Are Women Better Mothers of Infants Than Men?

Great Debates
1

I’m not asking for a comparison of men and women as parents.

My question is whether women are usually inherently better at raising infants and toddlers (from birth to about age 3) than men are.

Or are women usually responsible for those early years b/c (a) we can breastfeed, (b) we’re not as highly paid in the workplace, thus easier to sideline, and © men aren’t expected to do the work and therefore don’t have to try.

In my personal experience, women are usually (though not always) better at reading the signals of pre-verbal infants and toddlers. While my husband loves our children as much as I do, caring for them (doing the usual “mothering” tasks) is much more difficult for him than it is for me. I’m not talking about changing diapers & feeding, of course those skills can be learned. I’m thinking about soothing mysterious upsets, early discipline, getting up at all hours of the night, and the art of redirection.

What are your views?

2

I have a 6 week old infant and try to be a good father. I would say that women are better with the tiny ones. Besides the reasons you list, women seem to have a natural patience and sense of purpose with infants. I can do everything for an infant and have by myself for up to one week stretches but it takes extreme determination and focus. It seems like many women can just sit there with an infant day after day with only a tiny fraction of the strain that I seem to get. I seem to be better than most men in that regard even and people often comment on it. OTOH, I can play with a child ages 2 and up forever.

3

I don’t understand how the second sentence can follow the first.

4

jsgoddess, perhaps additional context would help — would it be reasonable to expect the men in our society to take a few years off work in order to raise their children from birth to age 3, as women commonly do?

Are women taking the primary caregiving role during the first 3 years because we’re better equipped for the job, or because it’s a job men don’t want?

Further, are we unnecessarily limiting our career options by accepting employment gaps as our fate, when instead we could reasonably expect a typical male to do just as good a job with infants and pre-verbal, pre-logical toddlers?

I excluded the question of “parenting” because it seems pretty clear that the larger issue of parenthood extends well beyond the early years.

5

I think infant care is generally speaking done better by women (all disclaimers about individuals vs. group statement apply), but I’m not sure why it is.

The humanist (a word I prefer to “feminist”) part of me wants to say that it’s because of cultural conditioning. Women, theoretically, helped out with babies more as children themselves and so learned what to do. While the boys were out hitting each other with sticks, we were called upon by our mothers and aunts to “help with the baby.” Baby girls recieve positive reinforcement from their parents when playing with dolls, where boys don’t.

Problem is, I never held a baby before my own, nor was I at all interested in babies as a kid, but I was still pretty good at it - better than most men I see. My step-brothers were pressed into baby duty as kids, and they’re still awkward and unsure with their own. Of course, this is going back to individuals, as opposed to a group. Anecdote /= data, and all that.

Asking my friends with kids about their previous baby experience doesn’t really reveal that women spent a lot of time with babies growing up - most of us come from small families, rather than the old style farm family with a dozen kids. Most of us weren’t around babies (except as toddlers) until we had our own. And, yeah, the men are clumsier and less able to read babies’ cues. I also notice that they’re less likely to be creative and try something new without prompting. If a baby’s crying, they’ll hand the baby to a woman instead of trying jiggling, swinging, rocking, walking, etc.

But don’t studies show that women are better at reading body language and facial cues of adults, as well? Maybe the baby thing is part of the same deal.

None of this is to say that men couldn’t be effective infant caregivers. None of this is to say that we shouldn’t share child care with them! I’m certain there are some individual men for whom it comes naturally. Every other man out there can learn it with some time and experience. But without teaching, I have to agree that women seem to have an innate advantage.

There’s no reason a man couldn’t stay home with the newborn and suffer a career gap if it was the best thing for the family. (That is, if her career would suffer more from a lapse, or she makes significantly more money.) I don’t think they’re THAT much less good at it so as to endanger the baby, and any baby care gap can quickly be overcome with experience and learning.

6

I’m not sure most people have ever had a real chance to find out. Throughout history, women have raised the small children because we are physically equipped to do it, and since most women had several children, there were always small ones to care for.

