not entirely domestic. Here he compares his day with that of journalist and mother of two Lisa Pryor.

If that is his experience of being a stay-at-home dad, I’m not surprised he loves it.

Apart from cooking those ‘gourmet meals’ (I have problems boiling an egg) that sounds pretty close to the perfect balance between interesting, fulfilling paid work and caring for home and kids. I take my hat off to him for organising his life so well.

“I take my hat off to Mark Latham.”

For most of us, however, life both at home and at work is not quite so easy to wrangle into the shape we’d like. Not many of us become stay-at-home parents after being an MP and Leader of the Opposition. Not even those (according to Latham) amazingly content women of Sydney’s Western suburbs.

I doubt many of them are leaping up from penning their next book to cheerfully change a nappy or put a bandaid on a scraped knee, or taking a break from crafting a perfect sentence to add just the right amount of saffron to that gourmet meal.

Want more? Try:  Jessica Rudd has some very choice words for Mark Latham.

Like Latham, my husband would have loved being a stay-at-home dad, but, as it is for many couples, when my kids were little, he earned the higher salary so it was me who got to stay home. I didn’t love it, but watching how the world responded to my husband’s parenting I began to understand why.

If Ralph did anything for the girls, the congratulations rained down on his head. He was a marvel and a wonder, the father of the year. For me, it was the opposite. It was expected that I would do things for my children.

It was when I neglected to do something that I heard about it – and how! We have very high expectations of mothers, expectations that at some point we all fail to reach. We have fairly low expectations of fathers, hence the chorus of praise when they do…well… anything.

Related content:  “It’s time to stop this man from bullying all working women.”

Latham’s determination to do the lion’s share of the parenting piqued my interest so (via his publisher) I asked him the following questions;

1) Why do so many people have such strong opinions about whether it is reasonable or not for mothers to want to return to the paid workforce, not just for the money but because they like their job?

2) What is it that concerns you so much about the decisions these women – most of whom you don’t know personally – make about their lives?

3) Given your wife is in the paid workforce, how do you feel about that?

4) If a mother feels unhappy and unfulfilled by full-time parenting what should she do about it?

5) Do you believe it is feminism that has created this discontent or has it merely given expression to a discontent that always existed among some women (given that it was a marker of class status in previous eras to hand children to others to raise and even breast feed)?

Jane Caro asked Mark Latham some rather pointed questions.

Here, in full, is what I received from Mr Latham in reply.

(I don’t want to be picky but I actually called mothering a ‘gilded prison’. By which I meant it was both lovely and restrictive. I stand by those words).

Parenting, like most really important things in life, is both good and bad, both joyful and depressing.

Indeed, most women, regardless of the suburb they live in or whether they identify as feminists or not, love being mothers.What they may not love quite so much is the drudgery that often accompanies staying at home.

What they may object to is the lifetime loss of earnings that they are expected to cop for choosing to give birth to – as Patricia Arquette so pointedly put it – every taxpayer in existence.

How they cope with the very exacting standards we have for mothers, the impossible expectations, the love and the pain that the parenting task entails, is to be honest and often to send themselves up.

Many of the comments Latham objects to so strenuously were meant tongue in cheek. Mothering may be serious, but that doesn’t mean mothers have to take themselves seriously.

Latham has also levelled ‘bad mother’ accusations at our Publisher, Mia Freedman.

Parenting isn’t sweet and endlessly lovely. It is much more interesting than that. It’s hard, demanding, messy, funny, rewarding, painful and exhilarating. And I think most fathers would rather hear the truth than be soft soaped into full time parenting.

I’d love more men to enjoy the delights and difficulties of full-time caring for kids but it isn’t ‘non-stop prison talk’ (I used that phrase once in one not-exactly-deadly-serious article) that’s making them hesitate. It’s the lifetime financial price that full-time parents pay.

Not many of us retire with a Federal MP’s retirement package, after all. The number of older women, many of whom were fulltime parents and carers, who are now facing poverty and homelessness due to lack of marketable skills and superannuation is proof of that.

How do we encourage more fathers to be involved as full-time carers for their children?