Millennial men pitched themselves as equal partners. What happened?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think a lot of women prefer to be the default parent. It’s not true in all cases, but it is in a lot. I happily put my career on the back burner when we had kids. I still work, but it’s not as much as my DH. I think we are both happy with the arrangement. I don’t regret it at all.

I wish I had a wife!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband is an equal partner. I've never downshifted my career.

+1. You may be in a circle where this isn't the case, OP, but that's more a reflection of your circle than it is every one's experience.

Yes, my husband is an equal partner with our 3 kids and in the home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's a few things.

First, as a woman, I am so much more aware than my husband and better at multi-tasking. If I notice something needs to be done, I do it soon because otherwise it takes mental space to remember. Meaning that it is actually less work overall for me to sign up for music lessons instead of discuss it with my husband and wait for him to get to it and remember the deadlien to sign up and then subtly check in with him as we get closer to the deadline because if I ask outright I'm "nagging."

For many things, the easiest thing is just doing it myself. The only way that I've found to split the work is for each of us to 100% own things. I own more than he does though, and it's self fufilling because I am busy so I want things to be done, and I have a lot of things on my plate so I want to manage work myself so I can plan around it. This means I continue to take on more than my fair share.

I think a big piece of it is mental load. I've tried to implement different mechanisms to share it but it's nearly impossible with someone who was socialized without mental load. It's like my brain has a rolling ticker at the bottom of things that need to get done and I can't turn it off.

The mental load is real. My sister’s husband has a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and it comes with its own issues, but part of it is that he wants to be in control of everything, so he deals with all of the crap…arranging childcare, finding music lessons, opening 529’s, getting the leak in the ceiling fixed, planning vacations, figuring out why the dog keeps vomiting, etc.
I had thought this was all BS when other women complained about it because it could be done between other things, but I can’t tell you how much easier parenthood has been for my sister when she doesn’t have to think about all of this stuff. She goes to work, then comes home and plays with her girls. If she has to go out of town, then she tells her husband and he just deals with it.

Wow!

My spouse has anxiety and other things but instead of doing them/in control, he sticks his head in the sand and hides.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's that they were young and naive when they said those things. They didn't understand how tiring and complicated it is when you have kids and both parents have real careers. They didn't understand anything at all about the parenting grind. They're more tired now than they were in their twenties. And some of them were saying those things and truly aspired to do it, but simply do not have the executive functioning ability.

Yeah. I think my husband and I both thought of our moms as having worked, and that's not exactly wrong, but they sure weren't working full time when their kids were young. And my career is a more demanding. And parenting is more demanding, too.

Yeah. A lot of boomers and the generation before that (the greatest generation?) worked part time or very part time for 15 years or so while they were raising their kids, then went back to work later on.
I think there was something to be said for just recognizing that women were going to spend part of their early career raising children. I wish that was something you could still do without feeling like you were going to be punished or like you could never return to a career.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's a few things.

First, as a woman, I am so much more aware than my husband and better at multi-tasking. If I notice something needs to be done, I do it soon because otherwise it takes mental space to remember. Meaning that it is actually less work overall for me to sign up for music lessons instead of discuss it with my husband and wait for him to get to it and remember the deadlien to sign up and then subtly check in with him as we get closer to the deadline because if I ask outright I'm "nagging."

For many things, the easiest thing is just doing it myself. The only way that I've found to split the work is for each of us to 100% own things. I own more than he does though, and it's self fufilling because I am busy so I want things to be done, and I have a lot of things on my plate so I want to manage work myself so I can plan around it. This means I continue to take on more than my fair share.

I think a big piece of it is mental load. I've tried to implement different mechanisms to share it but it's nearly impossible with someone who was socialized without mental load. It's like my brain has a rolling ticker at the bottom of things that need to get done and I can't turn it off.

The mental load is real. My sister’s husband has a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and it comes with its own issues, but part of it is that he wants to be in control of everything, so he deals with all of the crap…arranging childcare, finding music lessons, opening 529’s, getting the leak in the ceiling fixed, planning vacations, figuring out why the dog keeps vomiting, etc.
I had thought this was all BS when other women complained about it because it could be done between other things, but I can’t tell you how much easier parenthood has been for my sister when she doesn’t have to think about all of this stuff. She goes to work, then comes home and plays with her girls. If she has to go out of town, then she tells her husband and he just deals with it.

Wow!

My spouse has anxiety and other things but instead of doing them/in control, he sticks his head in the sand and hides.

I’m sorry. If you had to deal with the anxiety, I wish you also had the control freak!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You can’t expect it to be totally equal until you respect DHs who earn less and step back from careers to raise kids and want to go to Mommy and Me and story time.

