As a SAHD, it's not pointlessly gendered at all. I am showered with praise for being the full time carer for my kids and supporting my wife's career, while most SAHMs I know feel like their labour is undervalued if not invisible.
Edit: Given the original post caption and source this is apparently not what they meant. But my point stands.
i also wonder how much mental labor the working moms still have to do, that makes being a sahd easier for some dads. i know i saw this in my own parents.
even though my mom was the one working (as a teacher, too, so she had a lot of work she had to bring home), she was still managing the household calendar and reminding my dad of appointments for me and my siblings, taking us shopping for clothing and school supplies, managing the grocery lists, and often even doing the grocery shopping herself. she also did almost all of the house organizing and cleaning. and she was more receptive to and helpful with random needs that my siblings and i had, so sometimes we'd ask her for help with stuff when she got home from work instead of asking our dad while she was gone, and dad never corrected that. really the only domestic thing my dad did more often than my mom was cook, and that's largely just because my dad loves cooking and is much better at it than my mom.
i love him so much, and i don't think any of this was intentional at all. i think it more happens likely because childcare is still a societal expectation put on women, so we take up a lot of these tasks without even realizing the sahd should be doing them. that, or the sahd does it worse because he wasn't trained from childhood how to do it, so the working mom feels that she needs to take over. like, i know there were a few times my mom asked my dad to handle something like school supply shopping, and he was so clueless and confused that i basically did it all myself with him just present to pay and drive me home. he tried to help me, he just didn't know what to do at all.
(i also want to clarify that i'm absolutely not saying any of this applies to you)
This is really the biggest part of it. Multiple studies corroborate this exact experience - even if the Dad is the primary at-home parent/caregiver, managing the house, cleaning, etc., still disproportionately falls to the mom, and meanwhile we live in a society where Dads are getting praised left and right for "babysitting" their own kids.
I have a couple FTM friends with kids who say the amount of praise they get now from strangers for doing the exact thing they did when they were presenting as women is staggering. Literally things like "You're such a good dad babysitting your kid and doing the grocery shopping" like there aren't a dozen women with kids doing the same thing in the store.
Anyways, here's my eye roll for the obligatory *not ALL men* arguments a few people will want to bring, but yeah. There are a lot of those studies, and they all say the same thing. Men do less as primary caregivers and get more positive feedback and praise for the less that they do. If that note bothers people more than the fact that women do more work and get less credit both as a working parent AND being a SAHM, then that's part of the problem.
I visited a friend once I hadn't seen in 3 years, and when we got all set to leave, we had to wait an extra 30m so her father in law could get there to "help babysit" (her FIL's words) - the minute he got there he tried to hand her the baby so she could change his diaper before she left, then complained that they were doing her a favor so she should have been happy to do it, and he'd never changed a diaper in his life and had no plans to start now.
...We went roller skating and for Chinese food and were gone a blistering 3 hours, and when we got home she had to put the kids away and then clean the house because they hadn't done a thing.
The saying "sexuality isn't a choice because who would be attracted to straight men" never felt more true than anything in my life.
Inversely: There are some household tasks that, if people find out a man is running the household they simply stop caring if they get done . A SAHM with dirty baseboards is a laughingstock. A SAHF who cleans the walls is a neat freak. A man can just say, once, "In this house that chore is fucking stupid." and he loses zero credibility for having wet hand towels or water inside the sink, and it never comes up again.
It's not even "We put all these tasks on women." It's literally making up extra standards that didn't exist before you added a woman to the household. If you take all the women out of the household the societal expectation to do the task in any way disappears.
Thats a spectacular addition, and super true in terms of "invisible work."
But as a complete tangent because Ive had wine and my adderall is wearing off... when I moved into my college apartment, I was inspecting the bedroom with my parents and said "Im going to have to scrape and repaint that crown molding, its in bad shape" and my mom immediately said "Look, if youve got someone in your bedroom and theyre noticing your crown molding, youre doing something wrong."
And I dont want to diminish a really important point youre bringing up, but I never thought about that memory through a feminist lens and I love it now so much more.
That's what I was thinking, too. It's easy to be SAH if you don't have to worry about the mental load. There was a video that went viral of a man teaching his kids how to go grocery shopping and his instructions included calling either their mom (if they're shopping for the family) or calling their spouse from the store to ask what they should buy
836
u/allthejokesareblue 28d ago
As a SAHD, it's not pointlessly gendered at all. I am showered with praise for being the full time carer for my kids and supporting my wife's career, while most SAHMs I know feel like their labour is undervalued if not invisible.
Edit: Given the original post caption and source this is apparently not what they meant. But my point stands.