The Good Father
Vilma Steiert
Most dads are not good dads, or even adequate dads, because our culture places almost no demands on fathers, and because fathers feel almost no pressure to try. We occupy a bizarre reality in which a woman can sacrifice her entire life at the altar of motherhood, commit herself to doing everything perfectly, and still routinely hear that she is a bad mother. A father can do literally nothing at all, and still constantly hear about what a great father he is.
Children deserve to grow up in families where they feel safe loving all of their adults, and where they know that all of their adults are working together toward a shared goal, not actively undermining one another.
Most women spend endless hours of their lives posting on parenting forums and reading books and scouring through scientific studies. Most men, for some reason, feel no obligation to educate themselves about parenting.
Mothers almost never abandon their children. And most mothers feel guilty if they miss even an occasional event, or periodically forget to send that thing they were supposed to send to school. Mothers operate according to a profound sense of duty.
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I'll never forget the one time I tried to outsource help -- a house cleaning service -- and the boss said it would cost more/take longer because of how much there was to do. I said I understood, that I'd been juggling my father's last days in the hospital and death over the last month on top of my taking care of my 3 kids (2 special needs, one a baby). She pressed that they wouldn't actually have time to complete the service, and I expressed stress and she said, "Listen, I don't mean to mom shame, but..." My husband was working from home. He was literally home AS they were cleaning. Yet it fell onto me.
It\u2019s the cardinal rule of parenting, and sooner or later everyone learns it: If you\u2019re a mom, nothing you do will ever be right. The way you give birth is wrong and inadequate. You\u2019re feeding your kids wrong. You\u2019re simultaneously being too loving and not loving enough. You\u2019re too strict. You\u2019re too permissive. You don\u2019t show up perfectly for every single thing, always, forever, and do extra each time. You. Are. Inadequate.
Motherhood and fatherhood are dramatically different experiences. Motherhood is mired in guilt, shame, and inadequacy. Fatherhood is all about the participation trophy. Show up and get applause\u2014even if a woman dressed the kids, fed the kids, and did all the planning for you to show up and get the applause.
There will always be someone there to remind you that as a mother, you can never get it right\u2014the teacher judging you for your child\u2019s separation anxiety; the stranger judging you for the temper tantrum that you so expertly handled; the randos who object to what your kid eats, wears, does. The endless advice from people who think you\u2019re too stupid to ever pause and think about what you do and how you do it.
A woman will post a long list of the bullshit her husband has subjected her to. He leaves her with the kids all weekend so he can golf. He doesn\u2019t do his fair share around the house. She works, too, but still does 90% of the housework. He didn\u2019t make her a single meal when she was postpartum, or pressured her to lose weight, or said giving birth was gross, or did hundreds of other things that are objectively abusive, but which our culture accepts as the price of involvement with men.
No the fuck he is not. A lot of mothers, a lot of children, a lot of families would be a lot better off if we stopped with this cultural fantasy. If we accepted that when a father sucks at fatherhood, we need to admit it\u2014not praise him in the hopes that maybe he\u2019ll do better, because he fucking won\u2019t.
When a father demeans his child\u2019s other parent, he demeans his child. He forces his child to divide their loyalties, to pretend not to love the person they love most, in an effort to gain or retain the love of their father.
Oh, and btw, outsourcing all of the parenting heavy lifting, housework, and emotional labor to your co-parent is abusive. Buying your time with someone else\u2019s exhaustion is stealing their life. Good fathers don\u2019t steal the lives and time of their co-parents.
There are lots of ways to be a good parent. There are also lots of ways to be a bad parent. And so yes, there actually are parenting manuals\u2014many of them. They tell us that yelling and spanking and shame and threats don\u2019t work. Yet too many men parent by intuition alone, based on what makes them feel good.
We all pick up negative habits from our parents, from our culture, from our own shortcomings. The things that feel best to us are often the worst for our children. Let\u2019s be real: It feels good in the moment to yell at a child whose emotional needs frustrate us. But it\u2019s terrible for them.
The real work of parenting is in the lonely, solitary, unfulfilling daily grind. It\u2019s in remembering homework each and every day, getting up a dozen times with a baby, or a sick child, or a sad teenager, in advocating for a child at school and in the world, in the millions of mundane tasks that mothers do, and for which mothers never garner praise (and often find only scorn).
You have to do your kids\u2019 hair, and know how to feed them, and plan playdates, and think about and enroll them in activities, and clean out their backpacks, and care for their pets, and buy seasonally appropriate clothes, and establish a routine, and help them in the night. You have to do all the things mothers do without thinking.
For fathers, it\u2019s all optional. Because when a kid shows up at school without their folder, or in the wrong clothes, or throwing a temper tantrum, we blame mom. Never dad. Fatherhood is always optional in a patriarchal society, while the burdens of motherhood are inescapable.
Good fathers never treat the work of parenting as optional. They show up day after day, doing the dirty behind the scenes work\u2014both because they know their kids deserve it, and because they understand that outsourcing it all to mom robs mom of her life, her hobbies, her time, and her well-being.
There is meaning to be found in immersing oneself in these daily tasks. And more importantly, fathers who don\u2019t do this work force mothers to do it, thereby stealing significant chunks of mothers\u2019 lives.
Both partners\u2019 time is equally valid. So if he gets to relax after work and on the weekends, and she never gets a break from the endless slog of parenting, he\u2019s a shitty-ass father (and husband).
If you give birth to your children, as most mothers do, there\u2019s a hard biological reality: Motherhood demands more, physically, from mothers than from fathers. There\u2019s nine months of pregnancy. Childbirth. Breastfeeding. Giving birth in a birthing system that is getting progressively more dangerous and abusive. Most mothers put their lives and bodies on the line in a way that fathers never do.
Good fathers recognize this. They show gratitude for their partner\u2019s sacrifice. And they try to find ways to balance things out. If mom is up breastfeeding with a baby who won\u2019t take a bottle, then they take over cleaning, or make sure mom can nap during the day.
Bad fathers mock and demean childbirth. They minimize the effort involved. They demand weight loss. They use their partner\u2019s efforts as an excuse. \u201CWell, you\u2019re breastfeeding so I guess I can\u2019t do anything else!\u201D
It requires immense emotional intelligence and commitment to do well. Women almost never get credit for these attributes, even when they do it all on their own in difficult circumstances. If more fathers start doing the work, perhaps then we\u2019ll finally be willing to acknowledge how challenging parenting is. And the more fathers step up, the less overwhelmed and despondent mothers will feel.
This is the part where I ask you to become a paid subscriber, if you can afford to do so. Almost all of my work is free, because I want it to be accessible. I\u2019m doing this to change the culture, not to get rich. But my time on feminist writing is time spent away from my paid writing work. And I would like to make my feminist writing a more integral part of my paid writing work, so I can do more of it.
Additional paid content. Right now, I\u2019m publishing a twice-monthly column on the weapons men use to escape accountability. I\u2019m also going to start releasing more personal posts occasionally, about my marriage, kids, life, and generally building more feminist relationships.
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