My wife travels extensively for her work, averaging about one week a month, although she will have trips of up to three weeks.
Before, she was the one to manage all the doctor appointments, school stuff and such, but because she’s gone so much, it’s just easier for me to take care of it.
I think a lot of fathers fail to appreciate the amount of work it all takes. I know I was really surprised at the amount of time and energy it takes.
Even meal planning. Because our kids have to take lunches to school, we are cooking close to 21 meals a week. It’s just constant.
My daughter once built an entire town in our guest room. It was built out of cardboard boxes and populated with her stuffies and other toys, and it was awesome–until my parents came to visit, and I made her take it down. I sadly informed her that it takes a child to raze a village.
This. It’s not like I just dump my kids in the world and the “village” keeps an eye on them.
Obviously my wife and I have primary responsibility for raising them.
There is the extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins with varying degrees of interaction and involvement (largely based on proximity).
Our network of friends and neighbors
Teachers and coaches
Any hired staff such as nannies, tutors, or our building concierges
Although maybe the one thing that has changed a bit from when I was my kid’s age back in the 80s is that we used to be able to just go out “into the world”. No, we never actually searched for a dead body or old pirate treasure or fought some sort of interdimensional horror or anything like that. But I like to think that we were prepared to do so if we had to.
I think in our effort to center the important issues of labor and cultural expectations of husbands and wives, we can loose sight of the impacts on the child.
Even when one parent is doing most of the “raising” in an active way (assuming a mostly stable two parent household), the child is learning from both parents equally.
Or, in a more straightforward way: disengaged parenting is just as impactful as engaged parenting.
It would be interesting to shift the narrative from “both parents are responsible for raising their children” to “both parents by definition are always raising their children. So take it seriously.”
Lack of intention/attention on the part of one parent doesn’t mean they’re not teaching their children, and expecting that one parent or the other is going to be ‘doing the raising’ and that the child will magically only learn from that one parent is a comfortable fiction that pretends that the less engaged parent is not influencing their children.
No argument there. I just think it’s important for parents to realize that, even if both parents are in agreement about whatever division of labor they’ve got going on, both of them are impacting their child all the time. For example, model a hands-off father/hands-on mother approach, and you’re teaching sons and daughters (and others) what to expect from a father, mother, husband, wife.
That’s hilarious. I’m just glad my daughter hasn’t decided to build a stuffy village. Although one time I fell asleep on the couch and when I awoke I found she had amassed her army of stuffies to lay siege to me like I were some sort of sleeping giant.
I’d like to get my kids to raze the Lego village they built, but it seems like it just keeps getting “gentrified” with increasingly larger and more elaborate constructs. And when I say “village” I mean they’ve Legoscaped our entire apartment and have arguments about which district the school or the botanical garden or whatever should go into like it’s some sort of town council meeting.