I recently made a few waves with an essay I’d written in response to a friend venting to me about how her girlfriends kept saying that their husbands were going to babysit their kids so they could have a girls’ night out. Apparently, it struck a deep nerve.
But I feel like there’s something more that needs saying, so indulge me for a moment while I work it all out.
My husband is not a babysitter because he’s a parent. We’ve already established that. But how about we break this down a little, so, at its simplest, it looks something like this:
A parent knows what he’s doing.
It seems that not only have we, as a society, gotten so used to seeing mom as the sole caretaker of her children, but we have also gotten used to believing dad is an incompetent caretaker.
We see this everywhere. We see it in the public men’s restrooms that have no changing station included, because men, of course, would not know how to change a diaper. We see it in the lack of paternity leave at most businesses (maternity leave isn’t much better, but that’s another subject for another day), as if no father in his right mind would want to spend those early weeks helping his partner and acclimating himself to this new dynamic of family life. We see it in our TV shows and our movies and our commentary on clueless celebrity dads who carry their children all wrong (who of us really knows what we’re doing the first time out of the gate, anyway?).
So maybe this is where the real problem lies, why both men and women express outrage at seeing men put on pedestals for taking responsibility as a parent—because, the truth is, men don’t want to be there. They don’t want to be held up as an exception when they’re just loving their kids the best way they know how, and some days that’s taking care of the explosion that happened in their 6-month-old’s pants, and some days that’s mopping up the puke that happened in the hall, and some days that’s teaching a kid to ride a bike or roller blade or drive.
Of course we want to thank them for their contribution. Of course we want to acknowledge that they’re doing a great job as a parent, just as we are. Of course we want to make sure they know how beautiful it is to see a dad loving his by giving them his time.
