Shortly after the
birth of my third daughter I took all three girls into a supermarket where a
woman observed me wearing one child on my chest in a baby harness and pushing the
other two around in a shopping cart. “Wow, Dad doing the shopping and
the babysitting!” she marveled. Sigh. She was well-meaning but perhaps unaware
that for many fathers, that kind of comment – which suggests that Dad is just a
placeholder for Mom – is at least as frustrating as it is complimentary.
Granted, this was
an atypical outing for me and the girls. The vast majority of the time my wife
is the one out shopping with our kids. Mothers from time immemorial have been
the primary rearers of children partly by nature and partly as a consequence of
a logical division of family labor. But thanks to a rise in the number of
stay-at-home or work-from-home fathers such as myself, as well as a growing
desire of men to do more hands-on parenting, more men are sharing childrearing
tasks that once were perceived as solely the domain of women.
Society hasn’t
entirely caught up to this changing reality – hence, moments like the one I
experienced above. Part of the attitude I encountered in the supermarket stems
from the lingering stereotype of emotionally reserved traditional dads of yore,
who may have been responsible heads of the household out in the workforce but who
were uncomfortable with, or averse to, the more domestic side of childrearing.
In addition, pop culture has helped perpetuate the perception of dads as
comically inept with children. Think of the movie Three Men and a Baby or Homer from The Simpsons. So it seems noteworthy when men demonstrate that they
can be actual, capable, involved parents.
This is not to say that
dads like Homer Simpson don’t exist, of course, but fathers who are more fully
engaged in parenting chores are now beginning to resent the misperception and
to push back against it.
The
Huffington Post recently featured a brief profile of Don Hudson, stay-at-home
dad of four, who in 2015 opened a “father-focused” store in Portland, Oregon called
Seahorses. (Male seahorses actually undergo pregnancy, give birth to their young,
and shelter them in the father's pouch during the earliest stages of
development.)
Hudson was inspired
to open the store after feeling insulted by the constant suggestion that, as a
father, he’s merely a glorified babysitter. “It’s an insult,” he says.
“We’re not babysitting. We’re parenting. They’re our kids.”
Hudson “wants to
give dads a voice that accurately reflects fatherhood… We’ve successfully
conveyed the message that dads are
competent parents. We’re not a bunch of bumbling idiots like the media
portrays,” he said. “If you leave the kid alone with dad, he’s not going to be
home stuck to the wall. Not everyone puts sharpie marker on their kids’
eyebrows just to get a good picture out of it. We’re in the trenches, too.”
Yes, fathers are
parents too, but they’re not mothers. It’s not necessary to go to the
“gender-equal” lengths of Sweden’s “latte pappas” who are striving to erase any
natural difference between mother and father. A journalist living in Malmo who
authored an
article about research into the hormonal effect of parenting claims that close
daily involvement with his children has actually altered his hormones to such
an extent that on occasion his nipples “tingle strongly as if preparing to
lactate.”
He and other latte
pappas speak in high-pitched “motherese” to their kids, and he points proudly
to a finding that testosterone drops markedly in more involved fathers. In
fact, that seems to be the point: the owners of a drop-in center for new
parents in Malmo are “convinced that giving all fathers a six-month dose of
hands-on parenting would vanquish forever the brash, aggressive, insensitive
man. ‘If you are closely connected to a child,’ [one owner] says, ‘you can’t be
tough and hard.’” These Swedes seem eager not only to make fathers equal
parenting partners but to emasculate them until they are phsyically
indistinguishable from mothers.
That would be
unfortunate for the children involved. The article notes that an anthropologist
at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says that if Sweden achieved
gender-equal parenting, it would be the first society in human history to do
so. There’s a reason for that: biologically and culturally (regardless of the
culture), fathers and mothers generally have different and complimentary roles
to play in the raising of children. Those children and society are best served
when both parents fulfill those roles
responsibly.
I am very fortunate
(or cursed, depending on how frazzled I am when you ask) to be present in my
kids’ lives 24/7. Not all fathers can be so available, but that in itself is
not evidence I am any better or more committed a father than a dad whose job
allows him to be home only in the evening after work, or in between lengthy military
deployments. Good dads do what they can, when they can. We’re not Mom, but
we’re not just substitutes for her, either.
From Acculturated, 1/28/17
