to be fed up of crap fathers being excused from basic parenting?

[HazelMember]

I keep seeing posts (and hearing it in real life) where fathers somehow get a free pass for things mothers are simply expected to do without question.

Fathers who can’t cope with more than one child at a time.

Fathers who don’t wake up when the baby cries at night because they “didn’t hear it”.

Fathers who are “no good with babies” so the mum just has to deal with it.
Why is this still acceptable?

Mothers don’t get a choice. They have to hear the baby. They have to cope. They have to function even when exhausted. Yet men sleeping through the night is treated like an unfortunate quirk rather than a problem that needs fixing.

Do not even get me started on when a mum goes away for a few days and feels obliged to prepare food, clean the house, label things, and generally make life easier for the father when this is almost never done in reverse.

If a father is “crap” at parenting, the solution isn’t for the mother to carry more of the load. It’s for him to get better fast. That’s what parenting is. You don’t opt out because it’s hard or unfamiliar.

What makes it worse is that sometimes even mothers make excuses for it calling men “good dads” for the bare minimum or explaining away genuinely poor parenting as if it’s just how men are.

Before anyone jumps in: yes, obviously not all men are like this. Plenty of fathers are brilliant, hands-on and competent. This isn’t about them.

AIBU for thinking we need to stop normalising this and start expecting the same basic standards from fathers that we do from mothers?

Terrible! I heard some friends' husbands talking about this.. 'worried about their career'. As if every woman who has EVER taken maternity leave hasn't had the same worry!!

YANBU, but how well has the “get better fast” option ever actually worked? Usually the only option if you’re zero tolerance on this is separation and then you have a situation where women are handing their child off for whole weekends/weeks to the quite clearly less competent parent. I’m not at all surprised women refuse to do this and just suck it up until the kids are teens and can advocate for themselves a bit.
I don’t know if there’s any data but I reckon long long held resentment is the primary cause of midlife divorce.

I’m not really surprised as in my line of work I’ve been aware of dads basically being pushed out for choosing to take both weeks. It’s horrific.

I reckon this is another reason why women don’t leave - who could bear to watch that shower while you’re STILL doing all the grunt work

Men and women reinforce and enable terrible male behaviour in equal measure in my experience.

I sent my ex-husband (who hasn't paid a penny in child maintenance and has decided he couldn't be bothered to see our daughter in the past several years for no reason whatsoever other than he couldn't be bothered) a text this morning reminding him that it's our daughter's 16th birthday in a few days (given that he usually forgets to even send a text).

His reply was "Who the hell gave you this number?!?!?!?!?!" 🤔 (it was his mum and we had already previously communicated on this number, so I don't know if he was drunk/high but I am now blocked 😂). I literally sent one text saying: "... is turning 16 next week".

So clearly he won't contact her on her birthday. I literally have no idea what goes on in the heads of such men.

I see it a lot on here. Thankfully I don’t see it in rl - our men are equals who pull their weight! I’m not sure I’m on board with shared parental leave unless the mother chooses it. Dd1’s birth took me 10 months to recover and feel normal.

To a degree, but men regularly choosing not to see their dc is alien to most mums who just couldn’t think of anything worse!

Yes, and they are judged for it, particularly by fathers, whereas fathers get “you’re such a good dad” for doing the bare minimum.

Some women need to make better choices when choosing who to have children with . It’s no surprise that some men are crap . They need to set the bar higher . And yes I do blame some women before anyone comes along shouting about victim blaming .

Just read a post where someone claiming that a dad having his own kids EOW and “maybe some holiday time as well” is a fine arrangement because anything more is “too much of a strain”.

Behind every useless dad, there’s a woman who has enabled his behaviour.

Unfortunately babies and toddlers haven't got the memo that they shouldn't cleave to their mother as a matter of course but be open to alternatives.

This!

those of us who share parenting with competent committed men shouldn't shut up about it either as we have the living proof that you can have a penis AND hear a baby crying/dress a toddler/go to parents evening/whatever, yes and work full time and STILL do housework evenings and weekends
if these useless waste of space men aren't told its possible they will just carry on being useless

That's a tricky one.

If you read some Mumsnet threads, particularly those about dating separated fathers, then any father who has less than 50:50 is automatically viewed as a shit dad and so should instantly be regarded as lazy/unsuitable/abuser.

But then you read other Mumsnet threads (aimed at single mothers) and there are endless comments about how any father wanting 50:50 can only possibly want that so they can stop paying maintenance. They go on to say that children must have a fixed residence that they can consider "home" and from which they see the other male parent relatively infrequently.

I agree with some of it but I don’t understand getting up when the baby cries. I breastfed so there was no point my husband waking up. Also I wanted him well rested so he could do helpful things like make me breakfast.

My husband was pretty clueless when we had our first. However I wasn’t scared to be honest with him and tell him what I needed like when the kids were toddlers taking turns at weekends getting up early with them. A lot of women are martyrs who expect men to read their minds.

Totally agree

But women are waking up to their nonsense and saying, no more

Sick of this shit

Yes and no. I've seen superstar men turn to incompetent jelly when presented with the reality of fatherhood

You simply can't tell

(Disclaimer: happens with women tooe, etc, but seems to happen far less frequently. They somehow 'step up')

Not all babies are breastfed. Young children often still get up in the night.

The signs are usually there to see during dating - how they treat family/friends, how much they help around the house, their attitude to their job etc. I don't understand why other woman are choosing have babies with these lazy men.

Right I am a man and it fucks me off the number of men who don't step up and be dads. The blokes that go to the pub rather than home after work, who play football or go to watch it and don't take the kids, the dads who don't even know when their kids birthdays are. The dads who fuck off and never give a penny. The dads driving flash cars when the kids are dressed from charity shops.
My dad had a group of tough working class men around him, they and his brothers were all grafters who lived to put food on the table and clothes on their kids backs. My dad was a greengrocer and when I started school some kids didn't like me, I realised 40 years later when my mates older brother pointed out that they would have gone hungry if my dad hadn't have given credit (or free veg to a couple of families) why.

You man up and graft, you work as a couple with your partner to give your kids everything you didn't have...or am I just old fashioned?

My exh was great around the house before we had kids. He always put his family above everything too. For some reason the kids seemed to wake up the sexist bones in him that I didn’t know existed

True, I just don’t see the point of 2 people being sleep deprived and grumpy. I preferred my partner to support in different ways. However when I stopped breastfeeding my husband took over putting the kids to bed. It helped with the transition.

I think this is unfair.

There are lots of things I could do and probably get away with - be lazier at work, ruder to people, drive unsafely, steal small items. The chances of being caught at any of these things are pretty low, and, even if caught, serious repercussions lower again.

I don't because I have a basic morality, not because I'm being 'enabled' by my company/the police/society not enforcing it!

If (some) men are only lazy and useless because their 'wimminfolk' enable it, then why aren't the women equally lazy and useless? Who is "making" them act like vaguely responsible adults?