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In my post, Adoptive Parenting: Inequity In Hands-On Parenting Responsibilities, Fenyimom posted the following comment:
One that I’ve heard from several of my male co-workers, whose wives are stay at home moms – we work in an operations team, where we are oncall. If you’re oncall and get contacted after work, you have *got* to take the call and work the issue. For some strange reason, my co-workers wives don’t understand this. Their husbands come home, already on the phone working an issue, and the wife hands the baby to her husband because he’s home and it is her time now. So the husband ends up on the phone, and on his computer, trying to fix a problem, with a crying baby on his lap. Are these wives incapable of understanding that what their husbands are doing is what allows them to stay at home with their kids, and that their jobs do not end at 5pm? I can understand them being exhausted and not wanting to deal with their kids after their husbands get home. But these women seem to be so juvenile and unable to understand that their husbands work hard all day, and that it isn’t any treat to have to come home and keep on working. To have to do that while trying to cope with crying kids because your wife has decided that her turn is over is pretty unfair.
Many people seem to have the same attitude about stay-at-home moms — that they need to appreciate how hard their spouses work and not burden them with spending time with their own children when they get home from work. I take issue with this view of adoptive families for a few reasons:
1. Children are not burdens to be handed off between parents.
Let’s get back to basics. Why do we adopt children in the first place? It is because we want to love and parent them. We want them to thrive as we help shape them into the adults they will one day become.
In order to bond with our children, we must spend time with them. The time that we spend with them should be viewed as precious, not just a burden that we are enduring because our spouses are not bearing enough of the burden for us. Both parents adopted the children, and both parents made a commitment to love, nurture, and raise them. Part of this responsibility includes spending time with them.
2. The father’s role does not end with the paycheck.
Earning a living is what an adult does. When two people marry, they might shift responsibilities so that one takes on the full burden of earning the wages while the other takes on more of the other adult responsibilities. While it contributes to parenting, working a full-time job is not parenting.
To assume that a father’s sole role in parenting is making money is to equate him with a trust fund. Otherwise, what is the difference between an adoptive father and a trust fund? If I could replace my husband with a big wad of cash, then would my husband even have a real role in our son’s life?
A child needs more from his father than just money. Yes, the money to put a roof over his head is necessary, but that is not all that is required. He needs time with his father so he can learn what it is to be a man. A mother cannot replace this.
3. Families are too busy.
One big problem is that families stay too busy. Fathers are working 50-60 hours a week, which wears them out as well as wears out the stay-at-home wives who have no break at all from their duties. Any father who is too busy to spend 30 minutes a day with his child is too busy. Period.
Yes, I understand that adoptions are expensive. Yes, I understand that many jobs bleed outside of the 9-5 workday of days past. But if you are too busy to spend even 30 minutes with your child on a weekday and are too busy to spend a couple of hours with your child on the weekends, then you are too busy.
I believe that society’s compulsive busy-ness has contributed to the resentments felt by stay-at-home moms and their working husbands. Both are working themselves to death, and both desperately need a break. Perhaps rather than point fingers at each other, we need to reassess our priorities and set up our families in a way where our children are cherished members of our families rather than burdens to be unloaded upon each other.
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Photo Credit: Lynda Bernhardt
I didn’t mean that the father shouldn’t be involved with his kids. But if his job doesn’t end at 5pm, Mom’s job doesn’t either. Unless she believes that they can make do without that paycheck rolling in every two weeks, which would definitely be the case with my co-workers if they refused to take these calls and work these issues. They can always find other jobs that don’t require oncall work, but if their skills are all tuned for this work, and there aren’t a lot of other opportunities out there, you sometimes have to make do with what you can get. I know that several of the men that were on my team in this situation had been laid off from their prior jobs, and were pretty thankful that they had any job at all. But their wives didn’t seem to see it that way.
I’m a WAHM. My Husband works 24 hours on and then has 48 hours off as a professional fire fighter. You can bet that when he comes home at 7:30am on that morning, I’m handing him one or two children and taking a shower and then getting some work done before lunch that day. I am neither juvenile or viewing either boy as a burden. My husband can be called out at any time he is home (such as during Christmas Eve dinner… sigh…) and that’s just the way it is. So, if I get a chance for a shower and enough time to edit some work, well then, I’m thrilled beyond measure.
Of course, I write this with one child on my lap and another sitting on my feet playing with trains as my Husband takes HIS shower.
Families are good times!
(In short, great post, Faith.)
Faith, handing off the child is what you are posting about. Obviously, kids can be a burden, you are talking about needing a break, if they aren’t a burden, why do you need the break? A little dose of reality here, single parents do 100% of the parenting, they survive just fine. 90% is a lot, but not record setting. What is your solution to the dad that works 60 hours a week, quit? Take a large pay cut and work 40 hours a week to have more time with the kids? It sounds like your solution is 60 hours a week and do more with the kids. What are you willing to give up from a redeuced budget so that your husband can work less hours? Parenting is hard work, but work is hard work too. 24 hours on duty and he gets the kids the instant he walks through the door, not even a 30 minute break? Wow. John
In my personal situation — Yes, I have asked my husband multiple times to change jobs and/or cut down his hours to 40 hours a week. I would gladly make adjustments to the family budget.
In fact, I proposed that he cut down to part-time — work 4 days a week and then take Fridays off as his own personal day. Because he is one of the bosses, this is an option in his line of work and with this particular job. He won’t do it because he is a workaholic, and it has nothing to do with our spending. We are both pretty miserly and save a good portion of his paycheck.
- Faith
You have a realistic solution. The workaholic problem is another dimension. Folks that I have known with that issue seem likely to keep going back to their comfort level even if they temporarily cut back. Good luck on a difficult issue. John
Yes, you are correct about that. Workaholism is actually a compulsion to avoid feelings and emotions (like alcoholism or other dependencies), but it is viewed as heroic rather than a problem. It is not about money. That is why they keep going back.
- Faith