when mum is dad and dad is mum

[sahdad2]

all i mean by that is that mum is out in full time work and dad is at home full time with the (2) little ones

there's endless controversial stuff here about gender of course. of course men can do childcare and women can do work - that is too obvious to stress. i'm trying to say something about why this set up can be so peculiarly hard for both parties that does not depend on stupid generalizations about gender.

i think that if dad stays at home and looks after the babies he is going to need (moral - personal) support even more than mum will need when she does this - and i think that mum will be distinctively bad at giving it.

the other way round is true too:

mum - in being separated from the babies - will need more support from dad than dad would need from mum were he separated from them - and he will be distinctively bad at giving it.

why?

because dad has the very thing mum is pining for - constant closeness with the little ones (so she finds it impossible to understand why he's under so much strain)

and mum has the very thing dad is pining for - a role in the adult world of work (so he finds it much harder to appreciate why she is under so much strain)

the point of this post is to ask if others find this familiar

but also to try to provide some relief for those in this situation - the only thing that might relieve the distress caused by this combination of incompatible problems is if both partners can understand better why the other finds it so hard to appreciate what they're going through.

I have a problem with the assumptions being made in this post. Sorry, this will probably be long but I feel the urge to womansplain to the OP

As a woman in a western society, I actually did NOT grow up expecting to be spending a lot of time doing childcare at some point in my life. Nor did my relatives nor most of my female friends. It's not a matter of "hip" thinking. It was not something that was mentioned at home or at school or at choir or at sports or at university.

At the point of arrival of our first DC, when we were in our 30s, I knew as much about caring for them as my DH. I pointed out to him that I actually had no idea when he asked me for advice on something and looked at me as if I were the fountain of knowledge of all things "baby." Just because I played with dolls when I was 3, does not make me a baby guru. Just like playing with cars as a child did not make him a mechanic.

He sheepishly realised that he just assumed that because I had strong views about some concepts in life, the baby would be one of them. In my book, to have strong views, you need to know stuff and I knew only the same things he did about day to day care for babies.

I went back to work when DC1 was 8 weeks old. Do I miss DC? -yes, especially when I am away on business trips. Do I feel "torn"? - no, why would I - I absolutely trust DH to take care of DC, just like he trusts me when he's away. I enjoy my work most of the time and I find that it makes me a better mother and partner because I get to keep my own identity for a few hours a day and then go home and morph from worker to parent without forgetting who I am and what I stand for; just like I don't forget that I am a parent when I'm at work.

Did my DH feel a bit scared being at home full time with an 8 weeker? Sure he did - but no more or less scared than I was just 2 months before. Did he cope - yes. Did he develop a fantastic bond w DC? - absolutely. Did he step up right there and then, becoming an actual PARTNER in this whole set up? - yes. We share childcare/ house chores/ leave / cover each other's backs on trips away. Yes both of us work at the moment, but we've both alternated being a full time stay at home parent on several occasions when life required it, him more than me as it happens and he's actually looking forward to it again. This is not a stealth boast and the two of us are far from perfect (yay!), nor do we live in a perfect country, but....

Assumptions are misleading things. Our family setup is not an exception among our friends and colleagues either - it's life and we muddle along making it work for us, rather than dwell on what is common/natural/ expected/insert preferred epithet. The constant drivel about what I'm supposed to want and need as a woman and what my DH is supposed to want and need as a man is as laughable as it is irritating.

Out of interest, have you tried checking why you assume the things you do? when did you first start assuming them? Did your partner actually think what you think she did or was the assumption something she ended up being labelled with / felt that's what she "should" be doing/feeling/expressing?

I went back to work when DC1 was 8 weeks old. Do I miss DC? -yes, especially when I am away on business trips. Do I feel "torn"? - no, why would I - I absolutely trust DH to take care of DC, just like he trusts me when he's away. I enjoy my work most of the time and I find that it makes me a better mother and partner because I get to keep my own identity for a few hours a day and then go home and morph from worker to parent without forgetting who I am and what I stand for; just like I don't forget that I am a parent when I'm at work.

