Reply to S/O: ‘The DIL is in the busiest chapter of her life; you have nothing to do’

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Reply to "S/O: ‘The DIL is in the busiest chapter of her life; you have nothing to do’"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My retired MIL takes every opportunity to remind me of how she raised two successful sons without hardly any help from anyone including my FIL, worked full time, cooked everything from scratch and hosted regular parties for friends and relatives![/quote]

Maybe the most generous explanation is she's looking for sympathy for how difficult it was? I hope so.  Because deliberately raising sons in a home with a Dad not contributing to household management (and day to day parenting?) doesn't really seem all that  brag worthy to me. What was she teaching and modelling for her boys?[/quote]

Do you now know anyone who was married in the 70s?  The majority of a father's parenting was fairly limited to bedtime stories and special outings.[/quote]

[b]I mean, bad ones, sure.[/b][/quote]

You are being naive or intentionally obtuse. Dads being helpful is a new phenomenon.[/quote]

DP but I think it's more complex that that.

Dads helping with housework and female-coded parenting activities is pretty new. Stuff like carrying a baby around in a carrier was, until recently, seen as a feminine activity or it was "funny" for a man to do it. Taking kids on errands. Volunteering at school, on the PTA, was similar.

That did not mean that dads were not helpful as a rule. There used to be this idea that women were supposed to parent young kids and men were supposed to parent older kids. Discipline was a male area. Setting and enforcing boundaries with teens. Talking to kids about their future plans and careers. These would be considered "hard" parenting skills and thus were coded as male, whereas caring for little kids was viewed as "soft" and coded as female.

You also saw this in education -- young children had female teachers but they were more likely to be male as kids advanced through education. This is actually still in place -- men are more likely to be high school teachers than teach younger grades, and many college faculties are still male-dominated especially among tenured ranks.

It's interesting to me that you now see more men helping with young kids, doing housework, etc. but I feel like the stuff that used to be up to dads (discipline, guiding and advising into adulthood, helping with finances, etc.,) now gets done more by moms. In general it feels like a lot of men are less mature and less capable of acting as authoritative parents than in prior generations. I think of men I know in the 70s and 80s who, sure, were not changing diapers or do night wake ups with their kids, but had a very helpful and meaningful "dad energy" where they were very obviously involved in their kids' lives, aware of what was going on, and participating fully in their households even if the workloads were allocated by gender. They were still doing a lot, just more male-coded things.[/quote]

This is a good post 
[/quote]

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