Up close & personal: finding your place in your child's affections

"I love you daddy," my son told me the other week. It was a heart-warming moment. That is, until he went on to list everyone else he loved, including his mum, our helper, teachers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, stuffed toys and a few cartoon characters.

The list, however, was apparently not in order of importance.

There's this thing he does when I have to leave him and go out. He tries to stop me in various ways. Some obvious, like pleading "Don't go, daddy", and some more subtle, like running away with my shoes, blocking the doorway or latching on to my leg. It's somehow extremely touching and yet completely annoying at the same time. It's nice to know he cares. But how much?

When our helper leaves, there is a completely different level of commitment to stopping her, which usually ends in tears or a full-blown tantrum as the despair hits him that he's going to be stuck with only daddy and/or mummy. This begs the question: who is raising my son?

This is not a question my parents would ever have had to ask. Growing up in Australia decades ago the answer "his mother" was so straightforward that no one would think to even ask the question. Children were raised by their parents, and it was almost always the mother who was around until the children went to school. There was the occasional single parent or child with his grandparents, but it was rare. Live-in helpers were confined to the world of fiction where they served the unfathomably rich, such as Batman.

That was then and there. This is here and now: decades later and across the world.