Are dads the new mums?

It was the final piece in our domestic jigsaw puzzle. As well as being our baby's main carer, my partner, Alastair, had now mastered the cooker. But why did it feel so bittersweet?

This, after all, is what my generation pushed for, and what the next one fully expects: to be able to be a mother and to work. And here it was in practice, in my own kitchen. Dad doing mum's work.

Our family is not an oddity. A new study shows a tenfold increase in father-led households in a decade and a 25 per cent rise in homes where parents share childcare equally.

In London the trend is more pronounced because female breadwinners - of which there are an increasing number here - and male carers are two sides of the same coin. The main two reasons cited for men taking on childcare are financial: the mother's higher earning power and male unemployment.

When the two coincide, the obvious solution is a gender role swap. A further factor is the rocketing cost of childcare - again more acute in London - which is likely to be exacerbated by the baby boom that has already created unseemly bunfights for nursery places in the capital's "nappy valleys".

There is another reason, though, one that I suspect is more fundamental to the decision than many will admit. Some parents, ourselves included, simply want to look after our own children more than we want to be rich.

It is a conclusion Alastair came to before I did. When Robin was only a few weeks old, he decided not to renew a work contract so he could spend more time with both of us. He may have done this in the heady first days of fatherhood but he probably already knew that neither of us would feel happy putting our daughter in the care of strangers and that I would find it hard to walk away from my job. Clever him. When I realised he was planning to take up the bulk of Robin's care, along with several days' help from my mum to allow him to work freelance, I felt overwhelming relief.

Around this time another mother told me her husband had taken redundancy from his firm of architects to coincide with the end of her maternity leave. He would look after their son while she built up her career. They were clear that both he, as a father, and their child would benefit from this arrangement. Another couple followed suit with both going part-time. The men spoke of feeling deprived as parents by being at work all week, and the importance of the father-child bond. Being poorer was a small price to pay to be hands-on dads.

But of course there is a cost. Previous generations talked about the impossibility of "having it all" as they pulled their hair out juggling 60-hour weeks in top jobs with several nannies and often unhappy children. I refer you to Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It.

My own peers seem to see a more fluid, less achingly aspirational life where work does not deliver happiness or even riches most of the time. Having achieved some basics - a roof over our heads and a salary that just about covers a London mortgage and Virgin Active membership - the next task is to have children without going mad or broke. The gym pass will undoubtedly lapse but to keep the rest going requires the sort of pragmatism that often results in men looking after babies while women are in the office.

Yet just as we struggled to ascend and change the male-dominated structures of the workplace, so our partners and husbands are finding the task of colonising the domestic sphere to be challenging. In our fight for women's rights, we may have overlooked the obvious: those of men.

After all, what woman doesn't know how disempowering parenthood can be: stuck at home with just a toddler and a Peppa Pig DVD for company, caught in the relentless cycle of feeding, wiping, tidying and nappy-changing. I calculate that cooking the fish, cheesy gratin and apple crumble would have taken Alastair at least nine bowls, pots and dishes to prepare and serve. All of them teetering in a heap in the sink waiting to be washed. There is always a price to pay for domestic harmony.

During the week there are more dads out there, wheeling Bugaboos through parks, pushing pre-schoolers on swings. But they often cut lonely figures. They complain that the Groovy Tots class is still dominated by mums who invariably seem to know each other and they feel excluded from the rounds of coffee mornings that tend to spring from alliances forged in post-childbirth groups.

And who can blame them for questioning their life choices as they sit in a circle singing The Wheels On The Bus? I would rather shoot myself than go through that indignity on a regular basis.

But men are learning to balance emasculation with the harsh economics of life in London today - high mortgages, expensive childcare, less work - and the priceless benefits of being a presentee parent. They get to watch their children gathering autumn leaves, share a daily croissant with them on their morning walk, build the quietly satisfying routines that childhood is made of.

Men also get to create their own distinct form of parenting, away from the stricter rules of motherhood: sitting in quiet pubs with their laptops and half a cider while the baby snoozes, playing the Clash at top volume and teaching their daughters how to pogo, buying three pumpkins in varying sizes to keep them quiet while daddy scrolls through his iPhone.

Mums, meanwhile, are the new dads: at work all day, paying off the mortgage and under pressure to keep the family's finances stable. Is this the end result of women's liberation, the logical conclusion of educating us, employing us and promoting us?

I have long abandoned dreams of walking away from it all and setting up a small goat farm or yoga mat mail-order company. Instead, I am caught in the age-old male trap of seeing every penny I earn factored away into future nursery fees, roof repairs and supermarket bills and wondering why I bother.

Men may find it hard to cope with the feminisation that accompanies home life, but it is just as hard as a mother to accept I will not be the one who drops Robin off at nursery when she starts next year, or picks her up when she's sick. And if children's activities are mum-dominated during the week, at the weekend the reverse is true. Saturday morning groups at my local centres are dads- only affairs.

I find myself adding up precisely how many days a year I can spend with my child (139), how many waking hours a week (32½) and feeling, frankly, short-changed. Will I ever be able to justify taking time out to do Pilates or have a boozy lunch with friends when I know I should be hanging out with Robin, rebuilding the bond that gets strained by the end of a long week away from her?

Perhaps this is how working fathers felt all along. But there is one inescapable conclusion: it is what we feminists fought for, the right to do as men do. Be careful what you wish for.