During this now abundant time isolated at home, I’ve used (wasted?) a lot of it on twitter. And one of the accounts I avidly follow is @AITA_reddit, which reposts submissions from the subreddit “Am I the Asshole?,” where people detail their conflicts for strangers to vote who in their story is in the wrong. I read these tweets frequently, honestly because I like the drama and maybe this makes me a bad person, but sometimes it makes me feel better about my own problems. One of the posts I remember seeing and recently reread was by a woman who was asking if she is an asshole “for not forcing my husband to do hands-on childcare yet?” 

Some background: they have a two year old son together, and after asking her sister to watch him for a couple of nights, her sister got upset, saying that this should really be the job of the husband. The woman argues throughout the post that it’s perfectly normal for a parent to not be “super into the baby stage, and [prefer] not to take on the bulk of the hands-on parenting yet.” She also writes that she believes their situation is not out of the ordinary for other families or dads that she knows.

Spoiler: Reddit users voted her an asshole.

And the majority of people on the twitter repost commented with the same opinion.

This woman’s strong beliefs that this is a perfectly normal situation unfortunately reflect a lot of real sentiments when it comes to men’s roles within a family.

Disclaimer: the topic of men and masculinity within a marriage and family is so complex and would be basically impossible to fully examine within one blog post, due to the great variety in family structures and circumstances.

But looking just at the conditions in this post, I think it demonstrates a lot of common assumptions and attitudes regarding male parents. Social norms dictate that less is expected of men when it comes to their relationship with their children, especially during “the baby stage” and childhood. Sure it’s thought that they love their offspring (usually), but they are not generally expected for them to be the ones that have to take care of the kids; those responsibilities are often assumed to be the work of their wives.

Furthermore, it can often be seen as abnormal for dad’s to want to be more involved in the childcare. At first, it can be “sweet” or “nice of them to go out of their way.” But if they become too involved in these responsibilities there’s the risk of emasculation because they are “trespassing” into jobs and roles more commonly associated with women and femininity.

In the AITA story above, the wife truly believes that there is nothing out of the ordinary when her husband chooses to be almost entirely uninvolved in their baby’s care, and that it makes sense to ask her sister for help before asking him. I think this probably reflects a reality in a lot of families, where husbands have much more flexibility in the jobs they do and do not want to take on in regards to the kids. 

I thought the overall reaction to her story was interesting because while I agree that the husband should be more involved in the raising of his own child, I would be really hesitant to say that it’s her fault. Idealistically, in a two parent household, it would be a 50/50 split, and in this way I agree with the commenters. But I object to putting all the blame on her as a wife. Maybe she is guilty of perpetuating long outdated beliefs on the gender differences in parenting, but in that case, I think we would all be guilty to some degree, because a lot of us are conditioned by the society we are raised in, which in many cases says the dad just doesn’t need to be as involved. 

I really believe that if the genders had been reversed in the story above, and it had been the wife who wanted less to do with the baby and the husband who was left with the bulk of the responsibilities, people would not vote him an asshole and would instead use their comments to condemn her for being a bad mother. Sure, they did not hesitate to call out the father in the AITA story, but most people put the blame on the mother for not making him do more. If it had been her slacking, though, I expect people would still blame her, saying it was her fault for not doing what a mother is supposed to do, and I really doubt anyone would be mad at him for not encouraging her to be more involved.

So yes, I agree with the comments saying we should raise expectations for fathers. But stop making it the woman’s burden to fix all of these dynamics within her family, especially when he was probably raised in a society that preconditioned him to see his role in the family much differently. 

– Savannah Kuchar