When Husbands Take the Lead With Kids, Cont'd

As a dad, I’m generally assumed by the world to be less competent at parenting. When I’m out and have the kids with me, I often get compliments on the apparently enormous achievement of being a dad capable of shopping with children (I’m sure almost any dad can relate).

One extension of this unequal treatment that I don’t often see discussed is that other people (usually women) constantly question my knowledge or choices as a parent. I can’t tell you how many times someone has “corrected” a parenting choice, or said, “why don't you just ask mom” if I hesitate for even a second in answering a question to do with my children. They do not behave this way with my wife; they assume that she is innately capable because she’s a mom.

So your reader’s husband may simply be responding to the feedback he receives from the rest of the world that he is not, in fact, an equal parent in their eyes.

Your reader expresses surprise at her husband’s hesitance to make parenting decisions on his own, and notes that in situations where she was taking more of the lead, she was “expected” to be comfortable and capable. I think she answers her own question here; it’s the expectation that leads to different behaviour.

My wife and I are experiencing all of these tensions around parenting and balancing two careers. And on decisions like seeing the doctor, childcare options, feeding options, etc, my wife is just expected to know more despite the fact that we have precisely the same amount of parenting experience. It is this expectation that traps both of us a little—my wife is burdened with expectation but also empowered (in the sense that she feels she can make decisions without consulting me) while I don’t have the burden of expectation but would always check with her before making any key parenting decision.

It’s the different expectations we are held to, and to which we hold ourselves, that lead to different outcomes. Societal pressures still make it seem odd when a man takes the lead with parenting, and it’s very hard for any of us to counteract our own societal biases.

I’m a female breadwinner with a husband who stays home with our three- and one-year-old daughters. I’ve noticed two big differences, compared to a more traditional arrangement.

1) My husband’s isolation from traditional support systems for parents of young children. The lack of playdates and moms’ groups has been well documented in the articles written about stay-at-home dads, such as Moravcsik’s. But I find that it’s even the isolation from female gossip. People complain a lot about the judgments that are lobbed at new mothers by welling-meaning and not-so-well-meaning old ladies. But you boil it all down, and that childcare knowledge is transmitted to the next generation. My husband, on the other hand, had no one but me, and I wasn’t home full time with a baby, so I couldn’t possibly know.

On paper, we should have been equally (un)prepared for our firstborn; both of us were the youngest in our families, neither of us had changed more than five diapers in our lives before bringing a baby home. But I was constantly surprised by the things that nobody had ever told him … because why would a man need to know how to take care of a baby?

2) My husband’s (initial) expectation that he would get to “clock out” whenever I wasn’t at work. Evenings, weekends, and holidays—the assumption was that anything childcare related was in my domain (although he was willing to cook, clean, or do yardwork). It didn’t end up being sustainable, but I think it did push us into a more balanced arrangement than a traditional model with the mother in charge of the children 24/7.

The flip side of this, though, is that it’s created a need for a lot more negotiation. My mom was in charge all of the time, and so she set all of the parenting rules and expectations. I refuse to parent the way that comes most naturally to my husband, and vice versa, so we’re always having to work it out.

Overall, I feel like we’re fighting the good fight. It’s hard and imperfect, but our daughters, nieces, and nephews are growing up seeing more options for their future than they would otherwise … and so do the younger women I work with. Maybe it’ll be less hard for them.

As a woman in my mid-twenties, I have realized since entering the workforce that my parents’ decision to prioritize my mother’s career, while my father took on a primary care-giving role (whether he held a full-time or part-time job or stayed home, all of which he did for parts of my childhood), was the best thing they could have done for me.

I have a confidence that many women say they lack, having avoided internalizing many of the harmful stereotypes about women that nag away inside you. Of course a woman—like me—can have a career, while her husband does most of the care-giving and all of the cooking. It’s the most natural thing in the world! That is, after all, how I lived the first eighteen years of my life.

I don’t know how I feel about the issue in the original article: Can a child-raising partnership ever really achieve absolute parity in each partner's contributions to caregiving? That said, I hope we eventually reach a world in which it’s normal for either the man or the woman to be the primary parent.