I can’t tell you how many times when I was out with my infant, some well-meaning stranger said to me, “Oh, how nice! Are you Mr. Mom today?” or “Oh, look at you! Are you babysitting?
To which I’d say as kindly as I could, “No, I am her father.”
To which they would laugh as if I’d made some kind of joke.
Which meant they hadn’t understood anything I was saying. And I wasn’t saying anything complicated.
What I wanted to say was this: “Seriously? Am I ‘Mr. Mom?’ Do you know how insulting that is? What I’m doing here with this baby—it’s called being a father. It means that I’m her dad. It means I’m not the babysitter or the mom substitute or some incompetent fool. I’m her father and I deserve equal respect as a parent despite the norm in North American culture that dads are secondary parents.”
There, I feel better! But only a little.
Because the cruel truth is, in heterosexual relationships, so many dads accept and take up the role of secondary parent. There’s a lot of reasons for this, many stemming from historical gender roles to the fact that men historically are paid a lot more than women.
I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to be respected and treated as an equal parent. But given how North American culture views mothers as primary and fathers as secondary parents, where does this leave us as fathers?
Cultural norms
Until the cultural norm changes, we’re swimming upstream, which means there’s a lot of work to do to reverse this long-term cultural norm. It means that dads may feel like they’re working overtime.
For example, many dads are the primary bread winners because they make more money than the moms generally do. (In 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, “American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.” Women of color fared even worse: “Black women earned 70% as much as White men and Hispanic women earned only 65% as much.”)
Fathers then are spending more time at work while mothers spend more time parenting the kids and building their bond. If dads don’t also build this bond, moms will become the default go-to parent.
This means that dads have to do double shifts, the first one at work and the second one at home with their child. It may feel a bit exhausting, but it’s the only way to build the connection between you and your child so that he will have two go-to parents, not one.
Being pro-active, developing skills
A dad once told me, “From day one, she [the mom] was better at changing diapers. Our kid cried less when she did it. After a while, she just did all the diapers because I was horrible at it.”
When I probed further, the dad basically described how from the beginning, because he wasn’t good at changing diapers, he let the mom do it. She wasn’t particularly better, but as she did more of them, her abilities quickly improved while his remained unchanged. Soon, she became the go-to parent with diapers.
This example applies to all of parenting.
For dads to be equal partners, we may have to insist on doing the jobs that don’t come easily so that we can improve our skills. It means being pro-active and not letting skills atrophy because the other parent is more adept. Dads especially have to be pro-active because the cultural norm is often telling us that moms are better parents, that we should step back rather than step up.
If we’ve been told we are secondary parents, the real risk is our accepting this untrue version of fatherhood.
Because parenting is so hard—there’s no manual, only on-the-job training—all parents feel incompetent. But this is a feeling many men generally struggle with. This is how we’ve been socialized: society tells us that men have to be strong and competent, never weak or unsure.
Feeling incompetent comes with the job of parenting, and like any job, the more we do it, the better we get at it. When we tolerate that initial discomfort, we can then develop the skills to become competent.
Working with moms
That first day of fatherhood as dads watch their kid nursing, it’s often immediately clear how women share a unique bond with infants that fathers can’t share. Yes, we can take off our shirt and offer a bottle, but it’s not the same. And that’s okay!
This doesn’t make dads incompetent, and it’s not a competition with the mom!
When it comes to stepping up as a father, moms need to be included, not seen as the opposing team.
In reality, the vast majority of moms want dads to be fully realized, fully participating parents. They don’t want to be the go-to parent. They want a break. They want to share the world’s hardest job with us.
Because American culture generally sees moms as the go-to parent, both moms and dads have to actively work at reversing this trend. This means talking with your kid’s mom about how she can step back a little so that you have more space to step up.
In the end, the more you step up, the stronger the bond you’ll have with your child, and the more you’ll reap the joys of parenting.
Related Posts
How to Be a Father When Your Own Dad Was Absent
If your father was absent, you can still be the kind of father you wish you’d had. It starts with fathering yourself and here’s how. If you had an absent father, you can still be the kind of father you wish you’d had. It starts with fathering yourself, and here’s how.
Fathers: How to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Boys
The challenges fathers face when it comes to boys and emotions.
When Raising Sons: What it Means to be Masculine
This posts covers what fathers (or mothers!) should consider as they raise children in a world where masculinity and femininity are so important (and sometimes controversial).
