Reply to Millennial men pitched themselves as equal partners. What happened?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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