The Dad Privilege Checklist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So many of you can’t even see the irony of blaming the wife for the husband’s shortcomings! Way to prove the author’s point!

I think they see it and don't care.

This stuff is deeply engrained in our culture.

[Anonymous]

Men have a talent of not seeing, hearing, or noticing anything. I could never snore the way he does it 8 am and not knowing that the baby is up because of his snoring.
Most of this not seeing or noticing anything happens at work place also. Women notice that a customer needs help and proceed to help them. Men show up when customer is good and wonder what the fuss is all about. I envy them and the blinders they have on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Men have a talent of not seeing, hearing, or noticing anything. I could never snore the way he does it 8 am and not knowing that the baby is up because of his snoring.
Most of this not seeing or noticing anything happens at work place also. Women notice that a customer needs help and proceed to help them. Men show up when customer is good and wonder what the fuss is all about. I envy them and the blinders they have on.

All men are exactly the same.

[Anonymous]

I have two exes. One didn't have to do anything for the kid, but to keep them alive. Hasn't paid child support, provided insurance required by courts, and has kept the kid home from school which simply makes his life easier.
When he needed any documents, he expected me to have them, but then again, that's how he handles his own life.
The other one was on top of it all and kept me away from anything to do with the kid. I couldn't have copies or original of any documents without him wondering why I need them. Seems to me like a lot of extremes among men which complicates life for everyone.
Both were guided by their special needs which they take as NT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Men have a talent of not seeing, hearing, or noticing anything. I could never snore the way he does it 8 am and not knowing that the baby is up because of his snoring.
Most of this not seeing or noticing anything happens at work place also. Women notice that a customer needs help and proceed to help them. Men show up when customer is good and wonder what the fuss is all about. I envy them and the blinders they have on.

All men are exactly the same.

Have to agree. If a poster said the same sorts of things about all women, they would be eviscerated.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Honestly, all of this is made easier if mom stays home with the children and dad makes more money to compensate. I know it’s an unpopular sentiment, but most women would feel much less resentment if they dropped work to focus their efforts (when the children are young) on raising them and let their DH work harder to cover the bills.

So you think the only function women should have once they become mothers is to solely focus on being a mom? Why is that fair? Women have talents, skills and brains that society can benefit from! Why can Dads be dads and also productive members of society!

You do know the story of Japan? Women are choosing not to become mothers because of the unequal treatment of women! I am not encouraging my dds to become mothers! If the population dies out so be it.

I’m saying that mothers would be much happier if the focused solely on being moms when their children are young. They very well may have talents/brain/skills society can benefit from, but the discussion about happiness and purpose are two separate ones. The vast majority of career women have jobs, not careers, and it is ironic that women supporting feminism parrot the incredulous lie that working 45 hours per week as Regional Sales Manager to Management is worth more to women than being home with their child. It is certainly worth more to your company that you spend those hours click-clacking on your laptop, but it won’t make you happier. I think the female resentment is symptomatic that some women are waking up like “what the hell am I doing, getting sucked dry for $35/hr?” but the market absolutely cannot allow her to consider quitting so - quick! - blame her DH and they can fight about who cleans gutters so that no one stops and says “wait, who is actually getting all our time?”

Maybe... but only if her DH is happy to be the sole earner. A lot of men today hate that role and don't want their wives to stay home. Also many, many men simply do not make enough money to support a SAHM, even for a few years.

I know a lot of women who would happily have taken 4-5 years as a SAHM when their kids were small. Happily. But the household finances made this hard (it's not like 50 years ago where most working women made a small fraction of their husband's salary -- most married couples have a lot more pay parity now and losing one earner means losing 30-50% of the household income, not a small thing), plus they know that for their longterm finances (college, retirement) they have to go back to work, and they fear that even a couple years out of the workforce can mean a massive pay cut and never getting back on track.

Lots of women would love to be able to just focus on their kids for a while. They can't. But for some reason, this is just their problem and not a collective problem their husbands also must contend with.

That is why is said the solution for the resentment problem relies on both parents - women quit their job to focus on their children when they are young and men make more money. Unfortunately, telling men to make more money so their wives can stay home with a brand new baby is akin to telling women to lose weight. That this conversation is a such a black-box is a design of an efficient market, his company will fight tooth and nail to not pay him a dime more, so you fight about who is doing equal dishes at home so that no one stops and asks “why the hell does he get a $100 bonus when the company made millions in profit this quarter?”

One approach other countries have taken is a very robust mandatory, state-subsidized parental leave policy that enables families to have one parent at home with the kids for a year or two after every child, without losing their jobs or having to go down to one income. Yes these are expensive and difficult to implement, but many countries have figured out a way to do so, and while they are not perfect, they are shown to result in positive outcomes for children and women. And they are often paid for by corporate taxes that force companies to actually foot the bill.

