It's a Dad's Life:When I took on the role of chief childminder in our household more than five years ago, it was primarily for selfish reasons. I needed a change (at the time, I really felt I needed a bit more time in bed), but was unsure of what direction to take.

Initially, spending the majority of my time with a small baby proved to be just the tonic required. When everything is broken down to its most basic constituents, helping to keep a new life breathing is perhaps the most rewarding task on the planet, particularly when you are besotted with that new life like a lovelorn adolescent.

Time spent with that child led me back to college. In some ways, college gave me the courage to express my views about the time spent with that child. That brought me here, where I have the privilege of writing about my kids on a weekly basis. So, in a very real way, taking time out from a career, just to have time, became my career.

Last week Work/Life Balance Day cropped up on the media's radar once again.

There were the usual newspaper articles and TV lifestyle features on how best to balance "modern" demands on our time when we are stretched at home and in the office. A variety of experts got wheeled out to contribute their tuppenceworth on how society would benefit if we all held hands more, worked less and bombed the multinationals. Now, a week later, it's back to global warming worries: Big Business has relaxed a little and returned to juicing the maximum out of middle-management.

I don't buy it, on any level. For a start, the term Work/Life Balance raises my hackles, implying, as it seems to, that work is bad and life is good. For many people, exactly the opposite is true. Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, says in his book, How To Be Free, "Well, make work good, make work into a creative pleasure, and you don't have to worry about balancing the good with the bad; all will be good." The problem is that he is still operating from the assumption that life is automatically good, so when work becomes good, all is good.

Without meaning to sound facetious, doesn't life include all of this? Work, family, sport, drinking, smoking, playing? Life is the mix, and when the mix works, life may well be good. But the pitfall seems to be in expecting life to be good only when all these external factors are settled into some sort of harmony, as if they dictate how you will feel, rather than you dictating how much effort or time you will put into each.

This raises the notion of personal responsibility. The traditional cry in corporate Ireland is that we don't have enough time to devote to our own pleasure or our families because we are busy feeding the beast so that we can pay our hefty mortgage, upgrade our car and pay the childminder. And yet, all these requirements are the results of personal decisions made when we were in full possession of the facts. You know how much your house costs when you buy it. You enter into a contract to pay for it. The converse applies if you choose not to work (as opposed to finding yourself unable to work), you then are making an agreement that you will live in such a way that you will not have many things you might otherwise have.

For me, the motivating factor five years ago to make change was primarily for my own benefit, closely followed by my child's. Many times since, I have hankered after things I could have had if I hadn't made that change. Many times since, I have been unhappy and wanted to alter the environment my decisions have created. Many times I have been delighted at the decisions that brought me here. The crucial thing is I have landed myself here, nobody else has put me here. I have no-one to blame but myself.

And the kids, of course. With a bit of creative thinking, I can pin pretty much everything on them.