for getting annoyed when childcare just automatically gets dumped on women?

[HazelMember]

Visiting family for Christmas and I’m already irritated.

Why is it that whenever a child needs anything, it’s mostly a woman who gets asked?

Child needs holding? A woman.
Nappy needs changing? A woman.
Baby is crying? Give it to a woman.
Child needs to go to the toilet? Can you take her. Said to a woman.
Child needs help or comforting? Mum looks around for another woman.

The men are mostly left alone. Sitting, chatting, eating, relaxing. Not even considered.

What really gets me is that it’s not always their own kids. Women who need help often hand their child to another woman without asking, like it’s some unspoken rule that we’re all responsible. No checking if you’re ok with it. No thought of asking a man.

Those of us with older DC seem to get asked even more because our kids are not as demanding anymore. As if that means we’re suddenly available. As if we didn’t already do our time. As if we are now the default helpers just because we are not dealing with nappies or tantrums all day.

I don’t even mind helping sometimes. I just hate that it’s the default. That caring is treated as women’s work. That at Christmas when everyone is meant to relax, the women are constantly on alert while the men get an actual break.

It’s so normalised that no one even notices it happening.

Yes I know some men are amazing and look after their DC really well and some people always go to the men first to ask for help. I am just talking about what I see quite regularly.

Doesn't happen in my family, though it does in DH's.

First Christmas with my newborn, my dad ran around like some sort of muslin butler grabbing me pillows to support breastfeeding and handing me supplies.

Just had dinner with a friend, and my husband looked after both toddlers whilst me, the husband and wife all finished off the cooking. Both kids like synchronised pooing, so this was no mean feat.

Same as ours. The men in our family cook, clean and do everything the women do. My kids go to Dh or myself equally or whoever is there.

its your family - the men are useless and the women enable it. Not everyone’s are like this.

Never happens in our family. Parents take care of their own kids if they are too young to ask - both parents.
No one "gets asked to" change a nappy or do anything for a child, particularly one that's theirs.

If the kids need something, they'll ask whoever is closer to them, and that can be any of the older cousins, aunts or uncles.

If anyone was repeatedly asking me to do something children or cooking related, I'd tell them no thanks.

In my family I think it’s a fair split. But in DH’s family I see exactly what you mean. FIL is useless, doesn’t engage with kids at all. Then DH has two brothers and they will both very much take a back seat when we are visiting PILs. All of the blokes just sitting their watching TV while the women are expected to do all the childcare and cooking etc. MIL doesn’t help as she’ll tell her precious boys to sit and have a rest as they work so hard, while expecting me and their wives to do all the cleaning up. To be fair DH is the best of the lot of them but he definitely regresses a bit when at the PILs.

Yes, this expectation is annoying, but it should be an easy fix, surely. Pass the child to a man to look after. Go and join the men talking. If you're not going to do those simple things then nothing will change.

I'm child-free and have never been passed a child to look after - most of my parent friends would find the idea hilarious. At any social event that I'm not hosting, I'll join whatever group of people is sitting down and chatting about interesting things with a drink in hand. (If I'm hosting then I'll be clearing up and telling my guests, including the women, to go and sit down and chat.)

I think in my social circles kids would just be passed to either parent to look after but I don't especially pay attention - they're not my responsibility.

The men are mostly left alone. Sitting, chatting, eating, relaxing. Not even considered.

Go and sit and chat with them.

What really gets me is that it’s not always their own kids. Women who need help often hand their child to another woman without asking, like it’s some unspoken rule that we’re all responsible. No checking if you’re ok with it. No thought of asking a man.

Then don't take the child! Top tip, if you have a drink in one hand and a canape in the other then you physically can't. Then walk into the room where people are relaxing.

I don’t even mind helping sometimes. I just hate that it’s the default. That caring is treated as women’s work. That at Christmas when everyone is meant to relax, the women are constantly on alert while the men get an actual break.

I have never spent Christmas on alert. This is a choice you can make for yourself. No one is going to wave a wand and fix outdated gender expectations - you have to do it for yourself. I recommend it.

