[kqr]

As a new father, it is crazy how little us fathers write for each other. Almost everything I read on parenting is directed at mothers, and in some ways, it is infuriating.

Either way, seeing someone write about parenting and reference fatherhood is always a fresh breath of air.

(In a way, I guess I have tasted what it can be like as a woman in engineering, with everything written for "him".)

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I was a stay-at-home parent with a Y chromosome.

It was a deep and profound eye opener for me to (1) notice how most of the writing about the stuff I did all day was written specifically for people without Y chromosomes

but more importantly

(2) it made it much more clear to me what it must be like to be a woman who wants to be or is a part of a male-dominated field. Even though I was already aware of the concept of gendered literature as it pertains to a field of endeavor, wow, was it a totally different experience to have it apply directly to me and to my feelings. I used to be a bit cavalier about this - acknowledging that it was a real thing, but downplaying its significance.

No more. The kid is now 25, and we talk gender politics every other week :)

[watwut]

Out od curiosity what we're biggest things that you noticed or annoyed you? (I am woman programmer who was stay-at-home few years and I am curious.)

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It's been a while now :)

Almost any book on raising young children (say birth to 5) would be written with the assumption that diapers, feeding, play arrangements, and what we might call "very early childhood education" were the responsibility of a mother. Many early children's books would feature mothers as the ones taking care of young children too, and that grated on me a bit.

To be fair, there's a flip side to this which is almost as bad. By the time my child ended up at a (co-op) nursery school, I of course got huge karma from all the other stay-at-home mothers there for doing precisely what they did. That wasn't comfortable either, but at least it was an ego massage.

A couple of decades later ... it all seems like water under the bridge now compared to the deeper gender politics that we still face, and I am only glad that it made me pay attention to what I had previously assumed was a trivial thing.

[steve_adams_86]

Part of why it's like this could be because of how our dads and their dads handled being fathers. Perhaps too often they didn't own it, made child raising women's work, and created that gap in society that we see here today.

I might be wrong. I used to get a little frustrated by how men are treated as parents though, and I've come to think it's no one's fault today. If some old lady congratulates me for spending time with my sons (something I do every day and while it is nice, I don't want people to think it's remarkable and novel), I shouldn't assume it's condescending or rude; it's more likely that her husband rarely spent time with their kids and/or her father never spend time with her. She could be totally sincere.

Similarly, there could be very little written for us because in much of the world and recent history, raising kids has been largely placed on women. We might need to start writing if we want to see that change.

Again, I could be wrong. I think about it quite a bit though. Being a 'single dad' was a real eye opener about how men and parenting are perceived in society.