The vast majority of you do not actually respect that as much as the high earner, so you can’t be surprised that men are gravitating toward the roles that society respects.

I’ve SAH or worked part time for 6 years and hardly ever seen dads at story time. There was one man I’d see regularly and when we got to talking one day he said he was in his mid 50s, this was his second marriage, and he was semi retired so he could spend a lot of time with his new daughter. That was it. I do see a lot of dads doing weekend kid stuff though. But if there really are a lot of SAH or flexible/part time working dads - they aren’t taking the kids out during the day like moms do.

[Anonymous]

Maternity leave sets up the paradigm that moms are the primary parent and household manager.

If dads were expected and encouraged to take paid family leave and actually take care of the baby, it would go a long way to supporting a more egalitarian split at home.

I’ve noticed my Scandinavian colleagues seem to have more balanced family responsibilities, and I think this is a big factor

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In hindsight “I’d totally be a SAHD” was a big tell. I wish I’d asked those guys back then “because you love and respect homemaking as a calling or because you think it’d be a cover for your video game addiction?”

Because not one of those guys is actually Mr. Mom now.

I do think men generally are less prepared for the actual work of parenting than women are. Even if they are feminists and want to be equal parents, my observation is that they are more resistant to just doing the work. And this is true in my own relationship as well. My DH absolutely thinks of us as equals. But he also had a weird habit of disappearing when a diaper was dirty, has waaaaaay less patience with very normal baby/toddler/preschooler behavior (reverting to yelling or giving up on a kid super fast instead of learning to work through normal developmental stages), and also just had really limited confidence with kids, especially during the baby/toddler phase when they can't talk and you just have to know or figure out what they need (which requires you to seek out information about babies from other resources, which my DH was and still is weirdly resistant to).

In my experience, it takes men a few years to settle into parenting and come to understand the kind of sacrifice and effort required. Conveniently, this is also when parenting gets easier from the perspective of a working parent -- once your kids are on a school/aftercare schedule that roughly matches up with your work hours, and also are more independent generally, and very verbal so they can express needs clearly and can even be reasoned with a bit.

But what happens a lot is that women get stuck doing the bulk of the baby care and especially the toddler care/management (it is a really challenging time for parenting because they still need so much but have basically no emotional regulation skills at first), and that by itself is so disruptive to careers. Even if you keep working it's disruptive, because you get stuck with a lot of the childcare management and are doing the bulk of parenting nights and weekends. It's so hard.

I know not all couples are like this, but my DH was absolutely vocal about being an equal parent and I wanted him to be (and did not gatekeep), and he was surprisingly resistant for the first two years or so, and it was really hard. Covid made it way worse, because of course it was me who made the bigger sacrifice when Covid killed our childcare for 6 months and put us in a huge bind with regards to preschool also (public preschool went virtual, no spots in private, even the spots you could find had shorter hours and was constantly going into quarantine), since I was already the "primary parent".

It sucks. But no matter what my dH wanted to be the case, the truth is that he was not raised to be a primary parent and wound up being terrified of his own kids and defaulting to constantly deferring to me or trying to get out of doing things. It took a long time to overcome this and get to a more equal place.

[Anonymous]

Maybe men do a ton, an equal share let’s say, but are simply less vocal about their contributions and, especially, their complaints. Women, biologically, are programmed to be more emotional. They’re more chatty. They initiate 70% of divorces and 90% if they’re college educated. They’re more flighty, and variant in temperament, and neurotic in general as has been reported by top scientists. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

So a woman might complain a lot about feeling the emotional burden of parenthood, and a career, but perhaps that’s just her subjective, emotion-based, rather than a fact-based, objective assessment of her situation, we’re outside observers able to quantify her particular case.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe men do a ton, an equal share let’s say, but are simply less vocal about their contributions and, especially, their complaints. Women, biologically, are programmed to be more emotional. They’re more chatty. They initiate 70% of divorces and 90% if they’re college educated. They’re more flighty, and variant in temperament, and neurotic in general as has been reported by top scientists. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

So a woman might complain a lot about feeling the emotional burden of parenthood, and a career, but perhaps that’s just her subjective, emotion-based, rather than a fact-based, objective assessment of her situation, we’re outside observers able to quantify her particular case.

your "study" was self-reported.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Growing up, going to college and law school, I never knew a man who wanted a SAHW. Almost universally, high achieving men sought out peers to date. A guy who wanted to date a woman with a “mommy track” job or a low paying job was an unusual outlier. Most guys I knew were actively trying to date fairly high powered professional women, especially if they were on a high powered professional track themselves. One of my friends doggedly tried to pick up med students. Another one was over the moon when he met a woman who had just been admitted to Yale Law.

