husband as "junior partner" in childrearing
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Anonymous
Oh, and check the schedule, does anyone in the family have a conflict or need time at home to work on something? Is Fun Spontaneous Daddy even aware of when the kids' major projects are due, and their sports and activities schedule? Oh, it's so easy, grab your coats! With Fun Daddy, you're lucky if he even thinks of that. |
Anonymous
You are right to be skeptical. Even when I was the higher earner with the tougher job, I still did 80% of the parenting stuff. Pretty much all the planning/preparing. There was always an excuse why DH couldn't do it. Often he'd claim my job was more flexible because I had WFH options (this was pre-Covid when that was more rare, and his office was 100% in office with zero WFH at the time). But the reason I had that kind of flexibility is because I worked in a private-sector job where I routinely worked 50+ hours a week, put in hours in the evening and on weekends, and was expected to answer emails 24/7 even on vacation. So, yes, I had the "flexibility" to come into the office at 9:30 due to a pediatrician appointment, but only because I got up at 5am to prep for a meeting and respond to overnight emails. So DH would use this as his excuse for why he couldn't take the baby to the doctor since getting into work late required him to take leave (of which he has copious amounts, as he works in a union-protected job where his seniority means he has more leave than he can actually use). We had battles like this for three years until I finally got fed up and burned out and decided to shift to a part-time role. I didn't take on more of the parenting stuff when I did this -- I do the exact same amount as before, which is the vast majority of it. It just means that I have fewer work responsibilities so there is more time to do everything I was already doing at home. Universal PK and affordable aftercare made it possible, not anything DH did. Now DH works from home three days a week which means he can actually do some of this stuff, but of course now he says "well since you're part time it makes more sense for you to do it." So I've told him now that he's hybrid, I'm going to go back full time and he absolutely panics at this. I don't know for sure I'm going to do it, but it's interesting to test the waters and see how terrified he is of actually being a full parenting partner, even now that his work is more flexible and accommodating. The truth is that he doesn't want to do it and he is willing to do whatever it takes (including neglecting our kid) to make sure he doesn't have to. |
Anonymous
I don’t have any energy to teach my kid to fold laundry because I do *everything else* while my junior partner just gets to come and go as he pleases. |
Anonymous
+1 wtf is wrong with this poster? if you didn't want kids, you shouldn't have had kids. |
Anonymous
-1 If you can't go out and come home at 9pm and go straight to bed and have your H handle parenting you are a terrible parent and a f'd up person. If you want kids you need to let their father parent them, stop being such an insane control freak. |
Anonymous
Wanting a kid to have dinner before 9 (or dinner at all) is being a control freak? Wow. |
Anonymous
| I'm so confused by posts like these. Was there really no inkling that your husband was going to be like this? |
Anonymous
I am too-- I vetted young men very hard for this when dating. Any trouble with motivation, executive functioning, desire to be an active parent, laziness about chores, irresponsibility or unreliability or entitlement to women's caregiving and they were dropped like a stone. |
Anonymous
| I don't know any men who are this self aware to even realize this. But yeah, my dh is my junior partner. I call all the big shots in parenting. He still does 50% of the work however and of course we discuss everything together. |
Anonymous
Nope, it's not being an insane control freak unless this is the usual routine and your DH has a track record of handling it. Also if he is the one who will be dealing with the fall out the next day if the kids are overtired and cranky. It's just self interest to step in and make sure bed time happens if you know that you will pay the price for your DH's error here. Look, if you want to mess with bedtimes, mealtimes, the usual schedule, then you need to be pulling your weight day in and day out. If a DH is truly a 50/50 partner and he's going to the one getting those kids out of bed and making sure they get to school on time, he's going to be taking kids to swim class and dealing with it if they are low energy, etc., then sure, he can make his choices about the schedule and routines and experiment and the DW in that scenario should be okay with it because he's down in the trenches with her. But when a DH just occasional steps in to solo parent to "give mom a break" since she's the one who does most of it the rest of the time, his job is to follow her routines. Period. You want to be the boss? Then show up and do the work. If you only want to part-time parent, be ready to follow the brief because you have decided to abdicate the power you might have had to run shit when you decided to let your partner do 70-80% of the parenting. |
