The Remarkable Dad

Reevaluating our expectations of men and child care

My husband is a remarkable man. This, after all, is why I married him. His warmth, kindness, sense of humor, and laid back attitude was obvious to me from the beginning. He is a high school special needs teacher who runs a sports camp for kids. A month into our relationship, I visited his sports camp and immediately knew he was the man I would marry. I did, and since then we’ve had 3 beautiful babies. It is no surprise to me that he is also a remarkable dad.

Sure we have our disagreements- I’m more uptight, he’s more laid back. He likes to relax and take naps on the weekend afternoons, while my brain never shuts off and I’m looking for the next thing to cross off our to do list (often while silently resentful of his nap). And inevitably as two working parents the discussion of who does what for the family comes up a lot. I still bear most of the “mental load” but he probably does more of the day-to-day household/kid responsibilities like grocery shopping, cooking dinner, laundry, vacuuming, etc. I’m the planner, he’s the doer and fixer. Where we can, we try to leverage our individual strengths in this whole child rearing thing. Overall I think our contributions are pretty equal and we make a really good team. I consider myself lucky because this, I have come to learn, is not the norm.

Imagine my surprise when I posted this photo on a moms Facebook group this weekend and it garnered 349 “likes” and 81 comments.

In all 81 comments there was only 1 that said something along the lines of, “we moms do this all the time.” The rest of the comments hailed my husband as a rare super dad and me as “so incredibly lucky.”

It’s 2018 and despite the advancements women have made in the workforce, we still only make, on average, $0.80 for every $1.00 a man earns, and as a whole we certainly don’t expect men to be equal partners in the home or in raising our children.

If we are to ever close the gap and achieve gender equality in the workforce we have to have gender equality at home. We have to shift our collective cultural mindset away from the idea that men as caregivers to our children and equal partners at home is somehow exceptional. Even I, the women with the remarkable husband who pulls his weight, is guilty of this. Why else would I have thought the image of him holding the baby while vacuuming was so Facebook worthy? I knew it would get a reaction—I guess I just didn’t expect quite that reaction.

So how do we normalize dads taking an equal role in household and child rearing responsibilities?

We have to consciously recognize our own biased behaviors and start involving dads in everything we by default, delegate to moms—particularly in families with two working parents. As I see it there is a short list of things that biologically only a mother can do:

Everything else can be shared. There is nothing inherently maternal about enrolling in preschool, scheduling doctors appointments, planning extra curricular activities, doing laundry or cooking. Even the separation, sadness, and conflicting emotions many parents feel when returning to work after a the birth of a child is not and should not be exclusive to women. Particularly in Silicon Valley, tech companies have made tremendous improvements to their paternity leave policies and many dads take time off to be home with a new child, yet I have never heard someone ask a dad returning to work, “Is it hard to be back? How are you juggling it all?”

I too am guilty of this and all to often don’t engage dads in the same conversations I do moms. Even in my own family, I don’t always follow through with setting the expectation that we share childcare and household responsibilities equally.

Just this week I texted my sister-in-law “Shoot what are you doing for backup care for Columbus Day? Preschool’s closed!” Our kids go to the same preschool and we all work full time. “There’s the YMCA, or we could do shifts and each work half days” she responded. Who was conspicuously missing from this text thread? Whose work was not going to be impacted? Who was not adding yet another thing to their already impossibly long to-do lists? Our husbands. And not because they couldn’t or wouldn’t rearrange their schedules but because I didn’t include them in the conversation from the start.

Fast-forward a week later and my husband and I both received an email from the new room parent at my son’s pre-school highlighting some upcoming events. I responded on behalf of both of us (and cc’ed my husband) indicating our willingness to participate in the all hands site clean-up. The room parent responded with some follow up questions, and she conveniently dropped my husband from the conversation. I replied and added him back in, she continued the conversation and dropped him yet again. So either she’s just not in the habit of hitting “reply all” or she felt the information wasn’t relevant to him. In either case, by doing this it became 100% my responsibility to communicate, coordinate, and schedule our participation in the event. One more item on my to-do list.

While these things may seem trivial, the reality is these micro-interactions where we “forget” to include dads, interact with dads differently, or just assume it’s the mother’s job, happen countless times over the course of a day, a week, a year. Over time this adds up to working mothers unintentionally getting the lion’s share of child related responsibilities in addition to their professional responsibilities. It doesn’t take long to connect the dots and realize how inequity in the home has a direct impact on inequity in the workplace.

We are a far cry from equality but the more we can do to address our own unconscious bias and call it out, the better. So next time a dad comes back from paternity leave ask him the same questions you would a new mother. When dads are left out of critical planning conversations, insist they be added. When you see a photo of a dad vacuuming while holding a baby on Facebook, resist reacting with such astonishment. While I still maintain that my husband is indeed a remarkable man, if there is one thing I hope for my kids it’s that in the future this is not so remarkable.

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