Deborah Orr: Life is not just about work and children

Danny O'Neil has quit his £300,000-a-year post as chief executive of the Britannic insurance group. "I feel I wasn't getting the balance right between work and my family life," the father-of-four says in explanation. "There was no one main factor, but I couldn't see it getting better. I decided for me it was time for a change. You put your family life on hold so many times, then it is enough."

Mr O'Neil's decision has been greeted as an extraordinary one, which points up how rare it still is for a man to choose quality of life over advancement of career. Much has been made of the fact that he has triplets, even though they are nine now, at school all day, and not in need of the constant care that they must have demanded when tiny. Still, the implication remains that Mr O'Neil is making a sacrifice – maybe noble, maybe foolish – for the sake of his children.

Certainly, this is the message that family campaigners want to get across. The pressure group Fathers Direct is keen to emphasise that Mr O'Neil's stand is a very important one, because it is so rare for men to signal from the top that looking after one's children matters. This, I think, is true. It is also rare for companies to signal that they are willing to accommodate such priorities. Britannia has done this too.

But Mr O'Neil's decision is not quite as radical as may at first appear. He is not stopping salaried toil completely. He's just reducing his hours, and the amount of time he spends commuting. Doubtless he'll earn less. But he's surely sitting pretty after 20 years of success in insurance. Now, he will work three days a week in his home town of Glasgow as a consultant with Britannic's fund management business. As the chief executive of the group, he had to spend much time travelling to and from Birmingham and London.

He does intend to spend more time with his children – doing homework with them, taking them out for trips and so on. But he also plans to read more, spend more time at the family holiday home, and play more golf and tennis.

Sounds very nice, doesn't it? Very sensible. Why work full-time till you are 65, your health is failing and your kids have grown up when you're in a position to work part-time, stay healthier, and form more meaningful relationships with your family? I can't imagine why. Which makes it all the more baffling that Mr O'Neil should be considered such a maverick. Surely this man is just being sensible, wanting to get the best from his whole life instead of giving the best of himself to his working life.

Mr O'Neil made it to the very top, and quickly realised that maybe it was rather unnecessarily tough there. And it is. At 41, Mr O'Neil was on the verge of entering "the killing jar", the stretch of life in which men start dying prematurely from lifestyle-induced diseases (and work-style induced ones).

Like the boy who spotted the Emperor's déshabillé, Mr O'Neil is on to something that plenty of others ought to be waking up to, but don't – that "full-time" is too much time in an office, that somehow the work ethic has come so much to mean the paid-work ethic that we've lost sight of what life's priorities ought to be.

The great battle-ground at the moment is the fight to have bringing up children recognised as work that is just as important as salaried employment. When people talk about work-life balance, it is assumed that they must mean time to be with the kids. Often they do, because it is incredibly difficult for people to work full-time and bring up young children.

But I think that Mr O'Neil's problem is a wider one than just wanting to be with his children as they grow up. He does want that. But he wants other satisfactions too, ones that constant work has not given him. And why shouldn't he? Why should life be divided into work and children, with anything else considered self-indulgent or downright decadent?

There are all sorts of ways, endless ways, in which this attitude is damaging to all of us. In fact, you can choose almost any social ill and construct an argument whereby the emphasis on the work-in-the-week, family-at-the-weekend model causes strain. (Even those without children have family. Mr O'Neil says he wants to spend more time with his "wider family" too.)

This model is at the root, for example, of the gender war, and always has been. Once one parent got to work, while the other got to parent. That wasn't fair, but the solution is hardly better. Now, both are expected to do both. Talk to the working parents of small children, and most will tell you that they don't feel as though there is anything except work and children in their lives. It gets them down, and puts huge pressure on their relationships.

Meanwhile, initiatives designed to make things easier for people who work and have small children are said to cause much resentment from those without children, who feel that they're getting the sharp end of the deal.

At the same time, absolutely everyone is agreed that no one has enough time – to cook lovely food instead of reading about cooking lovely food, to walk to work instead of driving, to do a bit of voluntary work, to shop locally instead of at the supermarket, to do some creative work, to read, to play sport and so on.

Is it just time though, that stops us from doing at least some of these things? Or is the all-pervasive idea that only money confers value on an activity (unless you're looking after your children), actually demotivating people? What does it do to children to be told from a young age that they must be educated so that in future they can get a good job? Even when I was at school I found the emphasis on this aspect of education oppressive, and now it seems worse.

Are our sedentary lifestyles – confirmed this week by the news that more of us than ever are clinically obese – connected with the idea that unpaid effort is for the birds? Nowadays people marvel at the idea of walking a mile. Is this really laziness? Or is it because there's an idea that this is time squandered? Or effort squandered? Walking is actually pretty pleasant. Maybe people would feel better if they did it more. Maybe Mr O'Neil will be doing more.

Maybe, instead of everyone being encouraged to work as much as possible, and being given leave not to do this only while their children are under school age, the decision Mr O'Neil has made should be considered more widely. For sure, most people would like to be in his position, or even one very slightly like it. For many, cutting back work to three days a week would be too financially punitive to be considered. But even among those for whom fewer working hours is a real option, it is seldom taken up for reasons other than children.

It is not only parents who could benefit from fewer days making paid effort and more days making unpaid effort. In fact, the dividends in terms of extra time put into fitness, stronger extended family bonds, greater involvement with the immediate community, and so on, are clear for all to see. I don't imagine that Mr O'Neil will regret handing in his notice. Though I bet he'll be surprised to find it's made him into a role model.

d.orr@independent.co.uk