Anonymous
This. I mean yes of course there are guys who probably did a complete 180 but I find it hard to believe there weren't glaring red flags for most of these guys. Like the guy who let his kid stay in the same clothes for 5 days straight. |
Anonymous
well that escalated quickly! i clear beta male cuckold in our midst. watch out ladies ... apparently caring for the health of your children over the importance of your male partners ego makes you a "f'd up person" |
Anonymous
The 180 is rare unless they're cheating. It does sometimes happen that they have depression or some other health problem and refuse to do anything about it. Or that they are punishing their wife for some real or perceived injustice by treating the kids badly. Or that they have more kids than they wanted or can handle, or they agreed to just one more kid and it turns out to be really high maintenance or twins. |
Anonymous
I think what happens a lot is that women also have no real idea what parenting is going to be like, so they don't fully vet partners for these behaviors. If you are 28 and also like being pretty carefree and independent, you are fine with a partner who doesn't always wash the dishes before bed or is sometimes lax about schedules because it doesn't impact you negatively. You can be laid back. But what I see happen a lot is that when kids come along, women lock it down. Even the most previously carefree, laid back moms I know get their $hit together when they have kids, at least enough to handle the basics like bedtimes, feeding the kids, lining up childcare. This is bare minimum stuff but even with just one kid, if you have two working parents, it takes some planning, effort, and research. And most of the women I know just sort of naturally segued into that when they had kids. Maybe a few bumps early on as they realized exactly how much more planning/accommodating is required, but they get on board pretty quick. Men don't. They don't experience pregnancy, I think often kids don't really feel real to them until they show up, then they panic, then they shirk responsibility because they are freaked out, and then if their partner starts handling a lot of that stuff on her own, they just kind of pretend it's not happening and think "oh we're 50/50" even though deep down, both partners know they aren't. There's this whole dynamic where women step up to the plate because, as the one who actually gives birth, you kind of have to. And men, even men who are relatively equal partners pre-kids, sometimes freak out and step back because they feel overwhelmed and are afraid to mess up. And this leads to a situation where the woman does all the things and the man avoids, shirks, and defers. It's not really something that is discussed, and the only way to stop it is to address it directly. But some men are receptive to that conversation and some aren't. All of which is to say, I don't think these guys are always total layabouts before kids (the kids freak them out and cause them to start shirking) and I don't think these women always had it all together pre-kids (the kids inspire them to get it together because they quickly understand the gravity of the situation). And culturally, we reinforce these responses by having very high expectations for moms and very low expectations for dads. We even blame women when men don't step up, that's how lopsided these expectations are. |
Anonymous
Some guys are much more sensitive to the idea of not being in charge, and they are the ones who pick up on the dynamic and bring it up. They aren't self-aware. Self-awareness would require them to think about WHY they are the junior partner and why role they might have played in creating that dynamic. Rather, the guys who complain about this (and some of them are on this thread, btw) only notice that they don't like how it feels when their wife gives them tasks to do or instructions for how to do something, and they reflexively get mad about being treated like the junior. A self-aware guy would think "well why did my wife have to ask me to feed the kids at 6 when she was running late? shouldn't feeding my children at their normal dinner time be something I just do? why should I need to be told to feed my children?" A self-aware guy would think "well I guess my wife gave me instructions for how to get the kids ready for school because I've literally never done it before, since I leave for work before she does and I just leave it to her to deal with every day -- she's probably learned some valuable things from the hundreds of hours of experiencing doing this and is trying to help me learn from her mistakes." Most men are not self-aware though, so instead they just go "Stop talking to me like I'm stupid! I don't work for you!" |