Reality Check

One of the great delights of Swanvale Halt church is our Toddler Group, which has been going for years and has undergone a series of ups and downs over that time. At the moment we have gravitated towards operating on a Friday morning and regularly get 15-20 children and their parents and carers, whereas 18 months ago the numbers were down into single figures. Some families have prior connections with the church, some don't, and some don't even come from the village. Every month we have a short service in the church mainly involving lighting candles and rattling instruments, and the photo shows Marion our curate struggling with the CD player. She says that when it's my turn to do it it's more Solemn High Toddler Praise.

Of course part of the rationale for the Group is to provide a space for conversations about faith, which do sometimes happen, though that's not why we do it. One of the spin-off benefits is that I get to speak to a variety of people I wouldn't normally interact with during most other facets of the church's work, and gain some insight into the lives of a rather wider cross-section of my parishioners. One of the things, for instance, that strikes me is that about a quarter-to-a-third of the parents-and-carers there on any particular occasion are chaps (though you might not think so from the photo). Talking to them all I realise the levels of part-time and shift-working which either allow, or force depending on your point of view, families to share the childcare duties between parents rather than automatically devolving them on the mother. People (and not just middle-class professionals) are now used to the sort of fragmented and somewhat more ad hoc working arrangements which mean that any notion of gender-based role-assignment doesn't work.