If you want to go back to a system where men make more money to enable women to stay home, you have to contend with several issues:

(1) if women are not earning money in the workforce, where does their economic power come from? Depriving women of economic power is associated with economies/countries with high rates of domestic abuse. Women have to have economic power or they will be exploited. Period. So you need a way to make the SAHM role economically powerful. Is it paying SAHMs? Is it guaranteeing some portion of their spouses' income "belongs" to them? I don't know. But you can't just roll back the clock to 1952 and ignore that the original push to get women better access to the workplace was not some whim. Women without economic power are exploited. Period.

(2) You can't just bar women from the workplace. First, women want and can and are good at paid work. It's also counter to how we now conceive of equality (including economic equality) and no one will buy it. Plus, the intense work of parenting is finite. It is very intense for about 4-5 years, and then less intense but still heavy for another 4-5 years (yes, school age kids still need enormous amounts of childcare, school is only about 150-180 days a year, plus children this age still need a lot of parenting as they develop independence in a host of categories including hygiene, academics, socializing, etc.). But then it's a lot less intense. So... what about women. A woman's adult life cannot revolve around spending 10 years doing intensive childcare and then nothing. We need a path for women that protects their economic interests and provides for a future after the heavy lifting of childcare is done.

Oh, and I'm using gendered terms because this conversation is gendered, but personally I think you have to basically view this in non-gendered terms. You have just say "young children need a ton of attention and parental support, families should be able to designate one parent to provide most of that through the early years of a child's life, and as a society we will come up with a way to support that option" and it doesn't have to be about SAHMs. Honestly, if we actually structured being a SAHM in a way that made some actual sense, I bet more men would choose it and choose to partner with women who were more focused on work in order to spend time with kids. Right now it's a $hit gig and men know it and that why they don't sign up for it. Some men like the idea of just caring for kids and focusing on the home, I've heard them say it. But it's the total lack of economic power, the low social status, and the absolute mess of what happens when those years are over that keeps them from signing up.

Why would we bar women from the workplace? The conversation is about women’s happiness and the resentment of doing his-and-her job while he does his. We have protections for women like alimony and child support (which - surprise! - as corporations get more powerful, the movement towards divorce reforms in favor of the working spouse accelerate). Every. single. force vector in this country today is designed in favor of the market and consumer, NOT in favor of families. Every article, think piece and “feminist” politician will try to convince women to work more hours for less (“a seat at the table!” “a lucrative title!”), and when you cry that you’re tired and you want to see your kid and not work two jobs, one at home and one at your desk - the option is NEVER to blame the company, it is always “maybe your husband just needs to step it up!”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This again guys? Look, we know there are some men out there who do 50% or more. But they are rare. Actual, objective research time and time again shows women do more domestic labor even if they also work outside the home. The whole “default parent” thing is true for many of us.

What resonated most for me on the list is the freedom men have to just assume the mom will handle things. Even if the dad does some of the things on that list 9/10 the mom has set it up or monitors it in some way. I happen to have an extreme version of default parenting that has led to divorce. At the end of the day, it was his complete freedom vs my complete lack of freedom that really soured me, more than the actual work I had to do. Time and time again, being treated like the maid, chef and nanny as he just … walked out the door to do whatever tf he wanted to do … really got demoralizing

+1 I feel the same way. I actually ENJOY the work and what I do on a day to day basis for my children and family. I do NOT enjoy the attitude and saw it seeping into my children . That's why it has to change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yikes.

All the listed work are easy-peasy jobs for me. I prefer doing or outsourcing these to going to work for a paycheck. My DH thinks I am a superwoman just because I deal with everything that does not pertain to his career. This gives him space and bandwidth to become a high earner and give us a good lifestyle.

I prefer that 1) my DH make good money, 2) is loyal, loving and respectful to me, and 3) appreciates me. I do the same for him, except instead of making good money, I give him great return for the money he earns in the sense of building wealth, having a well run household and having kids who excel etc.

What about in households where men do not "make good money." Do you think it's reasonable for those men to expect their wives to handle every aspect of childcare and housework? Especially if their income does not enable them to outsource any of these items?

Many more women are in that position than yours. It is, yes, easier to be a SAHM with a high earning spouse whose income will enable you to outsource unpleasant or difficult tasks, and where some tasks will never even fall to you (like needing to budget very carefully on food and house repairs).

So maybe your comments are not actually very helpful except for other SAHMs of high earners, a tiny percentage of all mothers. Just a thought.

So, in other words, most people have an "expense" issue and not really a "problem".

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Is this the new replacement for the mommy wars? Now we can talk about how “household labor inequality is abuse”?

