This piece originally appeared on momaha.com. Republished with permission.
Last year, I wrote about Dad Discrimination. I wrote about how it felt to be treated as an insignificant side-kick to my wife, the presumed headliner parent.
I bemoaned how commercials by AT&T and TV shows like “Everybody Loves Raymond” show dads as bumbling fools when it comes to the basics of child care. I explained how this treatment of fathers amounts to discrimination by keeping fathers from engaging fully in the lives of their children because when they do they are ignored, ridiculed and shamed.
In the 1970’s, this is how many women who wanted to work outside the home felt. Moms were supposed to stay home and take care of the kids, not pursue a career and definitely not pursue a career that out-earned any man. It wasn’t until Mary Tyler Moore showed a woman could have a career and a commercial for Enjoli perfume sang “I can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan” that perceptions began to change.
Forty years later, no one suggests a woman should not be CEO or a doctor or a police officer. I dare you to call a flight attendant a “stewardess” or tell a working woman she should be baking cupcakes instead of selling insurance. Discrimination of women who want to work is nearly extinct.
Discrimination of dads may be following a similar path to extinction.
For the last six weeks, I have been watching “Up All Night,” a heavily publicized new sitcom on NBC. It features Reagan Brinkely, played by Christina Applegate, who struggles with her new identity as a working mom and her husband, Chris, played by Will Arnett, who is her stay-at-home dad husband. Surprisingly, Chris is not the butt of the jokes like most other dads in sitcoms from the last 20 years. He isn’t a loser who can’t keep a job but a lawyer who quit his job to stay home with his daughter. He doesn’t fail to clean the house or call his wife every 5 minutes asking her what to do but competently cares for their daughter.
Then, last week, I caught this commercial by Tide. It shows a stay-at-home dad folding laundry and describing how Tide Boost washes out stains better giving him more “me time.” But he doesn’t use his “me time” to predictably play video games; he uses it to French braid his daughter’s hair!
“Up All Night” and the Tide commercial show dads confidently caring for their children and household. They don’t make fun of the dads or suggest these men have lost some of their masculinity. They make it seem completely normal for dads to be in a role traditionally held by women.
I think these positive and realistic images of fathers will have the same affect as Mary Tyler Moore and Enjoli had in the 1970’s. People will begin to realize it’s OK for dads to change diapers and fold laundry. Dads will be inspired to become more involved fathers.
And, eventually, no one will dare call a dad who is caring for his kids a “Mr. Mom” or tell him to get a job instead of staying home to raise his kids because, as Will Arnett quips in “Up All Night,” “Yeah, ‘cause raising a human’s no work at all.”
Al Watts is the president of Daddyshome, Inc. – The National At-Home Dad Network and an at-home dad of four children living in west Omaha.
Photo credit iambigred/Flickr
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