Recent legislation in India around maternity leave and surrogacy have generated much debate around the idea of family, and the importance of parenthood and childcare. In all of this, the role of fathers as caregivers and parents and the challenges of single parenting are issues that have particularly been on my mind.

In this context, a recent experience to interact with a group of adoptive parents offered some interesting and unusual insights. I accompanied my dearest friend Nupur, and may I add mausi (translation: mother’s sister) to my kids, to Ludhiana’s district courts to attend to formalities related to her adoption of baby Bela, now about seven months old. When we reached the lawyer’s chambers on Monday morning, we were pleasantly surprised to meet three other families who had adopted babies from the same adoption centre. To an observer, it felt like a family reunion of sorts. Baby names and eating habits plus experiences with the adoption process were the main topics of conversation. The atmosphere was charged with happiness, and gratitude. Everyone there felt like life had given them that rare chance to fulfill the dream of parenting, a dream they had obviously harbored for a long time. The years of disappointment and pain, the feeling of emptiness that preceded adoption were unspoken but nevertheless evident part of their narratives.

The couple from Rohtak, whose baby girl was a bit over six months old, told us about the ingrained prejudice against the girl child that they faced everyday. The mother was pained about the mindset around her. She described it as a wall she could not penetrate. “Our neighbours advise was to wait for a few more years till the adoption centre had a boy for us. They felt that since we were adopting, we had the luxury of the choice of gender. The obsession with sons carrying the family’s name forward is disgusting,” she told me. “We have decided our baby will carry both parents’ last name,” she added.

In all three couples, I saw the fathers completely dedicated to the child and attentive to their wives needs through the day. I wondered about how fatherhood must appear a miracle to them and how little we think about the desires of a man to have a child. That came home to me when, in a rare moment of emotion, one of the fathers shared his feelings with me about being a parent. Their adoptive child was nearly a year old when they brought her home. His wife, a teacher, had been bold and bargained for a full six months of paid maternity leave from her school (before the law came through), asserting that adoptive mums need the time to bond with their children before joining work again. The father, on the other hand, said he was back to work in a week. He was pained about the fact that being away at work all day and spending only a few hours a day with the baby meant it took him much longer to get used to the idea of being a parent. More interestingly, he spoke about his passion for his work and how he did not like compromising on that either! “If I love my work, how can I do justice to it when emotionally I feel the need to be with my family?” he said, his anguish clear as he expressed his opinion on how employers need to think about offering options for leave periods up to two years for fathers/mothers to attend to childcare needs.

The reactions and opinions of these ordinary people in the midst of an extraordinarily beautiful and emotional experiences reinforced my suspicion that we need  to re-examine not just gender stereotypes but also our ideas of what constitutes an ideal family and ideal parenting. There are many ways to offer children love, care and a nurturing environment that operates around a sound value system. Why not create a policy framework that empowers parents and guardians to do so?