If you think the conversation about an unequal division of labor in households is "new" then welcome to society from the rock you've been living under.

No, it’s the new replacement for the divisive mommy wars. But just like the mommy wars between WOHM and SAHM, so many of these complaints come back to choices. Women can now make more choices about working/staying home, which is the point of feminism, and they can also make choices about what they do for their household and how things are shared with their partner. And of course, they can make choices about who they marry or partner with.

Make your own choices. Make better choices.

No, that wasn't the point of feminism. The point of feminism was to get equal financial footing, including equal pay. It had zero to do with making a "choice" between working and staying home. This is a popular misconception/appropriation of what the women's liberation movement was about.

NP. Flat out wrong. Feminism is about choices.

There are different strands of feminism. There is a strand of feminism called "choice feminism" that was heavily embraced by Gen X and older Millenial women. They were not totally happy with their mothers' feminism, 2nd wave, which felt very prescriptive ("if you do XYZ, you are supporting the patriarchy, so you can't do XYZ"). It could also encourage division and judgment among women, leading to the original SAHM v. WOHM wars, which were heavily spurred on by conservative women like Phyllis Schafley, who were only too happy to paint the feminists as unattractive, unhappy women who couldn't get a date, much less a husband, and were derelict in their roles as wives and mothers.

Gex X/Millenials looked at that and thought "this sucks" and invented choice feminism which said you could work or stay home, the point is that you should not be coerced into either. This dovetailed very nicely with the fact that the big reproductive battle of feminism had shifted from birth control (considered a basic right by the 80s, but actually something earlier generations of women had to fight for) to abortion, which was also framed as "choice" -- women should get to choose whether or not they become mothers, and when, and also what happens to their bodies. Thus: choice feminism.

But, as an older Millenial feminist myself, choice feminism also has problems. It can very quickly devolve into exactly what some PP's have said -- the reductive "make better choices." The problem with framing feminism about choice is that it's really only a choice for women who are already quite privileged. Most women don't have a choice as to whether they work or not. They don't get to pick between "leaning in" and "mommy tracking" (yep, Sheryl Sanberg is a Gen X choice feminist, although even she started seeing the flaws eventually). Choice feminism also lays all the blame for inequity, whether in the work or at home, on women. Again. If your husband isn't an equal partner, you chose wrong. If you are in a field that doesn't promote women or that is totally incompatible with motherhood (but not fatherhood), you chose wrong. Oh and choice feminism often assumes you are white, UMC, well-educated, and an American citizen. A lot of the choices advocated by choice feminists ("instead of fighting over childcare and housework, outsource these items and choose peace in your household") depend upon a seemingly invisible workforce that happens to be overwhelmingly working class women of color, many of them immigrants. There is a hierarchy to choice feminism where only some women get to choose and it is the job of other women to support those choices through labor and exploitation. Choice feminism is easily twisted into misogyny, even though the original genesis for this wave was an effort to reduce conflict among women and reduce the amount of self-enforce misogyny women engaged in. It did not work, at least not as well as we hoped.

2nd wave feminism was deeply flawed, so is choice feminism. Turns out untangling thousands of years of misogyny in a century is easier said than done. None of us has it figured out yet. But it is worth it to learn your history as it will at least make you a bit more self-aware when having these conversations.

Also worth it to avoid sexist diminutives and endearments when attempting to have conversations.

I'm not that PP. You can either engage with the substance of my post or not, but that's not me. I'm just explaining more clearly why some women think feminism is all about choice and others don't. They are simply talking about different strains of feminism and don't understand that feminism is not a monolith. I didn't even get into the fact that the 1st wave, 2nd wave, and choice feminism wave all were mostly led by and for white women, and that there are totally different theories of feminism espoused by black women and other women of color that are actually recently becoming more prominent. Like intersectional feminism. But they still aren't mainstream and a lot of women who consider themselves feminists don't really even know what they are.

A lot of people are woefully undereducated on these histories. It's crazy because this thread is about arguments that are 100 years old, but people don't want to read or think about how other people approached this problems. They want to keep inventing the wheel.

Oh just stop. There are zero versions of feminism that do not address the unpaid/exploitative nature of women’s domestic labor. There may be feminists who have differing opinions on whether women “should” work outside the home, but they will all agree that women’s labor should not be exploited. So yes, that boils down to financial matters like a woman without a job being allowed to get credit, co-own property, be financially protected in a divorce, not be discriminated against if she goes back to work, getting some public benefits in recognition of contributions to the economy, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Men have a talent of not seeing, hearing, or noticing anything. I could never snore the way he does it 8 am and not knowing that the baby is up because of his snoring.
Most of this not seeing or noticing anything happens at work place also. Women notice that a customer needs help and proceed to help them. Men show up when customer is good and wonder what the fuss is all about. I envy them and the blinders they have on.

