Fathers Don’t Babysit Their Own Kids?!
A Reflection on Being a Dad and Being Married to a Mom
My wife and I welcomed a new child into our family on Feb 23, 2021. At 8:14 AM, Seth was born and joined a rowdy family of 3 other boys and a girl. Seth was an unexpected blessing for our family.
He was 4 weeks early but has been nothing but a healthy joy. For those of you who have had more than one child, you will understand this next statement.
Seth is our fifth child. Each time we have one more I am surprised by how tiny and vulnerable they are when they arrive in the world. I am also consistently awed that we all arrived in the world in this condition.
I arrived that way and so did my 71-year-old mom. So did the 90-year-old woman who attends our church. Someday, the Lord willing, Seth will be a 71 or 90-year-old man marveling at how tiny his brand new great-grandson or great-granddaughter is.
Seth is my fifth and final child and his arrival has caused me to reflect on fatherhood and parenthood in general.
Parenthood & Dads
We live in a society that doesn’t value dads. Before you get all hot and bothered by that, I know that men in America (particularly white men) have had a pretty easy go of it.
I am well aware of the privilege of my position in many areas of my life. My gender has given me a leg up in my career, in my ability to access the education I was looking for, and in many other areas of my life.
However, when it comes to parenting, I am not convinced that this is the case. Our society tends to view fathers as being incompetent buffoons who can’t properly care for their children and must rely upon their partners or spouses to do so.
In fairness, my wife is a stay-at-home parent and does shoulder the lion's share of the parenting duties in our home. But this is a choice that we have made as a family. It isn’t because I am an incompetent buffoon. More often than not, the culture around me views me that way.
Daddy Daycare?
Years ago, when our twins were born, I would regularly go places with them on my day off. I was off on Mondays at the time and my wife worked. I would have my boys for the day.
We would walk around town, go to the aquarium, go to Starbucks, etc. Inevitably, I would be pulling them in a wagon or pushing them in a stroller and someone would approach me and ask if dad was babysitting for the day.
The first time I was asked this question, it caught me completely off guard. I had no idea how to respond. Babysitting? These were my children. Regardless of gender, you don’t babysit your own children. You parent them.
However, as time passed, this became an increasingly common question that I would be asked when I was out with my children by myself. Now that my family has grown, the question has changed a bit.
Now, I am often initially asked if all of the children are mine, which always strikes me as an odd question. Once I confirm that all five of them are, in fact, mine, they will inevitably commend me for being “brave” enough to grocery shop or otherwise be in public with my kids.
I am still never sure how to respond to that other than to thank them. What I don’t think they understand is that they are being unintentionally demeaning.
Why would it be brave of me to take my kids with me when I go out into the world? No one EVER says that to my wife. When she is out with them, people ask if all of the kids are hers.
Once she confirms they are, she often gets either a judgmental look or some sort of snide comment about how many kids we have. No one commends her for being “brave”.
These stories may seem minor or potentially trite to you but I think that they reveal a societal attitude that we have toward fathers and mothers. They reveal that we judge women for how many kids they choose to have.
We expect women to care for their children and sacrifice everything else in their lives on the altar of motherhood. We assume men either have no interest in parenting or are innately bad at it.
We commend men for doing the most basic parenting tasks as though they are deserving of being Father of the Year. There are a host of potential reasons for these attitudes. However, thinking and speaking this way demeans fathers AND mothers.
These types of comments are assuming that parenting is either too difficult for men or beneath their station. They are assuming that every woman on earth has an innate ability to be the caregiver to another human being.
What does that mean for the people who don’t fit those molds? Is a woman who doesn’t want to be a mom less of a woman? Is a man who wants to stay at home with his kids less of a man? We need to be better than that as a culture.
Dads Can Be Better, I Promise
The first thing we need to do is hold fathers to a higher standard. Simply being present isn’t enough. Fathers need to be engaged with their kids. They need to spend time with them.
They need to be interested in the things that interest their kids (even if they are legitimately not interesting). They need to tell their kids that they love them. And for the rest of us, we need to hold men accountable for that.
We need to more directly challenge deadbeat dads. We need to more directly challenge those dads that go to work, come home, zonk out on the couch with a beer and then go to sleep without even knowing there are kids in the house. We need to hold men to a far higher standard. We are capable, I promise.
We Can Let Moms Chill a Bit, It Won’t Kill Anyone
The second thing we need to do is ease up on moms. There is so much pressure put on moms all the time.
We expect them to maintain the beauty standards of our culture even after they have grown an entire human being inside their body. We expect them to have perfect children who obey all the time without any problem.
We expect them to be able to entertain their children all day with arts and crafts and songs etc. We expect them to not allow their kids to watch too much TV or use electronics too much or whatever else. We expect them to be the final arbiter of their children’s existence.
We also expect them to keep the house clean, the laundry done, the dinner cooked, and on and on and on. These women are human beings. Ease up.
Parenting is hard. This is especially true if you have more than one kid. Let’s have realistic expectations of women. Allow them to be the fallible humans that we all are.
Let’s Have Realistic Expectations
As a society and culture, we have deeply unrealistic expectations of parents. We hold men to the lowest possible standards while simultaneously expecting women to be supermoms in almost every circumstance. This is untenable.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the impact of absent fathers, which is increasingly being identified as an epidemic in America.
So as we go forward with our days and weeks, let’s remember that men can take care of children competently and we don’t need to congratulate them for doing that. It’s literally the basic definition of being a parent.
Women don’t need to be perfect. We can commend them for smaller, everyday successes and commiserate with them when things are going wrong.
Hopefully, this has been an edifying post. If not, blame my somewhat tired brain. I do have five kids you know!
Originally published at https://www.graceanddepravity.com.