Also, the men I dated and the men I was friends with along the way professed to be all in on equal relationships. I knew lots of guys who prided themselves on cooking dinner as a date idea to show off how domestic they could be.

Now that we all have kids, it’s the tiny minority of men I know who have lived up to the promise. Their wives downshift while their careers take off. Best I can tell they’ve all forgotten how to cook or even grocery shop.

Was it just not modeled for them so they they didn’t know what they were signing up for? I’ve heard it speculated that boomer moms “did it all” meaning being a housewife and a corporate drone at the same time.

Is it that modern corporate jobs have just become so much more demanding you can’t perform on both fronts anymore?

Or are men just socialized to be more selfish?

You live in a bubble

I do think this is part of it, OP. DH and I are doctors, and I can see a lot of our dynamic in your post. We had an actually agreed, prior to getting married, the we would both work part time when we had kids (guess which one of us actually does). I see this with a lot of our doctor friends too. I don’t really see it in people I work with who don’t have such demanding careers, though. Most of the therapists, social workers, and nurses I work with are in pretty equal relationships where they both work 30-40 hours/wk and both engage in childcare.
A lot of your perception is the bubble that you are in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maternity leave sets up the paradigm that moms are the primary parent and household manager.

If dads were expected and encouraged to take paid family leave and actually take care of the baby, it would go a long way to supporting a more egalitarian split at home.

I’ve noticed my Scandinavian colleagues seem to have more balanced family responsibilities, and I think this is a big factor

Yes, and it's not just having the leave available, it's also the cultural expectation and supporting dads in doing this.

My DH received 6 weeks of leave and originally was going to take it after my leave so that we could get another month and a half without paying for childcare and also so he could have that time to parent solo and bond with the baby. He panicked and decided to take his leave concurrently with me ("to support" me but in reality he just didn't want to be on his own with a baby). I was frustrated at the time but also I can see it as bigger than him -- he didn't know a single man who had done this, including of course in his own family, so even though he logically and intellectually knew he was capable of doing it, it was easier for him to revert to the cultural norms of "women are more natural caregivers" and "a man can't care for a baby" and "my boss and coworkers will look down on me for doing this." Like he KNEW these things were BS but this was the soundtrack playing in his head and I was the only one saying any different -- his family, friends, and colleagues were all raising eyebrows at his plan to stay home with the baby for 6 weeks. So he didn't.

It still makes me mad to think about. Not for political reasons or anything -- I just honestly think it would have been great for our family and would have helped him become a more confident parent more quickly, and also helped him develop a good relationship with our daughter sooner. It's still honestly hard for me because she still generally turns to me first, for everything, and I think about how that might have been different if both he and she had gotten used to the idea early on that he is fully capable of meeting her needs whether I am there or not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe men do a ton, an equal share let’s say, but are simply less vocal about their contributions and, especially, their complaints. Women, biologically, are programmed to be more emotional. They’re more chatty. They initiate 70% of divorces and 90% if they’re college educated. They’re more flighty, and variant in temperament, and neurotic in general as has been reported by top scientists. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

So a woman might complain a lot about feeling the emotional burden of parenthood, and a career, but perhaps that’s just her subjective, emotion-based, rather than a fact-based, objective assessment of her situation, we’re outside observers able to quantify her particular case.

your "study" was self-reported.

Sorry you’re not happy with the results. There are a lot of other studies that show women always score higher than men in levels of neuroticism. That definitely correlates to a perception of disparate levels of domestic contributions between married men and women.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe men do a ton, an equal share let’s say, but are simply less vocal about their contributions and, especially, their complaints. Women, biologically, are programmed to be more emotional. They’re more chatty. They initiate 70% of divorces and 90% if they’re college educated. They’re more flighty, and variant in temperament, and neurotic in general as has been reported by top scientists. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

So a woman might complain a lot about feeling the emotional burden of parenthood, and a career, but perhaps that’s just her subjective, emotion-based, rather than a fact-based, objective assessment of her situation, we’re outside observers able to quantify her particular case.

Study after study shows that women spend more time on childcare and housework than men, even in marriages where both partners work and earn about the same amount. And men spend more time on paid work AND on leisure activities. It's literally study after study, I've never seen a study on allocation of labor in marriages that found the opposite. This is one from just last week:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1168961388/pew-earnings-gender-wage-gap-housework-chores-child-care

[Anonymous]

I knew my husband would not be equal but I didn’t expect him to be as bad as he is. He really thinks he does a lot too. I love him and he’s important, but I would have less labor if he didn’t live here. I fantasize about a 50/50 custody schedule even though I don’t actually want that at all. I thought he would step up overtime but he’s just lazy and selfish. That’s the truth.