In all honesty, I don't mind Slater, he's my second favourite current Maroon after Johnathon Thurston. (I know, all us blue blood girls are allowed our dirty little secret.) Any player as small as Slater - he used to be a jockey you know - who displays such courage every time he takes the field, deserves a little bit of, as the kids would say, cred.

But now Slater is being lauded for something else. He's the local face of toy manufacturer Mattel's #dadswhoplaybarbie campaign which encourages dads to spend time with their daughters playing Barbies.

God bless him, Slater is kind of awkwardly cute in the video which he posted on his Facebook page. It's had about 80,500 views, 400 shares and there's 500 comments from his fans.

"Too cute!! Go you! Great dad ... Great NRL legend!"

"Role model on and off the field. True champion of a bloke. Nothing but respect for the mighty Storm fullback."

"Oh how cute Billy. We should put you for Dad of the year award. Tough exterior and soft on the inside. Perfect!!!"

Oh please.

And this brings me to the crux of today's rant. Why do we feel the need to laud dads for parenting?

A colleague was out and about the other day and saw a dad and his three kids. He had a baby in the Baby Bjorn, a small school-aged child in one hand and a toddler on a leash (and don't get me started on those) in the other. She said she had to check herself when she started to think "that dad is killing it!". "If it was a mother I was looking at," she told me. "My first thought would have been poor thing."

I'm getting so sick of seeing clips of dads dancing with their babies, or vacuuming their daughter's hair into ponytails, or struggling through changing nappies.

(The only How to Dad guy I'll let off easy here is Kiwi Jordan Watson whose How to Dad youtube channel is only funny because he's a DILF.)

I guess I got a bit cranky earlier in the week when the kids and I were lolling about on the lounge watching television and an ad for some telephone company came on. It was an ad to lure you into buying a bigger data plan or something. And there's a mother, sitting on a park bench watching something on her phone while behind her her children kicked a ball around.

Now, god bless her, she's probably just finished a full day at work, raced home to pick the kids up from school, and is watching a live stream of that late presentation she had to miss while she's waiting for soccer training to start, wasting another hour sitting in the car because the trip home is too long to warrant dropping one child home and coming back later to pick up the other. (Notice how my sentences get proportionately longer the crankier I get?)

But it implied she was ignoring her children while watching some ridiculous funny clip, perhaps fawning over Jordan Watson, or watching the Magic Mike XXL trailer again and again. Or maybe I'm the only one who does that? Oh Channing, you can weld for me anytime.

Sorry … where was I? Got distracted …

Oh yeh. It was the kids who first pulled up the ad, thinking it was terrible that the mum wasn't up kicking the ball around with the kids. And not for the reason I thought. My son, which made me even prouder, said they never would have sat a dad on the bench. They would have had him up kicking the ball around. And when I mentioned the Billy Slater Barbie ad to them, he said they'd never make an ad which pushed the idea of #mumswhokickthefooty.

Maybe that's just in my house. I'm more than happy to be outside passing the footy, or bowling legspin, or somedays we head to the park and kick goals, or play knee footy, or just plain old full on wrestle. (Note to self, wrestling not wise now he's just about six foot and 80kg.)

I encourage every dad to spend time with his children just playing. Heck, that's been one of the best things about parenthood, all those tea parties I attended with teddies, the Nerf wars, the Lego, the games of hide and seek, and even Barbies.

But do we need to applaud men for doing it. Mums do it every day and most of the time no one even notices.