Family

Comments

• Sorin
  05/14/12 at 05:01 PM #

  I wonder how much of this is caused by our gender stereotypes around males not being able to do any housework right. Personally I think men are being discouraged from it way before they have children. I do live in a different part of the world, so this might be mostly cultural difference, but growing up I wasn’t expected to do the same chores I would of been had I been female. Or at least I wasn’t encouraged as much. Heck, my grandmother thinks I’m starving because I live alone and there’s no woman around to cook for me. She did grew up in different times and apparently back then men were afraid of stoves, or something.
  
  Anyways, thank you for the article. I can’t speak for anybody else but personally I wouldn’t like to be pushed into working long hours because I am the main (or sole) financial provider for my family. I think if I had children I’d much rather spend time with them. I can’t even imagine how anyone would want anything else, unless they felt making money was the only way they can contribute. Because the alternatives of sexist conspiracy or some marital disease sound very much unlikely. And whether men are educated this way from childhood or whether we are pushed into it, doesn’t really matter, since the solution is the same: a constructive attitude.
  
  But sadly it’s very hard to make that case in our materialistic society, since we’re often unable to relate to anything that doesn’t have a price tag. In other words, it’s easy to understand why women would want successful careers but much harder to understand why men would want to change diapers. Both of those imply work but we see one as being a worthy dream while the other as just a meaningless chore. Not that parenting can replace a career, but when it comes to getting men more involved, maybe we should try a more positive approach. Instead of concentrating on the work men seem to be shamelessly skipping on, maybe we should be concentrating on improving their motivation. We’re currently looking at parenting as being the equivalent of a low paying job (i.e. what a nanny or maid would make) instead of it being an invaluable, unpaid and one. So if you want your husband to just “help” around the house as if he was a source of unskilled labor, don’t be surprised if he’s unwilling.
  
  Just my 2 cents

• SP
  04/11/12 at 04:25 PM #

  Years ago when I heard other women talk about husbands that didn’t pull their equal share in parenting and housework, I swore I would never be one. Those women were obviously in those situtations because they chose partners that did not value equal partnerships in a marriage. Now, as the mother of 2, I have to admit sadly that I am one of those women constantly bashing men.
  
  I ask myself if it is a male conspiracy that they seem to loose their intelligence after marriage as they assume women will take care of things; or is it that we live in a society that despite our best efforts, we find ourselves pushed and pulled into the steryotypical roles.
  After I had my first child, I chose to attachment parent, which requires more effort on a mother’s end – nursing on demand, holding the baby, sleeping with the baby. I started making career choices that made my life easier on my home life, not necessarily what was best for moving up that corporate ladder. The job I chose didn’t have good benefits, so our family depended on my husband’s job. Suddently his job became much more imporant than mine—we could afford me not working, but not the other way around. The responsibility of the children fall completely on me, so he could work long hours at his job. Since we had kids, his salary has doubled while mine is the same in the last 8 years.
  
  We want to say we are strong independent women that will not be stiffled by the traditional roles our mothers faced, but the sad reality is when childen are involved, one parent is also giving more than the other. And the way our society works, its just easier for women to be making that sacrifice.

• Andrea
  04/04/12 at 03:18 PM #

  I can relate so much to this post! My husband is also a wonderful and amazing father and husband and every time I am in a mom’s group I feel like a fish out of water because all the other moms are bashing their husbands and all I do is just sit there listening thinking my husband cleans and cooks and takes care of the baby, etc. I also agree that many people associate good mothering with self sacrifice and I also agree that most of these women don’t want to give up control over parenting. Since the very beginning I allowed my husband to do everything and I always praised him for being so helpful and never felt the need to control parenting. I think women like us should start to speak up a little louder.

• Lyla
  04/04/12 at 09:25 AM #

  Jennifer, thanks so much for your thorough and thoughtful response and for making me think. What I’m trying to do in this piece is deconstruct the barriers to equally shared parenting, particularly around the motherhood ideal. In my dissertation research I found that many fathers did not participate because they felt incompetent or criticized for their participation. I have often seen responses to this phenomenon suggest that women are control freaks who don’t want to give up their control over the parenting. It is that BLAME of women that I am trying to deconstruct.
  
