Who drives dad home when the gig is up? Via Tigerzeye @ Flickr.
Babysitters mind other people’s children. Parents mind their own children. Men who find themselves in the terrifying position of being alone with their youngsters are being parents, not babysitters. So why do some insist on referring to themselves as such when their wives or girlfriends have the audacity to leave the house?
Yesterday I made a snarky comment on a co-worker’s Facebook status update, which indicated that he’d be “babysitting the girls while M’s at such-and-such.” Reading that was like hearing nails on a chalkboard. Immediately, a friend of his, who I don’t know, commented to “back J up on this,” because he’d just spent the night babysitting his own kids. So, y’know, he’d been through the wringer (yet his logic remained intact, clearly). I told them they had no right to complain when their wives won full custody in their divorces – since they’re only the babysitters. Well the friend didn’t like that! He scolded me for ruining their Facebook fun and invited me to kiss his ass. Dad of the year.
This is what I hear when a man calls himself a “babysitter” to his own kids: “Their mother is the one who should be watching them.”
I assume it’s anxious masculinity that drives men to diminish their own roles as fathers. Maybe they’re unhappy they have childcare responsibilities at all, and “babysitting” prevents them from being further feminized by the role. I also have little tolerance for women who refer to their husbands or baby-daddies as “babysitters.” Shameful. Stop perpetuating the notion that fathers caring for children is a hilarious novelty act.
Love the “who drives dad home” cap.
And this drives me crazy too. Why not say “Dad is taking care of the kids” instead of “babysitting?” I was really impressed after spending the weekend with my SIL and her hubby and their toddler. They do a great job as co-parents sharing responsibility and I hope to emulate them when I’m a parent.
Another similar thing that drives me nuts: when SAHM friends of mine have Facebook statuses about how their hubby has “given” them money to go do something. As if he’s the dad handing out an allowance. This always provokes me to yell in my husband’s general direction (even though he’s like, uh, hun, I’m in total agreement here…) “EVEN IF I’M NOT WORKING IT’S OUR MONEY AND I DON’T NEED TO ASK YOU FOR IT AND YOU’RE NOT ‘GIVING’ IT TO ME WHEN I SPEND IT, OK????!!!!”
This is also a HUGE pet peeve of mine.
A few years back a grad student in my program, who liked to refer to himself as a feminist, declared that he hadn’t gotten much writing done that week because he was “babysitting” his kids while his wife was taking an evening class. Not only was it infuriating to hear him say he was babysitting his own kids, but it was infuriating to hear him talking about how his wife taking a few hours a week for herself was impeding his academic progress!
I also hate it when guys get credit for this– like hearing people say “awwww he’s such a sweet guy taking care of his kids.” WTF? Do they say that when a woman takes care of her kids?
I don’t believe my father ever referred to it as BABYSITTING us. When Mom was in Chicago for weeks on end while my grandmother had cancer treatment, he wasn’t babysitting us. No one referred to it that way. He was taking care of us (and depending upon the kindness of neighbors bearing casseroles to keep us from eating frozen pizza and Entire Meal On The Grill every night). When Mom had parent-teacher conferences? Same thing.
Babysitters were the high school students they hired when they went out for date night.
My former advisor’s wife is my facebook friend. (Don’t. Ask. No, I cannot defriend her despite the reminder of my past terribleness.) She wrote a note recently about how much she hates taking 3 children under the age of 5 to the grocery store that included this line: “Some people may be wondering why not leave all three with daddy and go? Ha ha ha.” Instead, she either takes all 3 to the grocery store and hopes for the best or sneaks out after they are asleep.
THE MAN IS A DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR. Like, he has a PhD in HOW KIDS WORK, and he cannot care for his own children for an hour without all hell breaking lose, AND he is a dick when she asks to the degree that she has actually emailed me before to see if he is lying about having other things to do instead. And he *wanted* kids. (Okay, so many of you know from my experiences that he doesn’t know how *people* work, but still, theoretically, this woman should be able to leave her kids with her husband who has a degree in kids.)
Thus, I was raging about this crap just yesterday. Seriously, you chose to put half your DNA in there, you should do half of the resulting work. WTF.