It would make sense for women to be generally better at the job, since for thousands of generations that’s been what’s going on, while men have presumable been selecting for other skills. However, I think many men could learn the nuturing and intuition through plenty of practice, which is how many women come by them. Moms simply usually spend far more time with their infants, so they get an awful lot more practice right from the start.

A good place to ask this question might be Scandinavia, where it’s common for men to get paternity leave of a few months, and frequently sequence the leave so that they’re home while Mom goes back to work. Seems to me that’s where you’d get the most data. But it might just not be very possible to find many dads who have been handed an infant who is totally dependent on them, right from the first hour, the way most moms have it.

Anyway, gotta go drive for a couple of hours.

7

Agreed. And I think that there are a lot of people of both sexes who would hate for it to be true–men because then they have no excuse, and women because they would then have no claim to superiority in the matter.

I don’t have any reason to believe that men wouldn’t be as good at caring for an infant as women are, if they had the same will, the same necessity, and the same training. My brother ended up having to care for his infant daughter once the mother was out of the picture, and I never noticed any awkwardness or tentativeness with her. Now that he’s married and with other children, he is still very involved. He simply knows how.

8

I think we can safely assume women always make better mothers. Men tend to make better fathers.

In all seriousness, though, women have breasts. Pretty big advantage there.

9

I think it is generally true that men will give up sooner (though many will come up with some magic move Mom never thought of!) and be awkward. But why is that? I suspect that a lot of the time, it’s because they can. They know that Mom is the last-resort-person, and she will come to the rescue most of the time. Moms don’t have that ‘luxury.’ We have to come up with something, so we do.

It’s a bit like the stereotype of the guy who can’t find the ketchup or do the laundry, or the girl who can’t fix a tire. They don’t really have to, so they can get out of it by being helpless. Sure, it sacrifices some dignity and self-reliance, but it saves 'em having to learn something new. Once they’re in a bind and really have to do it, they will suddenly develop a capacity for it.

I do think that as a generalization, women will have a somewhat easier time dealing with infants than men will–but both have to learn a lot, and plenty of women are clueless, while lots of men are naturals. I think the learning/necessity factor is very large.

In fact (alert: anecdote ahead) this weekend we visited my husband’s brother and his wife; they have a 2-yo daughter. Our two daughters and their little girl spent pretty much the whole weekend running around and hollering. DangerDad and I both hate this and have to keep telling ourselves that they are being normal kids, they’re having fun, and they’re not being bad (we squish over-the-line behavior promptly). BIL and SIL, meanwhile, are totally unbothered; neither of them mind at all and will sit there, benignly smiling at this utter mayhem that is giving me a headache. And why? Because our girls are normally relatively quiet kids; they talk a lot and run plenty, but don’t usually go in for mayhem at this scale. Their daughter, however, is like that all the time, and they’ve had to learn to deal with it, while we have not (thankfully).

10

I wouldn’t say “inherently.” I’d say women are statistically more likely to have the skills in questions, at least where I live, but also that the difference isn’t so skewed that you can make reliable predictions on random subjects.

11

Yes, they are in my opinion.

12

We have kind of an unusual situation, too, since our kids are twins.

From day one, I’ve needed my husband’s help far more than most women do. He was raised by a single mother (with a really big mouth and strong Liberal views) and I always thought he was more enlightened and less threatened by women than most men; he’s more “domestic” than I am, a really wonderful cook, and to this day does most of the laundry. I took it as a given that he’d do half the childcare while at home, as did he.

And during the first days, he did. Diapers, bottles, cuddling - no sweat.

Then the kids did that thing that most babies do after a few days - - they started crying. And crying. And crying. And it’s been a big struggle for him ever since. Bigger, in fact, as they’ve gotten older and their handling more complex.

At first I couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t read the babies and respond to them the way I did.

