Reply to Why do men assume their wife will become a SAHM?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Mine expected me to stay home and handle all of the kid and house stuff.....while still making 6 figures. Not sure how that works. But when I was SAHM, he resented that I didn’t make money. When I worked, he resented that it infringed on his career.

I think males in our society are raised to be entitled, while females are raised to sacrifice for others. They’re deep seated cultural beliefs that most people don’t even realize they have.

I see it even among SAH parents - SAHMs do way more for their kids, while the SAHDs I see are focused on themselves and ignore their kids, play on their phone, etc. [/quote]

This. I feel like my husband  does an okay job with it, but by "okay" I mean that he has very slowly adjusted to reality over the course of many years. But I do think he had incredibly unrealistic expectations for every aspect of our lives (home ownership, having a baby, being a two-income family, etc.).

A very common conversation in our house is that I will let him know that I will need help from him in order to do something for our family (like taking a break from work to care for our infant, or later, putting our child in daycare so that I could return to work), and his initial response is that he "can't" do it. Like I would say "In order for me to stay home, we're going to have to be thoughtful about how we spend money on food" and he would complain that he simply wasn't capable of doing things like looking at prices at the grocery store, or packing a lunch. Or later when I returned to work, I said that I would need him to commit to either drop off or pick up from daycare and arrange his work schedule accordingly, and his first response was that this simply would not be possible and I would have to do both.

Then we have a fight, then he thinks about it and realizes he's being rigid and needs to give a little, then he does the thing I originally asked for.

This is how it always works. I really do think he was just socialized to not have to never have to compromise for other people, and he has learned to just say no whenever anyone asks him to do something he doesn't want to do. Whereas I think many women, like me, are raised to always put others' comfort first and to compromise without even making the other person ask for it. I've had to learn to ask, and he has very slowly learned to compromise. But it takes work.

[b]We are teaching our own kids that they can and should always ask for help, or even just for more from other people. And we are also teaching them that part of being in a family or a relationship is listening when someone asks you for help or accommodation, and to treat others' needs as equal to our own. It's hard, but I do not want them to have to repeat all of this in a generation[/b].[/quote]

Good for you pp! We have to be the change.[/quote]

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