That echo's my experience as well. I never felt torn at all.

peppalongstocking explained exactly what i was going to say ... OP is making assumptions of some form of gendered conditioning that, in this day & age, and in western societies, hasn't been happening for a long time.
I'm working fulltime, DH is SAHD ... and those roles actually suit us well - I was always the more ambitious of the two of us, work-wise, whereas he is better at managing the house and all that goes with it. I wouldn't say he's better than me at childcare, but he is happy doing it.
OP I can understand if you're not 100% happy at home, but that could as easily happen to a woman - its all about what you're suited to, and not about whether you sit or stand to pee :D

interesting responses

of course staying at home with children can be hard - but leaving them at home and missing all that amazing stuff (that does not happen in office life!) can be hard too (so its odd to hear people speaking as if the only hardship in the offing is the hardship of giving up working life and financial autonomy!).

the point that traditional attitudes about the gender of parenting make it very difficult for women whose particular personality makes childcare hard for them is a very good one. if you just don't get on with childcare and you can't help feeling that you should get on with it because you have internalized (as one can hardly help but do)

personality differences - and differences in personal situations too - cut across the sort of TRENDS i'm trying to identify of course. but that does not mean they don't exist.

our situation i think is probably very unusual. i worked and my wife stayed at home for the first three years - and i stayed at home and my wife has worked for the last four years (all early years parenting).

both of us always worked before children (and we had them very late) - and we're both very successful people. of course both parties tended to have their characteristic challenges in the classic family of say the fifties (and the 1850s too). the point is to say something interesting about the TYPES of difficulty a distinctively 'modern' family might face so as to make it easier for people living in those families to understand their situation. this hasn't been done well i think - and more needs to be said about it. i think the very aggressive comment 'welcome to what women have been feeling for years' represents a common and deplorable attitude. i also think the idea that modern women expect - growing up - to be no more involved in childcare than modern men is very hard to believe. that people want to speak that way is itself very revealing. (my wife is a great case here - she is terrifically successful in her work - and has missed being at home with the kids enormously.) i have been delighted to play a hugely bigger role in parenting than my lovely dad did - but its also been very hard. i'm trying to say something here about the particular way my wife and i have found it hard - and that includes trying to say something about how hard we have each found it to give the other what they need. seeing these difficulties not just as consequences of our unique personalities and situations but also as aspects of wider cultural phenomena - might be important. both because they really are not just personal phenomena but also cultural ones - and also because seeing them in the second way as well as in the first can have real therapeutic value.

i suppose the reason a mum might find being separated from very small ones harder than a man would be that she had spent her early life expecting to spend a good deal of her life largely devoted to childcare - but a man would not have

I don't know if I really understand your post? I don't think my DH had an easier time going back to work than I did. He was upset to have to be away from his baby in the same way I was when I went back to work. If anything my DH struggles less than me being at home with DS. He's an amazing father and is as equally emotionally invested in DS as I am. I personally never imagined life at home as the primary care giver and it wouldn't work for me.

You make it sound like you & your partner are square pegs being forced into round holes because your genders don't match with societal norms but society isn't really like that anymore. Not in my experience anyway.

Do you think you need more support as a SAHD than your wife would because you're a man and you never expected to find yourself in that role? And your wife doesn't understand that?

I think trying to fit people into TYPES and TRENDS is a very bad idea - there is no therapeutic value to assuming something that could, and in many cases would be wrong.

I also strongly contest that these types & trends continue to exist to a large degree in today's progressive western world - very few girls have been raised in the past 30 years to think that they should be more responsible for childcare than boys

Every situation is inherently different, every person on the planet has different affinities. I think assuming one gender or another will struggle more or less with a particular situation, rather than looking at a situation purely on its merits, is the kind of biased approach we should actively avoid

to be criticized for genderizing by someone who wants to 'womansplain' something is a very odd feeling

and the idea that there is no gender in modern western society - that we all grow up with just the same assumptions about how our lives will go and the role parenting will likely play in them is very silly indeed. OF COURSE i'm trying to talk about TENDENCIES here - so as to allow for all sorts of deviations and exceptional cases. but there is absolutely no doubt that in the most modern and western societies women TEND to grow up with different assumptions about children and childcare and work than do men. (not different in the same way they were fifty or even twenty years ago - but still different).

so a simple way to put this might be this - if we're men at home looking after children we ought to be very ready to appreciate that our partner might find being away at work and missing home life even harder than we would find it if we had to do it

and that if we're women at work with male partners at home looking after small children we ought to be very ready to appreciate that our partner might find being immersed in childcare and cut off from the world of adult work even harder than we would were we to find ourselves in that position

and further

the naive 'post genderist' attitude according to which men should have no more (or no different) difficulty than woman isolated at home, and women should have no more (or no different) difficulty than men separated from children in the work place - is liable to cause a lot of suffering. it is important to get away from out-dated male-centric attitudes towards gender and childcare etc. - but pretending that there are no gender issues in parenting (and in life more generally) is not the way to do that.

do people really believe that one can say nothing interesting about differences in the way women and men will TEND to experience being primarily responsible for the care of babies and very small children for long periods of time? personality differences will indeed serve to undermine these trends but the idea that they simply don't exist is bonkers.