Now I see a huge difference between us in that I practice careful manipulation to get them to behave, using distractions or verbal finessing until something works. My husband, who is extremely bright, cannot seem to do this - he’s direct, and when it doesn’t work, he’s direct again - only louder.

Our daughter excells at manipulation, too; when they were 8 months old, our son was far more mobile and stronger than she and would steal her toys. She quickly learned to distract him by taking something he wanted and then trading it back for the toy she desired. Nobody taught her this.

It seems to me that this is what half the girls in high school were doing. At the time I wasn’t any good at it - I just remember watching one of my girlfriends finessing the car keys out of a mutual friend of ours, who was entirely too drunk to drive. Rather than taking the direct route “Hey, you’re loaded”, she charmed him into giving her the keys. She came from a large family.

13

Dangermom I think you’re right, too; I guess it’s probably a bell curve, like most things. And I know that new moms are famous for criticizing their husbands’ efforts with the baby - “You put the diaper on wrong!” Bit of a disincentive there.

14

Women are more likely to be biologically equipped to be better ‘mothers’ of children. From the start of their pregnancies to the time they give birth and into childhood, they are generally chemically geared to ‘mother’ their children.

That is not to say that fathers cannot do an admirable job, but that the average mother will nurture and protect her offspring more capably than a man will. Men are designed to propagate the species far and wide…women are designed to cultivate the issues of their seed-spread and make sure that the children survive and thrive to adulthood. Males (of any species) are less likely to worry about that because if one of their offspring dies, there is always the prospect of another one to take their place, biologically speaking,

15

If you find the subject interesting, have a gander at Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature. It is an extremely dense book, but (if you are interested in the subject that is) it is a transformative book, not to be missed.

Hrdy is not given to neat conclusions. However, one of the things I did come away with from the book is that any comitted caretaker can give a baby the message it really needs to hear in order to thrive – which is “you are cared for and will not be set aside” – but that there are nevertheless differences the way caring is approached. Fathers and mothers, for instance, are equally likely to come to the aid of a baby if its crying indicates severe distress but the mothers are more likely to respond (and respond more quickly than do the fathers who do respond) to cries indicating mere discomfort.

One of the things that is rarely brought up (vis a vis infancy or anything else) is that caring for a child is a two way street. If a father is the primary caregiver, I expect that babies adjust their communication style to his to the extent they can (which is quite a lot). But given both a mother and a father, and especially where the baby is nursed, I think that babies express a preference for the mother pretty early and often pretty clearly.

16

I have my observations about humans, but I’ll save those for later.

About 35 years ago we had a Welsh collie bitch, straight off a farm, some friends of ours had a male, same ‘breed’ with a similar background. They lived sufficiently far away that we were not on their dog’s ‘route map’.

He was brought down with a rose in his collar, our dog cottoned on and a litter of six turned up. Astonishingly one day the father visited us, inspected his brood and ambled off.

As a stud fee one of the pups went to the owners of the stud hound, who then gave him to friends in France.

I went up to visit them after they had the pup, nobody was in, but looking through the kitchen window I saw a small vociferous male pup perched on a pile of heavy duty plastic (on which he had peed) and his father lying down nearby, head on paws, looking the picture of misery.

Nature equipped the mother to look after six of the blighters, and it looked to me as if Nature had made the father thoroughly ill equipped for looking after one.

In the UK there was a recent survey that showed that males are not that enthusiastic about paternity leave.

17

My wife will freely admit to not having had a clue what to do when our eldest was born and I had most of the practical skills. She’s an only child, wheras I have two older sisters who both have kids. So I probably did 60% of the nappy changes etc for the first few months. I was also the only one who could get him to settle in the middle of the night even though she breast fed.

When our second child was 2 my wife wanted to go back to work. She’s a journalist and a local company was just about to launch a new magazine. They were happy for her to work part time eventually, but wanted her to go full time for the first 3 months while they got the first edition out. My own contract was about to come to an end so I took 3 months off to be a house husband. I coped quite well for those 3 months and the only problems I had were to do with society accepting my role. I remember almost throwing the iron at the tv when one of the morning shows had a phone in on stay at home dads. The question of the day was something like: ‘stay at home dads. Secretly gay or just plain lazy?’

