Gender Wars: Why Working Mothers Envy Stay-At-Home Dads

Posted by: Lauren Young on June 18, 2009

This entry was written by Jeremy Adam Smith, the author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, from which this piece is adapted. His is also the founder of the blog Daddy Dialectic.

Today, a third of wives earn more than their husbands. Eighty percent of mothers work. Meanwhile, 80% of the people being laid off in the current recession are men. Pay gaps persist between mothers and childless women—as well as between women and men—but the female breadwinner is here to stay.

And yet when I traveled around the country interviewing breadwinning moms for my new book, The Daddy Shift, I found that many of them were struggling with their role. “I feel happy at my job,” said Oakland mom Rachelle. “But all things considered, I’d give it up and stay home with [my son]. And that’s strange. I didn’t realize that I’d feel that way.” She was shocked to find herself feeling jealous of her stay-at-home husband.

Rachelle isn’t alone. In a 2007 essay for the New York Times, M. P. Dunleavey wrote that breadwinning moms “are seething—with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration.” While her own husband “cooks, cleans, shops and takes care of our son,” Dunleavey said that she was filled with “terror that I’ll be the breadwinner forever.”

The roots of this discomfort are not hard to understand. A series of studies by sociologist Joseph Pleck found that the more a mother is involved with the worker role, the less time she feels she has to enact the mother role. But this result did not apply to fathers, despite the fact that fathers reported working twice as many hours on average as mothers did. “These findings suggest that although caregiving and breadwinning behaviors may be competitively organized [internally] for mothers, they are not for fathers,” writes Pleck.

In other words, fathers tend to see breadwinning as part of parenting, while many mothers see working as a separate activity that takes time away from their children. These feelings are products of a sexual division of labor that is centuries old; they explain why both stay-at-home dads and their breadwinning wives struggle with feelings of inadequacy, even as they continue to grow into new roles.

But those struggles, I discovered, are only half the story. Many career-oriented women marry men who become primary caregivers, and they are extremely happy with the arrangement. What’s their secret? In an age when gender roles are open to negotiation, the first trick, I found, is to identify what you want and find a partner who knows what he or she wants, bargain openly for roles as changes like parenthood loom, and clearly identify what strengths each partner brings to the table.

I saw this principle in action with Chicago parents Misun and Kent Hoffman. Misun made it clear at the outset of the relationship that she wanted children but that she also wanted to pursue her career, and Kent responded that he wanted to raise the children himself if she would support him. If the couple had not been able to arrive at this arrangement, Kent and Misun both told me, the relationship would not have gotten to the next stage.

It’s a discussion that every modern couple must have. If the sexual division of labor is indeed in the early stages of dissolving and gender roles are up for grabs—which I argue is the case—couples must put their respective assumptions and innermost desires on the table. When they do not do this, the silence can become a liability in their marriages. Misun and Kent did, and it became a source of strength. And after the children were born, Kent was grateful for his wife’s success as a provider, and Misun expressed appreciation for her husband’s unique contributions as a caregiver.

This is also true of another Oakland couple, Gopal and Martha. “I’ve always wanted to be a father, since I was a teenager,” Gopal told me. “There was definitely an understanding that we would share parenting. I always knew that I wanted to stay home and she always knew that.” This combination of self-knowledge and honesty created the basis for a successful reverse-traditional partnership. “Having a partner who stays home helps tremendously,” said Martha, a public school teacher. “It’s easy to play the game of the overworked mother, but I’m not an overworked mother, because Gopal takes on so much care.”

In short, here’s the formula for successful reverse-traditional families, especially those created by an unexpected layoff: prizing time with children and seeing the value in Dad learning to take care of the kids; respecting each other’s roles, both breadwinning and caregiving; being grateful to each other’s contributions; and being able to articulate what you’re gaining through a reverse-traditional arrangement, even when it’s involuntary.

The definition of fatherhood has expanded to encompass a capacity for caregiving, just as motherhood has expanded to include breadwinning. This expansion can create stress and unhappiness. But as I hope the stories in The Daddy Shift reveal, it doesn’t have to be that way. When parents like Gopal and Martha embrace their roles, it creates new examples—and new possibilities—for all of us.

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