Are women better than men at childcare?

If you can find in the stats that men who opt to be stay at home parents on the whole leave higher paying jobs than women who opt to be stay at home parents then you have your answer.

Assuming that men and women have equal pay and equal career opportunities. Don't forget that most children have one male and one female parent and the choice is between who will stay at home, i.e. not made solely on the merits of the individual's situation but the comparative situations. With women underpaid and concentrated in less well paid professions, this is deeply important.

What year are you in your degree? Reason I ask is that it will guide where you look in the literature. For a good basic (but dated) source check out Susan Owen's work on domestic specialization. For something that looks objectively at the marriage contract check out Richard Posner's work. One of his arguments is that a woman's domestic labour is very valuable in the early years relative to the man's labour, but over time the man's labour becomes a lot more valuable and therefore he is strongly incentivised to break the marriage contract.

I'm an economist so I would investigate this using an economics lens.

Value is often defined by price. What price are people prepared to pay for childcare performed by men versus performed by women? The price that's paid for childcare is the opportunity cost - the cost of not working in the next best career option for that person. If you can find in the stats that men who opt to be stay at home parents on the whole leave higher paying jobs than women who opt to be stay at home parents then you have your answer. You'd need to do the research by number of hours spent at home. you could compare your actual results to what people say they think the result would have been. Therefore providing a conclusion about whether people generally accept that women are better at it.

Oh come on, it's not "all them". It's just a product of our verbal community in which both men and women have, on a total social whim, decided that doing x means y about men and doing x means y about women.

People - men and women - tend to be very seduced by ideas of "the way things are". I know I am. There's a branch of psychology that looks at this as rule-governed behaviour: we tend to be resistant to changes to the status quo, even when they are of direct benefit to us. I know when DH first touted being at home, I certainly felt all sorts of discomfort and confusion about it. I even felt it when we looked at four day/four day weeks, because I've internalised all sorts of rules about how women should be there for their children and men aren't as capable etc.. and so has dh, but as an adult, he has broken free of it to an extent because it just so happens his peers are all sharing workload equally with their partners on four day/four day weeks.

Dh's mother was absolutely THE most damning of our shared arrangement, and I certainly was cast as the haranguing harpie in her eyes, as it was so inconceivable to her that any man would choose to stay home with the kids - it must be me "making" him do it.

I don't like it when feminist angles make it out that women are always just the products of oppressive patriarchal structures but men aren't either. Why do we assume that all men actually WANT to be career-driven with much less time in the domestic sphere unless we secretly feel that it's undesirable?

Sorry I meant don't be ridiculous women are better than men at childcare. Some are, some aren't. My dh is better at childcate than a good sized percentage of women at childcare. It is just practice

Yonic - absolutely yes. And there was another article in yesterday's Times about super-alpha dads who gave up high-powered jobs to look after their kids. And as I read in I imagined the collective MN FWR hackles raising - 'ffs, this is what women have done forever !'

I think our society is in flux about stay-at-home dads. It is very slowly becoming more prevalent. From my anecdata, there is a high percentage of women on MN who's partners are stay-at-home dads. And I don't think society highlights them as suspicious, or predatory, or dodgy in the slightest. Quite the opposite - they are put on a pedestal, which is OTT.

But if you look at the wider aspect, more men in childcare would 'normalise' SAHD's even more. In fact, you might gets dads who decide that it's a worthwhile career once their own have grown up. And maybe that pushes wages in the sector up, and maybe women in that sector benefit too. There are reasons why that may not happen, but it is at least a possibility, and a positive one.

I really find the lionization of men who do childcare/teaching irritating. Let's face it - the reason they are no longer to the forefront of those careers is because they're perceived to be women's work, and and any work seen as women's work sheds status and loses pay. But this idea that they are totally brilliant and would solve society if only they could be accepted into this kind of work by maurading harridans is totally false. As is the accompanying notion that the people who will do this work - women - have devalued education by their innate rubbishness.

Men are happy to be involved with children when it interests them. They run sports teams, scouts, all kinds of things. They just don't want to assign themselves as women in a career sense. That's all them.

Narrowing or removing the pay gap should also help SAHD and APL uptake prevalence.

Yops, isn't it easier to fix the SAHD side of the equation? Things like shared parental leave help and I would love to see a use it or lose it piece of that for men.