Men make horrible husbands.

[Anonymous]

I criticize gifts for family members or my children that I did not plan, buy, or wrap for being too expensive, inappropriate, or otherwise the wrong choice.


This one got to me. I did not think a husband acting like a boss providing feedback on a wife's decision was so common. In my family, I do all the research and other labor for camps, gifts, trips, etc., and DH gets to criticize if he does not like it or not acknowledge it at all if he does. Drives me nuts and makes me feel as if I am his subordinate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is this the new replacement for the mommy wars? Now we can talk about how “household labor inequality is abuse”?

If you think the conversation about an unequal division of labor in households is "new" then welcome to society from the rock you've been living under.

No, it’s the new replacement for the divisive mommy wars. But just like the mommy wars between WOHM and SAHM, so many of these complaints come back to choices. Women can now make more choices about working/staying home, which is the point of feminism, and they can also make choices about what they do for their household and how things are shared with their partner. And of course, they can make choices about who they marry or partner with.

Make your own choices. Make better choices.

No, that wasn't the point of feminism. The point of feminism was to get equal financial footing, including equal pay. It had zero to do with making a "choice" between working and staying home. This is a popular misconception/appropriation of what the women's liberation movement was about.

NP. Flat out wrong. Feminism is about choices.

No, that's some derivative post-feminist bullshit by people who've co-opted the original goals. True feminists would say not all choices are valid (including "choosing" to stay at home and be subservient to a man, economically speaking).

"Choice feminism" is a thing, sure. But's kind of like "cafeteria Catholics."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I criticize gifts for family members or my children that I did not plan, buy, or wrap for being too expensive, inappropriate, or otherwise the wrong choice.


This one got to me. I did not think a husband acting like a boss providing feedback on a wife's decision was so common. In my family, I do all the research and other labor for camps, gifts, trips, etc., and DH gets to criticize if he does not like it or not acknowledge it at all if he does. Drives me nuts and makes me feel as if I am his subordinate.

I hear this. When we go on vacation I often feel trapped-- DH will complain if he thinks the accommodations aren't nice enough or our flights aren't direct or whatever, but if I spend enough to make him happy he'll say "you spent HOW much?!" like this money was spent on something frivolous just for me and not a vacation I planned on his behalf.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I criticize gifts for family members or my children that I did not plan, buy, or wrap for being too expensive, inappropriate, or otherwise the wrong choice.


This one got to me. I did not think a husband acting like a boss providing feedback on a wife's decision was so common. In my family, I do all the research and other labor for camps, gifts, trips, etc., and DH gets to criticize if he does not like it or not acknowledge it at all if he does. Drives me nuts and makes me feel as if I am his subordinate.

Same. I called my DH out on it and he didnt even realize he was doing it. But it was about shoes and sports equipment. For example, bought x type of pants for a sport and he was like why did you buy those? because they are x sport pants and on amazon and got here in 2 days. Or why did we sign up for this program? Uh because its cheap and accessible. The worst part is I have said hey look over the amazon list and see if you want to make any adjustments we need to order equipment for the upcoming season. Nope nada.

Again, feel free to take over any of this AT ANY TIME. But he can barely take care of himself sooooooo.

Also, camps drive me mad. I made camp in January. He - yet again- questions the decisions months after. I sent links to the camps, told you we needed to make decisions at sign up time or we would miss it and you know who would end up being home with a rising 1st grader while trying to work FT....me because he works in a SCIF.

"Why didnt we look for wrestling camps? - You said you would do that.
"Why arent the camps all day?" - Thats how most camps work.
"Why do they cost so much?" - they all cost on average 350-450 per week. Thats what camps cost. And you would know that if you did any research into camps.

I provided receipts- in January- and they STILL HAVENT BEEN SUBMITTED FOR REIMBURSEMENT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I criticize gifts for family members or my children that I did not plan, buy, or wrap for being too expensive, inappropriate, or otherwise the wrong choice.


This one got to me. I did not think a husband acting like a boss providing feedback on a wife's decision was so common. In my family, I do all the research and other labor for camps, gifts, trips, etc., and DH gets to criticize if he does not like it or not acknowledge it at all if he does. Drives me nuts and makes me feel as if I am his subordinate.

I hear this. When we go on vacation I often feel trapped-- DH will complain if he thinks the accommodations aren't nice enough or our flights aren't direct or whatever, but if I spend enough to make him happy he'll say "you spent HOW much?!" like this money was spent on something frivolous just for me and not a vacation I planned on his behalf.

This sounds like my husband! And he is always accusing me of spending money on Amazon. I’m like “Look at the account history! It’s pull ups, it’s socks for the kids, it’s drawing pads, it’s groceries from WF, it’s wipes.”