  I don’t think women just can’t let go, I think many want to, but there is a cultural notion that self-sacrifice IS what being a GOOD MOTHER means, so many of us don’t know how to feel like a good mother and LET GO. I take your assertion that I am blaming women very seriously, and really want to be clear that what I am trying to do is ask women to question why they are doing all this self-sacrifice?? Why is it so hard to demand men do their share? I’m saying it’s not just about gender inequality but notions of motherhood. It is these notions of motherhood that are to blame. But YES, women AND MEN need to take action to break those notions down and reject them! It’s hard to draw a hard line between blame and attempted empowerment. Yes, in a sense I am asking women to do something different, but I don’t entirely see that as blame. It’s unlikely if we don’t stand up as mothers and REDEFINE OURSELVES, that the cultural concepts of motherhood are going to change for us.
  
  Your point about new models of parenting requiring even more time investment is a key one. I would argue this puts even more pressure on women to sacrifice their own time and interests. If women are the ones taking on the majority of childcare (because our culture makes it almost impossible to FEEL like a good mother otherwise), then they are the ones taking on this additional burden. Making it harder and harder to be a good mother is a form of cultural oppression against women. It’s a way to keep women out of positions of power, out of intellectual debate, out of political action, etc. As a mental health professional I see a lot of parents putting tremendous effort into aspects of parenting the culture has convinced us are important, and neglecting obvious emotional needs of their children. Children need attuned attention from parents. They need very little in the way of “stuff,” “classes,” etc.
  
  Again, I think both men and women need to take responsibility for changing the cultural conversation around parenting 1)in terms of who should be doing what and 2) in terms of what successful parenting is. This includes how focused we are on it. In my opinion to resist this oppression of women we need to question the deeply held cultural standard that being a good mother is sacrificing oneself. We need to demand selves, and we need to demand fathers and male partners do their share. I don’t see this as blaming women, but rather giving them PERMISSION to make demands and still be good mothers, to stop feeling like their whole lives should be about sacrifice.
  
  Part of fighting this oppressive cultural ideal of motherhood does indeed involve choice of partner. I would argue that any couple who views themselves as making a long-term commitment should be talking not only about whether they want children but how childcare will be divided. I told my husband on our second date that I wanted a 50/50 division of childcare labor in my marriage. That was almost 8 years ago, but it was important enough to me that I didn’t want to date men who couldn’t imagine getting on board with that. Of course when and how to broach this depends on how committed one is to shared parenting. But one way to fight the oppressive motherhood ideal and demand men do their part is not not marry or partner with men who won’t. This may sound unromantic, but so is working 12-13 hours days doing childcare while your partner works 70-80 hours per week. Where’s the romance in that?
  
  I wouldn’t call equally shared parenting experimental, I would call it less common. In my study, I found about 25% of adults I surveyed had parents who shared parenting tasks equally “often or almost always” according to my scoring system. This number would probably be higher now, as I was interviewing people who were already adults, and younger participants where more likely to have had shared parenting. I would hardly call 25%% experimental, but definitely not the majority.
  
  As far as the idea that some women have no interests outside of parenting, I think you are right. But I would go one step further and ask why. Being trained in psychology I always questionspeople’s beliefs about themselves. Do these women truly lack outside interests or do they believe having outside interests means they are a bad mother, so they have put their outside interests aside to avoid that cognitive dissonance. Of course, the answer is BOTH. There are some women who truly experience mothering as their main interest. More power to them! They probably find it easier to fit into the cultural ideal of motherhood than the rest of us. They probably experience less guilt about those pesky little thoughts abbout wishing they were somewhere else sometimes. But I believe there are a lot of moms out there who have put aside their own interests out of self-preservation, because the guilt of preferring to sit here writing this comment than change a diaper is more than they can bear.
  
  Finally, on breastfeeding, as a mother who breastfeed twins, I can assure you I am not only looking at this issue from a theoretical lens. For my doctoral dissertation I interviewed adults who had had parents who shared parenting tasks equally. The variety of ways they structured this was infinite. Shared parenting doesn’t mean doing the exact same tasks for the same amount of time. It means things even out to an equitable place. This could mean when a child is younger and needs attention only a mother can provide the mother is more involved and then the father works part-time later when the children are older. For some of the families the mothers were stay-at-home moms but they still had equal parenting set-ups. I truly don’t believe breastfeeding is a barrier to equally shared parenting.
  
