A few weekends back my wife was travelling and I was the only parent for 5 days. A few disappointing things happened/occurred to me.
People said ‘How will Daddy Survive’
Possibly the most annoying thing I heard from others was the question “How are you going to survive without Mommy around to watch her.” My response was some variation of:
The same way I do every other weeknight when I make dinner and watch my daughter, and don’t forget Saturday’s which are always done totally on my own since my wife works every Saturday.
The assumption seems to be that Dad is a total baffoon when it comes to raising a child. The only way the kid survives is because Mommy comes around to pick up after dad and save the child from his innumerable stupid decisions.
This Dad does most of the child raising and that’s fairly common now. Get with the times people.
I realized 99% of the books for the Kid are about Mommy
We did a lot of book reading over the days my wife was travelling and almost all of the books around are about a child interacting with Mommy. We have one book that is about a Dad interacting with their child.
Really I can’t say I’m all that surprised. I already think that Dad’s are marginalized in society. Here we simply have another example of the expectation that Dad is not spending much time with the kid and it all falls to Mommy.
Maybe I should write some children’s books about Dad’s and their children doing stuff around the house, like cleaning and cooking and going to the park. There doesn’t seem to be many others out there doing it.
Photo by: prolost
3 responses to “2 More Examples of Dad’s on the Outside”
You wind up not wondering where people get their ideas about things like this when you realize it’s perpetuated everywhere. :-/
That’s the unfortunate part really. Need to stop it from being the case if we can.
I think modern dads are a little over-sensitive in this regard. We can still raise our kids no matter what society thinks.