When Husbands Take the Lead With Kids
Josh Levs wrote a thought-provoking piece for us last week insisting that “‘primary’ caregiver benefits sound gender-neutral but aren’t,” making the case that companies should drop the “primary caregiver” distinction because it’s based on traditional stereotypes that presume one parent—the mother by default—is mostly responsible for parenting. A reader responds:
What the author calls stereotype, I call a Bayesian prior. Without Bayesian priors, nothing really works. The idea that a woman is more likely to be primary caregiver than the man:
1) Isn’t always true
2) Is true enough for a company to use that as a prior.Welcome to Life, where everything isn’t all equally likely for our convenience.
Another reader is on the same page:
Some people still don’t understand that free enterprise businesses in a capitalist economy aren’t charity organizations; they are in competition with one another.
If one business offers both parents caregiver bennies that their competitor doesn’t, that gives their competitor an advantage that very likely will enable their competitor to survive and thrive while they go into bankruptcy and get bought out by that competitor. Laws have to be made to even the playing field without destroying the natural environment, like laws against pollution that ALL businesses must obey even though it is an expense for some businesses that hinders their competitiveness.
Giving mothers caregiver bennies is widely recognized as unavoidable because women are determined by biology to be the child bearers. Men carry no such gestational burden, and they are actually capable of continuing to “bring home the bacon” while women are incapacitated by child birth. Claims by feminists to the contrary, men didn’t decide that; biology did long ago, before humans even came on the scene.
But as long as the majority don’t find gender-neutral caregiver bennies to be quite the same urgency as pollution, they won’t enforce such laws, which would hinder business productivity and thereby raise the cost of goods and services that we all consume.
Another reader sighs:
Sadly, this proposal by Josh Levs will only gain traction when enough fathers have decided they want it. As is often the case with women’s issues, they don’t become legitimate until men say they are.
By the way, Levs’s is a great companion piece to an essay in this month’s print edition of The Atlantic, “Why I Put My Wife’s Career First,” by Andrew Moravcsik. His wife is Anne-Marie Slaughter, who wrote the controversial Atlantic cover story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Here’s Moravcsik:
[M]ost two-career families sooner or later find that one person falls into the role of lead parent. In our family, I assumed that role. To be sure, Anne-Marie was actively involved with our boys, taking responsibility for specific chunks of their lives, like dealing with teachers and planning college trips. She was—and is—emotionally close to both sons. And, as she described in her article three years ago, she broke off her government service to help our older son through his rocky transition into adolescence.
But none of this is lead parenting. Lead parenting is being on the front lines of everyday life.
Here’s a related passage from Levs:
[T]here is something about the idea that a child has one parent who is a “primary” caregiver and another who is secondary that is startlingly outdated. About 60 percent of families with children at home have two working parents who share caregiving responsibilities. Workplaces should be doing what they can to encourage an even distribution of those responsibilities, not encoding the idea that one parent will do more.
One parent who’s done more is this female reader:
I am almost content being the sole breadwinner. My only point of contention is that my husband doesn’t immerse himself in the primary parent role. When I was at home more, I didn’t call him in the middle of a business trip to ask whether I should take a child to the doctor; I just made the decision I felt was best and went with it. I also never pulled him into every single interaction with school; I just handled it.
My husband is getting better (I feel I need to stress that more), but it has taken years to reach the point where he felt confident enough to parent without asking for constant reassurance. I was never expected to need that reassurance; I was always expected to be comfortable and capable in my role as mother. He has just as many years experience as a parent as I do (a few more, in fact), so I don't understand where the hesitance originates.
Can you relate to that reader? Or are you a dad who has taken the lead with parenting? Email [email protected] on those questions or any others raised by Levs, Moravcsik, or their readers above.
