Who is going to cook? Who is going to wipe the dust? Who is going to stay at home with the sick child? Who is going to come back early to let the baby sitter go? Who is going to prepare the children for school? A general observation of different kinds of societies shows that those activities are one partner’s work. She is the mom who should be responsible for all this.
It is not because man is not able to do them. It is not because parenting is naturally designed this way . On the contrary, the analysis of such an issue is definitely related to social and cultural background. It is for the safe of man’s masculinity, dignity, and superiority that the male partner has not to do anything related to housework. Whether the woman works outside or she is a housewife, some societies are strictly merciless with man who tries to help his wife at home. He is very likely to become an object of mockery, criticism, and sometimes rejection. Are some conservative areas people do not even sit with such a kind of men. Not only manhood societies who adopt such an opinion, even women in so many cultures belittle the man who tries to help his mother or wife at home. Unreliable, weak, his wife’s servant, foolish, poor, and so on and so forth of the degrading descriptions they make for him. Hence, sharing parenting or alternative parenting like what some prefer to call is more limited by social and cultural customs than by natural rules.
Although such a topic might seem a big problem, yet, it is still worth discussing for the sake of a successful matrimonial life. I am not going to focus on relationships in the past since most women did not work. However, within the contemporaneous changes of women status, one may wonder why men are still unwilling to participate in different types of housework. At this level of analysis, I would take off the norms from the list of the reasons because even norms change. I don’t see man’s selfishness among the reasons either. In an article published on Feminist.com by Julie Shield on family and parenting, negotiation is stated as the best means to cope with men’s prejudice on sharing parenting.
Thus, the lack of negotiation between couples will be among the basic reasons I would agree on for such an issue. I don’t know what couples are talking about when they start dating each other. Eventhough nothing would be wrong with keeping all the time cooing at each other, worshipping, or courting one another as it is the nature of love, mature couples would also find sometime to discuss their futuristic responsibilities. Hence, instead of fighting about which of the restaurants they want to go at the weekend or about how much money they have to spend to have a prestigious wedding ceremony, couples would rather sit to negotiate the different ways that may help them make their married life happier. Children’s care and alternative parenting for example, is among the crucial issue that should be discussed before marriage. Indeed, a true successful matrimonial life can even have the woman pumping a bottle of breast milk from her nipples and giving it to the father to feed it to the baby later as he going to work and he is on a day off or an afternoon partime job.
A second reason why man is still unwilling to help with children’s care or housework cleaning refers to the woman’s attitude or what Chester L. Karras (one of Julie Shield’s persons in her article) calls “aspiration level”. Woman, who asks for more since the beginning of the relationship, gets more. Woman who asks for less gets less. I think that men who are in love are usually open to understand and to love their partners’ perceptions of life.
In summary, although sharing parenting seems to be a challenge for men to accept, negotiations between couples in association with the extent of woman’s conviction with her husbands’ help at home may make it easier for both couples.
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