this site is full of all sorts of enthusiastic generalizations about the differences between little boys and little girls - so the very idea ought to be perfectly familiar to most of you

and i do think that someone who always expected (in an unconscious culturally conditioned sort of way) to be a primary carer who is not a primary carer is likely to need more support in their role as breadwinner than someone who always (in a culturally conditioned unconscious sort of way) expected to be a breadwinner will need in their role as breadwinner. and the other way round too - of course if you never unconsciously expected to be a primary carer and you find yourself one you may need more moral support than someone playing that role who always - in an unconscious culturally conditioned sort of way - expected themselves to play it.

and i think the kind of naive anti-genderism that is on show here is likely to make it very unlikely indeed that they will get it (or ask for it - as a female breadwinner....). and i think challenging that sort of bad gender philosophy is a large part of why i am posting.

and no-one can know if the role of primary care giver at home will 'work for them' unless they try it for at least a year....

What insight your arm chair psychology provides

I have no clue what you're going on about now about now.

But no, if my husband ends up a SAHP then I won't expect that I'd need to offer him more support than I would need if I were in that same role. Just no. It smacks too much of the "women are naturally better at tidying up and cuddling babies" nonsense which I think is destructive for women and men.

You can dismiss our opinions as silly and poo all you like, but I think it's your huge generalisations that are the issue. Like that working parents are "missing out on all that amazing stuff" No they're not. They're at home for 2 days out of every 7, as well as first thing in the morning and in the evening, and on annual leave. I was a lone parent for a few years, working full time, and I assure you that I still had time to raise my children and make sure homework was done and feed them and revel in their successes and enjoy their company.

What's the point of your post, OP? You seem to be saying the same thing over and over about men and women TENDING to be bad at roles other than the normal SAHM / WOHD roles, with some bits of (ill thought out) gender theory tacked on for good measure

OP not sure what age you and your partner are, but as a 30 year old woman I certainly did not grow up expecting to spend a large part of my life doing childcare, and don't know anyone who did. Even in my parents' generation, I have 15 aunts and all of them worked, as did my maternal grandmother. I don't have any sahm friends.

I went to school and university then did postgraduate training, so funnily enough I expected to spend a large part of my life working. My DH feels the same, but we are approaching parenting as equal partners. We will both take some time off, and we will have to pay for childcare after a certain point, like most people I imagine.

Nobody's womansplaining - I'm not generalising i'm talking about my experience. I didn't ever want to get married until I met DH, I didn't think much at all about kids until the year we started ttc so I hadn't spent years of my life longing to be a mother or imagining what that would look like. I've tried being a SAHP for a year, it didn't work for me.

Maybe worth adding you say you had children later in life so I'm going to guess I'm a fair bit younger than you OP - almost all of our friends that I can think of have some kind of blended childcare arrangements where mum & dad do their share which is in part facilitated by reduced hours, flexible working and family friendly workplaces. I only know one SAHP. For me that's what modern families look like now.

My circle of friends weren't raised with such specific ideas of what we should expect from our lives just because of our gender and it's not the way I'm bringing up my son.

I'm not saying your wrong - it's your experience but it's not my experience.

the idea is that they will each need more support because under greater than normal strain (bucking against their own assumptions about the shape of their lives) - and will each be less able to give it (because the other will have precisely the thing they are so conscious of lacking)

Not our experience. Any strain comes from outside-other people imposing their assumptions on us, or trying to. People really do talk a lot of wank about parenting, usually to justify themselves.

I agree with Crackles too. The binary of full-time at home parent and full-time at work parent is less common than two parents juggling work and childcare in various complicated ways, often with grandparents in the mix as well.

Also, your assumptions about what men and women respectively want and assume or are programmed to be able to do are actually very culture-specific. In my father's (non-European culture), men were traditionally very cuddly with tiny babies and toddlers in particular. He very much followed that model, outraging my English grandmother by (shriek!) pushing the pram which she and many others considered emasculating and (gasp!) actually playing with his children, way back in the 1960s.

In our circle at least, it seems to be universally accepted that men have a nurturing side and value time with their children, and that women have ambition and aspirations they want to satisfy through paid work.

Working full-time only means missing out on meaningful interaction with the children if you do an astonishingly high-pressure job, and/or you want it to. I know someone very high up in international politics who would still go and see his children play sports or leave work early to have dinner with them. He just made up the hours later. The people he worked with did not think this was odd.

it is important to get away from out-dated male-centric attitudes towards gender and childcare etc

so, many women have come on and said that they have moved on from out dated make centric attitudes, and you have repeated said they can't have, because you haven't.