I have 2 guys who have offered to be future stay-at-home dads for me… men who want to be more than just your regular father, but even the primary caregivers! I’m going to try to focus on these friends so that I don’t get too stabby.
I have a lot of rage… I try to aim it at the patriarchy these days to make it more productive….
@Funnyface: This is why I will never give up working, even when I have kids. I must haz paycheck with my name on it!
One of my best friends’ husbands put up a status update that said “John Doe is playing Mr. Mom” when he was taking care of their daughter for 2 weeks while she was out of town on business. I came THISCLOSE to saying “Dude, that’s called playing Dad.”
See, my mother was relatively untouched by feminism and remains so, and yet I still just can’t picture this sort of thing actually happening in my parents’ marriage.
I feel like we’ve gone backwards somehow, like women go out of their way to be “good” housewives and men go out of their way to be boorish in order to show they aren’t PC or some such tripe.
Oh man, sarahmc, I am SO with you. Don’t really have anything else to contribute besides, MY GOD YES.
Jesus Christ. I don’t (think I) know anyone like this thank god but I am sure they are all around, lurking, impregnating women and then being annoyed by the presence of their own offspring. Can you imagine how fucking cheated and angry you would feel if this turned out to be YOUR babydaddy? This is why if I can afford it, I am totally outsourcing child care (while we are at work anyway). If the dad has a problem with that he can decide to stay home.
I don’t want to make this all about the Menz, but it can be pretty offensive to dads too. My husband and I have an absolute rule that on Saturday I get time to myself and on Sunday he gets time to himself.
There’s a woman who, every week stops him at the coffee shop to tell him how nice it is that he’s babysitting so I can sleep in. Lady, he’s not babysitting. He’s parenting. It’s this thing that parents do. I’m not paying him $4 an hour, and he plans on doing this for, you know, the rest of his life.
There’s a stay at home dad down the street, and people are so patronizing about his providing childcare – like it’s cute that he tries. And people act like his wife is crazy to trust him.
Yeah, P.Soul, the backlash didn’t end after Faludi’s book. It never ends, I’m afraid. I try to be hopeful that the reason it continues is because the march to gender equalityis advancing, but criminy, it’s taking a long-ass time.
This annoys the hell out of me too. I didn’t even realize that I was saying it myself and perpetuating it, actually! And when I kind of woke up and realized that my kids’ father sort of picked up on it and was using it to his advantage (can you tell we’re divorced now) then I felt really stupid. So my point is, that the mothers need to be aware of how they treat childrearing and the fathers’ role, because some men will take it and and run with that shit. They were never truly given the responsibility and chance to make mistakes and learn from them, so now they play utterly clueless. But i want to make clear I am not blaming the mothers!!
This was just my experience.
Oh, and sorry about the smiley. I just realilzed I have never seen one on this site!
@Avogadro: I think you’re right on the money. This is a feminist issue that shows how patriarchy hurts men too. The idea that men can’t be a parent stems all the way back to the Victorian Era, and perhaps beyond. I feel for the stay-at-home dad you mentioned since it seems no one will ever take him seriously.
If I have kids I’m going to refer to myself as the babysitter when I’m alone with them. Then I’ll demand a “Best Mom in the World” award for “allowing” my husband to leave the house once in a while. See how that blows people’s minds.
See, this is why I was actually RELIEVED to have my life evolve into single motherhood.
is it so hard to say “watching the kids”???? ARGH!!!
I am also really peeved by men who say “we’re pregnant” no buddy, you are not experiencing pregnancy. No one is kicking you from the inside or pinching off your nerves, etc. Not that I’m discouraging being involved, yay for being that inclusive, but say “we’re going to have a baby” as when it’s all over you will have the baby sitting in front of you.
@Avogadro – I’m totally with you. My husband stays home to take care of our son while I go to work. He takes him out all the time, and he often gets asked, even though he’s got the diaper bag, stroller and is playing with our son, “Is he yours?” with puzzled looks. Which we both find very odd. No one would ever ask *me* if our son were mine. And yet, it’s seen as so strange for a dad to be taking care of his child, that it must be some other arrangement. I just don’t get it. And especially with the social and economic upheaval going on (though it started even before then) there are many, many more SAHDs out there than ever before. Why can’t the world get used to it? Even other fathers are unsettled by it.