Doesn't really happen within our family or wider friendship group, however I was recently at an older female relative's house who announced that she needed 'a man to help!'. We all stopped mid-sentence and I, (a woman), asked what she actually needed help with. Turns out she need a tight jar opening. I asked why the helper needed to be male, we all had a little chuckle and I went and opened the jar. She hadn't really thought about her use of language and it's only by addressing these examples in the moment that things will change. My 9 year old son heard and saw all of this and it does go in!

I did say this in my OP:

Yes I know some men are amazing and look after their DC really well and some people always go to the men first to ask for help.

This is the tricky part. The DMs or MILs keep telling the men they can just relax while the women get told to serve the men or help with the washing up. Even trying to tell the men to do their share gets undermined by the 'matriarchs'.

Sadly I have even seen the DMs/MILs tell the girls to help while the boys play and are not expected to do anything.

Trying to say anything in that environment just leads to an argument.

I would probably just have the argument then because no matriarch is telling me to get back in the kitchen. Who do they think they are?

Well, statistically, children are much more likely to be abused by a family member than a stranger/nursery worker...

I'm not saying that most women believe that their own male family members are a threat. What I'm saying is that, once the culture of 'men are unsafe to look after young children, so women need to do it all' is entrenched in people's minds, it crosses the boundaries and pervades, even when it's family.

This mindset is used to a greater or lesser extent by women who don't trust men to do it (whether their intentions or competence), by men who find it a handy get-out to consider it 'women's work' and thus supposedly beneath them, and possibly also by 'the decent men' who thus mean well and don't want to cause any concerns by offering or showing willingness to look after babies, especially intimately. Not the baby's father, but maybe if it's an uncle or friend.

I don't think the boundaries between in the family (except for the baby's own parents) and in a wider setting (such as childcare) are so clearly cut and dried, once both women and men go from a basic automatic assumption that everything to do with looking after children is 'women's work'.

The thing is, though, that even without vocalising 'needing a man', that's the kind of task where people would automatically gravitate towards the perceivably strongest person present - who will most probably be a man - even when it may be just one older/slighter woman who struggles and everybody else there could have helped.

People do similar things when, say, they meant to bring something from upstairs and now need it. They won't just sensibly avoid asking the 90yo great-grandparents, but they'll also avoid asking any of the adults in their 20s or 30s, who would be perfectly capable of fetching it, if there's a 7yo child present.

Just like when somebody needs help with a baby - they instinctively look for the 'most motherly' person, who is thus very unlikely to be a man.

People have an ingrained mental assumption about who is the 'best person for the job' and ask based on those criteria without thinking for a second.

I agree that the idea of childcare as women’s work is deeply entrenched and damaging but that is exactly why women should not be defaulting to offloading childcare onto other women either.

When women automatically turn to female relatives, friends or nursery workers while excluding men, especially capable and willing fathers or male family members, it does not challenge the culture you are describing. It reinforces it. The burden stays with women and men are allowed to opt out whether through suspicion, claimed incompetence or convenience.

If the problem is the assumption that men are unsafe or incapable, the solution cannot be women quietly absorbing the work instead. That simply entrenches inequality and normalises unpaid or underpaid female labour.

Women did not create this system alone and we cannot dismantle it by compensating for men’s absence. Caring for children needs to be shared and expected not redistributed sideways between women while men remain peripheral.

I agree with you; but an awful lot of women just will not.

Babies and young children obviously need to be cared for by adults; and if you're one of the women who instantly discounts men as being able/safe/appropriate to do it, which other adults are you left with?

Even though there are clearly differences in the scenario between home life and paid-for childcare, if all of the little children in the nursery see only women looking after them in their formative years, what mindset is that going to firmly impart to them for when they are older and becoming parent-age themselves?

My observation is that if there’s a content newborn baby up for cuddles for a couple of minutes then there’s almost always a queue of people who’d be delighted to oblige, and most of those people are often women and already hanging around by the baby. I can understand being cheesed off at being handed a toddler that needs a nappy change, but I can’t quite understand why you’re offended about being offered a newborn to hold (given you have kids, I understand someone with infertility might find it hard). And why if you don’t want it you don’t just offer it to someone else. Baby holding is hardly “helping”.

Mostly people are cautious with newborns anyway, mine would’ve only been handed to DH or my mother because I wouldn’t want them exposed to loads of winter germs. Mostly they lived in a carrier precisely so I wasn’t expected to hand them round.

The issue is not that anyone is offended by being offered a newborn to hold although some might be, I don't know.

