"There's the mummy swan with all her babies!" exclaimed my three-year-old daughter about the swan on the canal with their cygnets. We had probably seen daddy swan earlier, fighting with the local geese.
I've been home with my daughter since she was six months old, but despite having a stay-at-home dad for most of her life, she still defaults to the assumption that the adult looking after their children must be the mother.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising. We had just left the baby and toddler group I help to run, where there were dozens of parents and carers - but I was the only man there. On the walk home, we bumped into a few more parents we knew, all of them mothers at home with their children. That morning, I had read numerous books to my daughter, including classics such as Where The Wild Things Are, Dogger, and some Mog books - all of which, like many in our collection, feature the mother as primary carer.
This 'norm' carries over into other aspects of how parenting in portrayed or perceived - including nature, where there are far fewer everyday examples of nurturing fathers to cite. We tend to humanise, or give character too, the animals around us. When it comes to their parenting, the gender roles can be perceived very rigidly, whether it's a cartoon with talking animals or us observing their behaviour in real life.
But one of the things that makes us human is our ability to transcend nature. Unlike animals we can choose to suppress our urges, not act on instincts we know are not relevant to the world we find ourselves in, and change the way we parent to suit our circumstances.
Being the dad used to be seen as being the breadwinner, or the sports guy, or the one who cooks with on the barbecue. Some of those dad cliches apply to me. But I'm also the dad who's at home with our daughter, loves cuddling her, will happily play dolls with her, and ties a damn good ponytail.
Reflecting this changing view of fatherhood, stock photography provider Getty Images has launched a special collection to coincide with Father's Day. The images show fathers as nurturing, caring, and attentive parents, offering a more modern idea of masculinity and fatherhood.
These stock photos will become part of the everyday noise of the online parenting world, turning up in peoples social timelines and hopefully evolving perceptions about dads among those that don't see fathers this way yet.
It's easy to relax into accepted norms. Sometimes we need to curate the way the world around us is presented, to reflect not only the way it is, but the way we want it to be.
So when my daughter pointed out the 'mummy' swan, I felt the need to introduce an element of doubt and analysis into the conversation. "How do you know it's the mummy swan?", I asked, "It might be the daddy?". She pondered for a moment, then decided that this time it was indeed the daddy, while it was the mother that was off having 'me' time battling the geese.
This may have been factually incorrect, but learning isn't just about facts. I am a great believer that one of the key ways we learn how to be human is through stories, and this includes the narratives we witness in everyday life. We take what we learn in these tales, to build up a vision of how people behave and society works. The fluidity of gender roles in parenthood is part of that.
And perhaps I'm being unfair on the poor old male Swan? They CAN change the way they parent to suit their circumstances. Cobs (as they're called) are known to rear their cygnets by themselves if they lose their mate, so they clearly have within them the same desire to love and nurture their children as the female. So as far as we were concerned, daddy swan was with taking care of the kids that day, and we agreed they were having a wonderful time of it too.