@AuntieEm: Heh, SarahMC and I were talking about that yesterday. I’m going to do a pet peeve post on it. It took me a couple years to break my beloved brother in law of the habit of saying “we’re pregnant.”
@elibard: Your husband is an awesome dad. And so nice for him to do all that “babysitting!” Sheesh.
As a guy who is working from home and caring for his sick kid while his wife is at work, I couldn’t agree more with the general sentiment expressed on this string. I’m not “babysitting” or doing anything extraordinary by rearranging my day to take care of my child, I’m pulling my weight.
The only two times someone has referred to my husband as “babysitting” his own daughter I have smacked them down so hard it nearly ruined the relationship (once a former co-worker, once my uncle).
We both fucking hate it when fuckwits say shit like that- not only does it confine me to the home every minute my child needs adult supervision, but it undermines any expectation of caring and love that adult men have to their kids and family- like, maybe he has kids coz he likes kids and wasn’t tricked by some harpy into looking after them once a week.
@SarahMC re: Mom as the babysitter- you totally SHOULD do that. The ensuing mind-blown-ness would be hilarious.
My brother does this. It drives me insane. He also acts as though he hates his children, because whenever his wife is busy and he has the girls, he brings them to grandma’s house so she can watch them. Grrrrrrr!
I also have no idea how this happened, since my other brother is completely opposite. He and his wife are very equitable in childcare duties. They were almost neurotic about keeping the diaper-changing equal, while the “babysitting” brother has probably never touched a diaper in his life. (Don’t get me started on the time when, shortly after the birth of his first daughter, commanded me to change her diaper because I’m a “woman who will have to do this someday.” Um, yeah.
The problem you identify is real; the way it was approached was counterproductive in its shocking rudeness.
Speaking as someone who studies communication and culture for a living, it is possible to lead people to question their actions. Verbal attacks are typically not a good way to do it.
Then again, your response to your coworker (and subsequent description of his behavior as a “pet peeve”) suggest that your action had more to do with what YOU wanted than with trying to actually effect any change in the world. If that was the only goal, then fine. Personally, though, my feminist agenda has more to do with changing minds than raging against patriarchy.
[...] have started to refer to said joy by using the phrase “we’re pregnant.” Commenter AuntieEm brought this up in a post yesterday and coincidentally, SarahMC and I had been ranting privately about it. So [...]
Last time I checked, neither was being a patronising arsewipe.
Another spot on post. The unhusband changes diaper for diaper with me and would be insulted to be called the babysitter. The problem is that we have been socialized to understand child rearing as a womans job thus allowing men to abdicate a lot of the responsibility that comes with parenting. When they willfully chose to disengage society always finds a way to blame the woman. You hear things like well you should have known what he was like before you had his child. We tell women to be responsible in their reproduction decisions and yet never think twice about the men that don’t want to actively engage. Fatherhood is understood as being a provider and not a nurturer and I believe that to be the crux of the problem.
Actually, I hear women use the term “babysitting” with reference to their children’s father more than I hear men use the term.
Quite often, I also hear women complaining that they can’t trust their spouses to properly dress their children, properly feed their children, properly bathe their children, properly check their children’s homework, properly do the laundry, take their children to medical appointments, and/or clean the house, etc. And I think that’s part of why these women refer to their husbands’ caring for their children as babysitting.
This leads me to believe that feminism needs to focus more effort on advocating education and empowerment of women in the area of choosing better mates. Because I don’t understand why anyone would procreate with someone who is obviously so incompetent in so many areas of life.
@Emma: I’m not so sure it’s just that women are choosing bad/incompetent mates, I think there’s also a bit of willful ignorance on the man’s part that maybe they don’t want to overcome and their partners don’t want to help them overcome. I also know a lot of women–some of them in my own family–who persist in saying “well, he can’t do it” and when asked “well, why not? can’t he learn?” just say “he’d only fuck it up, it’s my job, not his job!” Now, if their husband said something like that to them about, say, the household finances, they’d rip his head off. But childcare is the one area where society always teaches that mama knows best, so it can be a control issue for women who get into power struggles with their husbands.