It is the wider pattern where women default to handing children to other women rather than to men. That is not about the baby or the moment itself. It is about how care gets informally routed along gendered lines without anyone stopping to question it.

When women automatically look to other women to hold, watch or manage children even briefly, it reinforces the idea that women are the natural carers and men are peripheral. Men are not being excluded because they are unsafe in that moment.

That is why saying just pass the baby on misses the point. Passing the baby from one woman to another does not challenge anything. It simply keeps the responsibility circulating among women while men remain free.

So this is not about personal offence or social awkwardness. It is about noticing how expectations around care are quietly reproduced in everyday interactions.

This isn't how it happens in my family. DP will almost always be with the children, keeping them entertained or seeing to their needs to I can chat to my mum and catch up with other family. My mum's partner (as close to grandad as my kids have) will take kids out for a walk, or a run in the back garden, he sorts all the food and keeps everyone's drinks topped up. Lots of uncle figures on hand who help with toys, and games and building Lego.
I went to lift dessert bowls today to and got sternly told not to do that by male relative who cleared the table later.

Men are 100 percent oblivious to this, though. I doubt if any man who has not been sexually abused gives it a thought within the family and the one man I treated who had been sexually abused was constantly protecting the family children from others but did not think he was a danger to them.

So after this, on Boxing day we had my husband's family over. I was cooking the roast for the evening when toddler DS totters past me.

Toddler falls and hurts himself in the room past the kitchen FIL comes in and asks me what happened.

"I'm afraid that's on the three of you who were 'watching him' to know."

This is why I said:

Yes I know some men are amazing and look after their DC really well and some people always go to the men first to ask for help. I am just talking about what I see quite regularly.

I don't find this in my family TBH. My mum is quite sexist and has made one or two comments, but she generally gets shut down very quickly. My BILs and DH tend to do their fair share at family events.

The funniest one from my mum was when DH and I were helping in her garden and she was indoors with a toddler DS.

DH was working by the back door, I was working on the other end of her garden. She came out of the back door, stood NEXT TO DH and shouted the length of the garden to me, asking where his sippy cup was.

I shouted back "ask his dad, he's standing RIGHT NEXT TO YOU" and DH said "here you go" and handed her the cup.

This is why I said:

Yes I know some men are amazing and look after their DC really well and some people always go to the men first to ask for help. I am just talking about what I see quite regularly.

But great that your mum is shut down.

Same here.

In fact, we had family drinks here yesterday, including 4 babies / toddlers 4 and under. All nappies were changed by the little ones' Dads.
But it's not a 'that generation' thing. My generation (50s and 60s) were the same and both mine and dh's parents are / were the same. Indeed, I remember dh's Grandparents and they were the same. Then it's the same in all the families that have married in to our family - when I've spent time with dh's sister's dh's family for example, long before getting on to all the nieces and nephews families and my dc's partners' families.

I did say this in my OP:
Yes I know some men are amazing and look after their DC really well and some people always go to the men first to ask for help.

But you are trying to make out that what your family do is 'the default', as if it is what happens in most families.
Posters are telling you that it isn't the default at all.
Those of us who had children with equal parents are not some sort of weird minority.

I am not saying this is the default everywhere. If I thought it were, I would not have said that some men are amazing and that some people go to the men first. I explicitly acknowledged that equal parenting exists and that many families do this well.

What I am pushing back on is the idea that because it is not universal, it is therefore not a wider pattern worth naming. Saying something happens often or culturally does not mean it happens in every family or that families who do it differently are unusual or imaginary.

I am also not talking about one generation versus another. As I said, I have seen involved fathers across generations too. That does not contradict the point. Individual examples of good practice can exist alongside a broader social tendency for care to be routed towards women.

So this is not about denying that equal parents exist, or claiming they are rare, or suggesting that your family is unusual. It is about recognising that, outside of families where this has been consciously challenged, women are still more likely to be defaulted to for child related tasks, even in small everyday moments.

Pointing that out is not an attack on men who do their share or on families who have got this right. It is noticing a pattern that still shows up often enough to be noticed and discussed.

84% of people currently say I am NBU. That gives an indication that the majority of women are having the same experience of having children given to them rather than the men.

Also, grandma comes to stay. Looked after by the woman of the family.