What you seem to be missing is that most of us were brought up by working women. We are well past the generation brought up by SAHM. I am 50, and my mum worked.
So we have ALWAYS HAD the expectation that for the mum to work was normal.
And, incidentally, so did my brothers...

Well that's a bit stupid.

Just read most of this until my eyes started to glaze over during one of the lengthier postifications and I have to say so far I agree mostly with Ttbb. It really is a bit stupid.

As for OP trying to us that 'women' spent her early life expecting to spend a good deal of her life largely devoted to childcare - but a man would not have, seriously OP did you grow up in the 1950's? Literally never thought that

You seem to be repeating yourself in a very long winded manner.

It is difficult to engage with you when you find our responses 'hard to believe' and keep repeating this theory you've come up with.

I'm 32 and have just had my first child. I certainly never had the idea growing up that I would spend a lot of my life doing childcare. I think if I thought about it at all I thought I wouldn't have kids.

I am sometimes envious of my husband heading out every day to do something intellectually stimulating and surrounded by other adults. He is sometimes envious of me staying home with this small person we have created and who he misses a lot during the day

When we switch roles at 6 months, I expect we will both experience the reverse. I doubt it will be any more due to our respective sexes.

I think there are a lot of generalisations in your post that may well apply to you and your wife but don't necessarily apply to everyone in the same situation.

For example:

i suppose the reason a mum might find being separated from very small ones harder than a man would be that she had spent her early life expecting to spend a good deal of her life largely devoted to childcare - but a man would not have

Never in my life have I expected to devote a good deal of my life to childcare as a woman. I've never thought I'd be at home with the children more than perhaps the first six months that it takes to wean them on to a diet of more solid foods (and therefore reduced need for breastfeeding).

My (male) DP couldn't wait to give up work on the other hand and was much 'broodier' than me, much more keen to have children than I was.

Being a SAHP would drive me nuts, whereas the pressure of being the breadwinner would really get to DP (and he wouldn't be able to earn half what I do anyway).

It works in our situation as I think I'm much more keenly aware of how hard it is to be a SAHP given the exposure I have to posts from SAHM's on here and through friends whereas the average man working out of home doesn't seem to have much of a clue IMO.

I think @Somerville makes a good point. Being a parent is bloody hard whether you stay at home or go out to work.

It's just a different kind of hard.

SAHP: Constant demands, lack of adult company, no time to themselves, work is '24/7', more likely to feel loss of own identity, chores and childcare may feel like a repetitive daily grind

WOHP: Coming back to childcare and chores after a long day at work, missing seeing your children's milestones, lack of quality time with children, feel pressure and anxiety of being the one who is solely responsible for keeping a roof over heads and food on the table, commuting, deadlines, shit bosses, shittier colleagues/office politics/drama/targets/performance reviews

It's easy to look at the other one and think 'I wish I could drop everything and be away all day'/'I wish I had no deadlines and could spend my afternoons at baby groups'.

They're both hard. They both have perks and they both have downsides.

That's why DH and I have both gone part-time, eyebrows It's early days so I'm yet to work out if this is the best of both worlds, or the worst!

also think the idea that modern women expect - growing up - to be no more involved in childcare than modern men is very hard to believe

So, we've told you how we, as women, actually grew up feeling and you, as a man, are telling us that it isn't true? Weird.

I can't speak for anyone else but I genuinely mean it when I say that being a stay at home parent has never, ever, ever been something I've considered. Not even for one second.

Okay, maybe when I've had a really shitty meeting I might think 'fuck...I should stay at home and go to baby groups instead' in the same way that I occasionally also think I should sell all my worldly possessions and live off the land in a remote corner of the world. That's the full extent of my consideration of full time childcare.

I grew up with a single full time working mother and full time working grandmother. My DP also had a full time working mother. It honestly never occurred to me that women did anything else until I got into my late 20's and a couple of friends gave up work.

But y'know...don't take my word for it. You obviously know my mind better than I do...

I think the main problem that dh and I have is that we both expect to work a lot and neither of us were brought up to expect to have to give up our careers for childcare. We've both been educated up to our eyeballs and have high flying careers which we want to keep. Neither of us want to be the stay at home parent.

I took a year's maternity leave last time and ended up with severe depression that miraculously lifted when I went back to work... so don't tell me my dh would have had a worse time than me at home... not possible! My problem is that the world expects me to want to be at home... and I don't want to be at home all day any more than dh does.

We've ended up relatively happy by employing a full time nanny and I am home for bath and bedtime every night and then work once ds is in bed. I love my ds but I don't 'pine' for him when I'm at work anymore than I pine for my dh (who I also love)!