  Thank you again for your time and interest. Your point about finding a better circle for myself is well taken. Working on that!

• Jennifer
  04/03/12 at 08:34 PM #

  This post made me think of my husband’s MA thesis supervisor, who has been an academic his whole life and seems to see everything in life through a theoretical lens, rather than through the hard-earned experience of reality. I applaud your husband for committing to equal parenting as well as you’d like; I think you’ll find that half the reason that these mothers in your parenting circle are so irritated with their husbands is not because of some further failure on their own parts, as you suggest, to allow their husbands to flourish as parents, nor because they fail to have a firm mental grasp on theoretical or ideological notions of equality in their relationships, much less that they have no other interests of their own outside of parenting. In fact, I think that much of the dissatisfaction comes from the wholehearted acceptance of the theory that parenting should be equal, and that their own individual interests should be given time and space to flourish, but the reality of the situation does not match their ideals at all and that is why they bitch about it! Asking yourself how women allow themselves to get into this situation is a bit silly. You might be very committed to finding someone who promises to be an equal partner in parenting, but if you have never parented before, how do you actually define and delineate all those responsibilities? And would you encourage couples to get a pre-nup outlining all of them and drawing up some 50/50 checklist to help them ‘avoid’ this unequal parenting situation? The fact is, most people that get together with their spouses before having children and think about the specifics of having kids later, which is only natural considering that might be years off and they might not know much at all about having children or the minutiae of what that entails and how that changes one’s daily life and routine. It’s unreasonable to think that just because two people get on well and have a strong commitment to each other that they will necessarily be able to foresee all the demands of parenting and actually follow through on their theoretical pledge to share the responsibility equally.
  
  Am I bitter? Yes. But I am bitter precisely because I firmly value my own academic and intellectual interests and have little time to pursue them outside of work and parenting, and I see the inequality of responsibility as unfair. I also think that you fail to recognize that one’s parenting style and choices have a big influence on the division of labor and that may be something that one or both parents are unwilling to compromise on. For instance, however much I would like to even out the responsibilities of parenting, I am not willing to bottlefeed over breastfeeding when I know that is what is best for my children, and unfortunately I can’t delegate one of my breasts to my husband. I don’t feel forced into this decision to breastfeed by popular culture, but I know that many women do breastfeed for precisely this reason (and the arduousness of pumping milk so that someone else can feed them from a bottle is just double the work, in my opinion; it actually increases the total labor used in the family unit rather than eliminating some of the burden from the mother). So in your theoretical quest for understanding this issue, you really need to spend some time thinking about the ways that the ideals of parenting and the master narrative about what a good parent is have changed over time – with the intensive mothering and pedagogical( rather than pediatric) models of parenting that are currently promoted requiring a much larger time investment o qualify as “good” parent, regardless of gender. It is also a complete historical and cultural anomaly to suggest that mothers and fathers spend equal time parenting, so you should view this as an experimental form of parenting and not judge others as strong or weak women based on whether they fit into a highly irregular division of labor.
  
  As it reads, I’m really not sure what it is you are suggesting – that women might, after years of being together with someone in a personally edifying relationship, and after bringing other human beings into the world who love and connect with both parents, and after discovering through the reality of lived experience that their own and their spouses’ theoretical ideas about equal parenting do not match up in the myriad of small parenting responsibilities that they had never foreseen to discuss and divide up before entering into a relationship, that the women should — what? Abandon that relationship out of theoretical mismatches about the equality of their contributions and go on raising the children alone? Or give them over to the father and abandon their role as parent altogether? That would simply burden the mothers even more, either logistically, or emotionally, if not both.
  
  While I find your observations interesting, I also find it laughable that you seem to champion strong women and simultaneously blame women for the fact that their husbands aren’t doing their equal share! Women just can’t win, can they?
  
  On a different note, in relation to other comments about finding circles of mothers to talk to about wider interests – it’s certainly possible to find those people to talk to, but let’s be realistic. If you are going to a “parenting” circle, you are meeting up with other strangers on the basis of one commonality – parenting. Is it really fair to expect that they have the same political, academic, or whatever interests as you? If I went to a book club or a gardening club, I certainly wouldn’t expect to be sharing ideas and conversations about diapering and breastfeeding and wouldn’t get irritated at not finding people with those interests there. Join a different club or social organization (or start your own!) for those other interests if you can’t find fellow moms who like discussing those things.

