Creating Opportunities for Men to Be More Involved With Their Children

Suggestions for making roles more flexible.

For generations, most heterosexual parents followed fairly rigid gender roles in how they ran their households and parented their children. Typically, men worked outside of the home and were responsible for financially supporting the family, and women were responsible for running the household, taking care of the children, and managing the family’s relationships with friends, other family, and each other. Men sometimes “helped” with certain tasks, but women largely remained the ones responsible for monitoring things and making sure everything got done. As it became more common for women to work outside the home, although many men stepped up how much they helped, women often complained about the burden of feeling in charge of everything in the family and lamented not having partners who would shoulder that responsibility equally with them.

In my experience, many families today (particularly younger families) are genuinely interested in working toward a more egalitarian division of roles in their families, but practicalities often interfere with living their values. For example, I think the litmus test of how a family’s egalitarian values is the question of who stays home with a sick child. Although this is changing, in many…