18

I remember seeing some surveys that showed women in general are much better at reading body language and seeing on a face what mood it expressed.

In Denmark there is one year paid maternity/paternity leave, which the parents can choose freely which parent (if any) is to take. Only a very small percentage of fathers choose to make use of the paternity leave. Around 6% if I remember correctly. In Sweden they chose to tackle this with customary Swedish elan by having the state setting off portions of the leave for each parents, so they won’t have to go through all the bother of choosing for themselves. But even so, I think a much larger percentage of fathers chose to entirely forego the paternity leave. The next logical step would be to make it mandatory.

19

I took on the role of primary care giver to two newborns when I was 50 and 51 1/2.
I am male. I was never before interested in having children and had no children specific skills or interests.

My wife was more traditional and had lots of experience and socialization. However, I was able to take early retirement and she was earning more than me, so I shared care with her for the first six months and then became the primary care giver while she works full time.

We are both Mental Health Nurses. My experience was broader than hers- geriatrics, rehab, adult acute and community crisis services. Her experience was mostly limited to adult inpatient and community.

My observations:

My experience with physical care of adults generalized into care of the new-born- shit and piss didn’t bother me, and physical care was second nature. Less so for my wife.

I was always the first responder at nights, partly because she worked and partly because I was used to broken sleep patterns in sleep-in work.

I am extremely tolerant of noise and untidyness caused by the kids and able to function well in that environment. Not so for my wife.

I am able to set firm but caring boundaries for behaviour without ‘giving-in’
to special appeals. Not so my wife. The kids are noticably better behaved when with me alone than with her alone or both of us together. They are also considerably more competent at everything from feedin to dressing to presenting themselves at the car ready to go out (now aged 4 and 5 1/2). This is because I adopt the adage- a good nurse is a lazy nurse- always get the client to do as much as possible for themselves.

I don’t claim to be a super-dad, just to point out that an under-motivated under-experienced father can learn and generalize experience and do a decent job.

And my watchword is Winnicott- who said that being an excellent mother is unnecessary, it is quite enough to be a ‘Good Enough Mother’. I think I managed that.

Now excuse me while I go and let the kids out of their cage. :smiley:

20

(Y’know, I was about to begin this post with something like “Kudos to the HouseDads in the thread!” but then I thought, WTF? Why should they get special kudos that we HouseMoms don’t get? That’s another thing I notice: my husband changes one diaper when we’re over at someone’s house, and suddenly he’s Parent of the Year. Meanwhile, I change the other 59 diapers a week, and I’m “just doing what moms do!” Fuck that, let me instead open with…".)

Kudos to the parents in the thread! Like I said, anyone can learn to take care of a baby, and I think the “baby care gap” is one of statistics, not necessarily individuals. Any specific couple should absolutely do what works for them and their baby, whether that’s mom, dad or full time nanny.

Funny thing happened last night. I have been struggling for 6 months getting WhyBaby’s teeth brushed. She HATES it. Part of it’s normal toddler resistance, but it’s exacerbated in her case because she was intubated (breathing tube) for weeks and weeks as a preemie, and so she HATES having anything put into her mouth (other than food.) She screams, cries, twists around, far worse than any kid I’ve nannied. I’m actually afraid sometimes that I’m going to hurt her inintentionally. And the way she screams, I’m not sure I could tell right away if I was hurting her or not.

Daddy brushed her teeth for the first time last night. Not. A. Peep. No tears, no struggles, nothing. Complete silence. He came out and said, “Maybe I didn’t do it right?” I of course assured him that not only had he done it right, but he was going to be doing it every single night from now on.

He frowned, and I laughed. I suddenly realized another reason he (maybe not all men, but he) can be incompetent: because then I don’t ask him to do it again.