"It doesn't make sense that only women are saying 'How can I combine career and family?'"
I heard Gloria Steinem say this in an interview today. First of all, I would love for her to be the next President. Just saying. She's awesome.
But anyway, this is such a great statement. Today we still don't think of men as responsible for childcare. Yes, there are more men choosing to stay home with the kids, but pay attention to the key word: choosing. For many women, staying home is not a choice. It's a practicality and an assumption; daycare is too expensive, so someone has to stay home, and many families assume that someone will be the mother.
Recently, having a conversation with a soon-to-married friend of mine, he was joking around about his future wife staying home with the kids. I asked him, "Well why don't you take the time off and stay with the kids?" He said "Done! That would be awesome!" He made it sound like a vacation, something exciting. And yes, many people love, love, love, staying home to raise the kids, and I'm not knocking it, but no one who has done it would say it is easy. It is difficult, exhausting, all-day unpaid work. And while men may see this (before they do it) as a vacation from work, a year off, a choice they can make or not, too many women deal with it as work, as an obligation, as a choice they didn't get to make.
My mom often talks about what it was like for her when she and my dad were still married. He helped with us a lot; she often had friends mention how impressed they were with his involvement. But he always expected to be thanked. This shows that he fell into the same trap of thinking that raising the kids was just women's work. She was expected to do it; if he deigned to do it, he should be rewarded. Her obligation, his choice.
I don't mean to say that this makes my dad a bad father or anything like that. This is just a personal example of how these cultural assumptions really affect our personal lives. We have to stop seeing stay-at-home dads as these wonderful, self-sacrificing people who are giving up on a (masculine) career to be a (feminine) stay-at-home parent. Or rather, we should start seeing all stay-at-home moms as the wonderful, self-sacrificing people who are giving up on a career to do very real work at home with their children. All stay-at-home parents are sacrificing a portion of their lives for their children, and they all deserve equal credit.
Penises don't make men better parents; they shouldn't get them more praise either.