• Jen
  04/02/12 at 11:33 PM #

  I, too, studied egalitarian relationships and didn’t believe I’d find a man willing to enter one until I met my husband. Before we had kids, I told him I wasn’t getting into this to be a single parent, so this had to be 50/50 or we weren’t doing it. There are some inherent inequalities in parenting (ie pregnancy, nursing), but there’s lots of other stuff that can be done. I have trouble connecting with other moms at times because I think there’s a part of them that WANTS to do it all and be persecuted for it. There’s also a lot of a-hole men that flatly refuse to do anything to help, either because they don’t want to or because the wife does it so why should he? I’ve had plenty of blank stares when I’ve shared that my husband did night time feedings, or when I was nursing would get up and change the baby and bring him to me to nurse so I didn’t have to get out of bed. And yes, he would work 8 hours the next day. But we were in it together. Choice of partner is a big part of it, but a lot of women say things like, “but I couldn’t ask him to lose sleep because of the baby if I’m the one who has to feed her.” Why not?? Sharing your experience lets them know that there’s another way, but they may not welcome the news with open arms. ;)

• Lyla
  04/02/12 at 05:04 PM #

  Thanks Al and Victor for your comments, and for encouraging me to speak up. I think I am always a little unsure, because it’s so hard to know if in a given (heterosexual) relationship the problem is the woman needing to be in control, the Dad being unwilling or viewing their roles too traditionally, or some combination. But I think you are right, regardless of their situations, it’s important for them to know other types of Dads exist. I think the key is to empower the women I encounter to change the dynamic rather than just conclude that I really lucked out. Then again, part of it goes back to choice of mate. I was very clear with my husband about what I wanted before I got married and we were in agreement. Anyway, perhaps getting the word out about involved fathers will cause more women to choose/appreciate men who want to play an active/equal role in childcare. As I said I wrote my doctoral dissertation on equally shared parenting in heterosexual couples, and I found an endless number of benefits to children who had involved fathers, the more involved the better!

• Victor
  04/02/12 at 12:30 PM #

  As a guy I relate to this perfectly. Guys don’t preform well when they feel that doing nothing would get them the same result. Allot of guys feel it is not worth stepping up just to get cut down. As a guy that observes people I see it all the time. Many times, the second a father is taking charge and doing something, the mother steps in because the shoe might not go with the pants, or some other small nit picking. I think allot of mothers have a need to find something to fault the man for so that they can not see themselves as “as good as the mother.”
  
  My wife is the best. She is able to tolerate my little mistakes and points them out in a constructive manner. She doesn’t make me feel like a total boob because I forgot a bib in the diaper bag or something like that. In turn I have actually evolved to where I have become the stay at home dad. And my wife finds herself in the same awkward situation (Although she is vocal and doesn’t care what people think) when she says what I do. She gets into the husband bashing circle and feels that they are trying to one up each other on how bad their husbands are. And when she says she can not relate and tells them they should cut them some slack and not make them feel like crap for missing one little thing, she would have gotten a better response if she came out about being gay in a church.
  
  I’m in no way perfect or the best dad or husband, but I am motivated by knowing that I can try something, mess up a little aspect of it, and not be demoralized by constant reprimands. Otherwise I would have thrown up my hands and said you deal with it then… as many men end up doing.

• Al Watts
  04/02/12 at 11:03 AM #

  Great job understanding that your husband can and is a great dad! Most men, as you explain, can be just as good as your husband. Too often, moms feel like they do it better and then criticize their husbands for not helping out. Why would a dad help if he is always told he’s doing it wrong?
  
  I hope that you explain this to your group of moms. Tell them that your husband is nothing like theirs. Tell them a dad can be an equal parent if given the opportunity. The only way the stereotype of dad as incompetent is dispelled is if we keep telling people the stories of dads who are good, equally capable parents.

• Stephanie
  04/02/12 at 08:45 AM #

  I really relate to this author’s discussion about the confining conversations between mothers. I find it hard to broach topics outside of motherhood in a parenting context. Sometimes when children or not around or I meet mothers in more academic or professional contexts there seems to be more room for political or other more expansive discussions, but often that is not the case. This feels to me like a way to limit women’s identities and send a message that mothers should stay focused on mothering. This often does mean for women the feeling of having to choose between motherhood and other aspects of self.