The perception greatly outweighs the reality. In the same way that only a handful of muslims are terrosists, only a handful of men are predatory paedophiles. But the media is full of scare-mongering. I think it's similar to the rape myth that women lie - yes, a very few do, but those cases are highlighted and sensationalised.

I am talking specifically about sexual predators here. I wasn't referring to adult-on-child violence, as it isn't something that gets much focus, and isn't sensationalised in the same way that predatory sexual behaviour is. I think this perception is harmful, and prevents men getting involved in childcare as a career. If more men were involved in childcare, there would be less fuss and idolisation of stay-at-home dads. I really don't know how to fix it though.

The other thing is it really isn't uncommon when women ask men to step up to the plate with regards childcare for men to come back with the exact response Yops did in that men are perceived to be untrustworthy when they do. This has the twin effect of excusing them from childcare and also putting the onus back on women to change that perception. Without actually tackling the root of that perception, which men really need to own for themselves.

Tiggy... If you're suggesting that men's predilection for violence (as suggested by the crime stats) has no bearing on the incorrect beliefs around men in childcare, what do you think underpins that instead?

Also evidence would suggest that when men are in childcare/teaching small children roles they appear to be so good at it they get promoted to the top of the tree much faster and in much greater proportions. So are these perceptions actually damaging? It certainly doesn't seem to stop the money/power flowing.

I am not rainbow just to clarify.

What I was trying to point out was that Yops seems to think the problem is that men are perceived as being predatorial and that is the problem of those doing the perceiving. Whereas the fact that an overwhelming majority of violence is perpetrated by men is a real problem. If the perception of men as being predatorial is so prevalent and harmful to men why aren't they doing anything about reducing the level of violence (rather than just claiming women and children are lying about it, for example)?

Plenty of the things 'workers' do during the working day isn't really work.

Commuting- being able to listen to music you like in peace/reading a book/paper

Lunch- getting peace to eat also reading/chatting maybe a quick walk or gym class

Tea breaks, chatting, someone to listen to your woes

Cigarette breaks

Toilet breaks where no one follows you in

General office chatter/time wasting /booking holidays online

Travel time between appointments- again more music/reading

Training days-a break from the normal routine and often a shorter routine and free nice lunch

Work parties/socialising

Maybe even the opportunity for a weekend away-hotel luxuries

Waiting time for meetings/people running late-time to check phone/pay bill/check fb/mn

Ime a much easier life than the hell of childcare.

Yops, I think scallops was indicating that your statement didn't qualify as a "huge" problem. I may be wrong though.

I disagree with the airlines' stance on seating, BTW, and with all posters on other MN topics saying male nursery workers shouldn't change nappies.

Sadly, I think it proves my point. All elephants are grey animals and so on....

That wasn't the issue Yonic. It was Scallop's(/Rainbow's) use of sexual violence statistics as the means of a put-down during a conversation about childcare.

I think it's one of those things that will take decades to change.

Agree with ShadowFire

There's still an expectation that childcare and housework are for women, so from an early age, women and girls are encouraged to practice these things in a way that men and boys aren't.

People who are encouraged throughout their entire lifetime to practise a thing, are better at that thing.

If there is a true innate difference, because of hormones or brain chemistry or something - we CAN'T TELL - because there is no way to compare what people would have been ike without this training.

So yeah, on balance women are better, but that may not answer your question. (bearing in mind overlapping bell curves and whatnot - any individual woman may or may not be better than any individual man).

Yops is male, Tiggy, he's said so before.

I wish that childcare and early year teaching had more men involved, I just think perception is linked to "family childcare" split too.

Don't be ridiculous. Of course not

True Yonic, so let's get more men in childcare.

Is that particularly relevant when talking about childcare abilities of the sexes and the imbalance of early education Scallops? Or do you just like to shout it every now and the at posters you think are male?

I feel at the moment there's an overwhelming belief that childcare equals women's work, so men don't really try/ get the opportunity. Hopefully that will change. There's currently a huge thread in chat/AIBU with many posters only wanting women to change their daughter's nappies in nurseries. There's a long way to go.

"Having men looking after children more generally, rather than just their own, might dispel some of these myths"

Chicken and egg, Yops - if more men did day to day care for their own children, caring for children would become less of a perceived female task.

No Yops the huge problem is that 99% of sexual violence is perpetuated by men.