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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I feel bad for the moms who feel this way.

My DH and I both work, and both do the parenting.  We are both lawyers with busy careers.

My DH enjoys doing grocery shopping and cooking.  He also enjoys being a dad, and so does half of the parenting and household stuff, for sure.

So I think it's crucial to pick the right husband.  If the moms have all of these complaints, maybe they settled for the wrong husband?

Also, my own dad (now in his 80's) was [u]not[/u] like the dad described in the article.  He was a super active dad and never assumed my mom would cover things.  My dad cooked dinner on weeknights, and my mom cooked dinner on weekends.  (My mom was a top realtor in our area when I was a kid/teen.)
[/quote]

Have you ever wondered if maybe having a dad who was unusual for his generation by cooking and supporting his wife in having her own career, it made it easier for you to find a similar man who would be an equal partner?

My dad was not like that. He did nothing. He still does nothing. He does not know how to cook. He does not clean. I do not think I have ever known him to clean a bathroom, run the vacuum, straighten/tidy, in 80 years. I am not sure I've ever even seen him wash dishes? He also didn't do almost any of the parenting beyond yelling at us occasionally. My mom also worked, but she had to squeeze her work in around his expectations -- he was never going to do anything to facilitate her working. And as a result, her work history was spotty and she often dropped in and out of the workforce because it was so hard to maintain a job while also raising kids and taking care of the house.

So maybe for those of us who did not have good role models in terms of the gendered division of labor, it is harder for us to know how to find partners like that, and it's harder for us to have more equal relationships because it was never modeled. So maybe for us, lists like this are (1) more relevant and likely to be reflective of inequalities in our marriages, and (2) really important for pushing for greater equality so that our daughter's don't have to start from scratch.

I hope my daughter gets to be like you, and simply expects equality from the start because she saw it modeled in her home. But in order to create that dynamic, I have to push my husband (who grew up in a home similar to mine) to do more, which means looking at lists like this and having these conversations with him because this is not how it was for us growing up and as a result my DH *has* exercised a lot more "dad privilege" since we had kids, as we have fallen into unequal patterns because we are having to invent a more equal dynamic from scratch.

If this list doesn't apply to you or your marriage, congratulations! You win. Some of us are still working on it because it turns out that sexism and gender inequality was not magically fixed across the entire society in 1978. I know, surprising.[/quote]

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