I don’t know that it’s just about “choosing better mates,” (although yes, ideally, every woman would find a proper partner and now we’re talking about giving women the tools to say no to sex, to control their fertility, to feel their worth isn’t tied to having a man, etc.), but since child-rearing is one area where women are allowed a lot of power, some are loath to surrender any, whether because they feel that they really DO know it all (or should), or that they at least have to appear to be the “boss” of their husbands when it comes to the kiddos.
It just makes me think of that Oscar Wilde quote: “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
@PhDork: Jinx! Great minds think alike.
Historically, society may have taught that “mother knows best” when it comes to childcare, but the tide has been turning on this for quite a while as more and more women/mothers have been entering the workforce. By this point in time, I would think that couples should be much more advanced in equal parenting, which would cause society in general to acknowledge the change.
And a relationship fraught with control issues and power struggles doesn’t sound like a very healthy relationship, especially when there are children watching/learning from the sidelines.
@Emma: “A relationship fraught with control issues and power struggles doesn’t sound like a very healthy relationship, especially when there are children watching/learning from the sidelines.”
Right you are, and yet, I know very few adult relationships that don’t contain at least some control issues and power struggles. Even generally happy, healthy couples have their moments. And a LOT of couples are not happy or healthy and yes, their struggles for dominance totally fuck up their kids.
Emma, you also have to remember that whether or not women have–or even want–the power to make choices for their children and families, women are far more frequently held responsible when it comes to such matters (by other women, by men, by most people). The last time I was at the theatre, I heard a older woman two rows in front of me rip into a couple of college-age girls during the interval about their behavior. I hadn’t noticed anything during the performance, but she went on and on about how ill-behaved and inconsiderate they were, and just before she flapped out of there, she spat “NO POINTS FOR YOUR MOTHERS!”
It doesn’t surprise me that women want to exert control over family matters. If they’re going to get blamed for any and every fucking thing their kids do/say/seem, they might as well actually be responsible for some of it.
@PhDork: Perhaps. But if women aren’t going to partner with men they can trust to be an equal partners in raising their children, it gets a little old hearing them refer to their husbands as “babysitters” and complaining about how they have to do absolutely everything around the house and with regard to the kids.
I nstead of blaming the men for being lazy schlubs (because, chances are, they didn’t magically become lazy schlubs immediately upon the birth of their first child), we should encourage women to choose partners that are more suited to what is desired in a spouse/father of their child(ren). In other words, we need to teach young women to stop “settling.”
My brother and I used to ask my mother when she would get ready to go out in the evening to her classes if Daddy was babysitting. It drove her nuts. (perhaps we were also trying to get a rise out of her, though I don’t remember it that way). She always said no, Daddy is not babysitting, he’s your Daddy. I think for us it came from the fact that they did disproportionately care for us, though I never ever felt that my Dad devalued us or didn’t care about us. He did choose other chores over taking care of us when we were small (much less so as we got into the 8 year old + range). He did the grocery shopping, laundry, and weekend cooking, and my mom spent more time with us.
I haven’t heard anyone use this terminology in ages (about 20 years). When I was a little kid my dad would pointedly correct people who asked “oh, are you babysitting?” with “No, I’m parenting.” But I’m surprised to hear that anybody says that anymore.
That said, I don’t see that it’s helpful to suggest to your co-worker via Facebook message that his wife will _divorce_ him for using that terminology.
Jessica, I did not suggest that to my co-worker. I merely told him, “Dude, you don’t babysit your own kids,” and when his buddy got indignant I made a joke about the potential divorce in his future. We’re friends at work; it was not a comment made in seriousness.
I just wanted to add that it is not only the men. I’ve often heard women say “My husband’s babysitting tonight” as if their husbands are 14 year old girls.
As you can see, PepsiCoke, I call women out too.
[...] From The Pursuit of Harpyness, Pet Peeve: Dads Who “Babysit” Their Kids. [...]
ditto ditto ditto! this is a peeve of mine as well and whenever a man says he’s babysitting his kids i launch into the “it’s not called babysitting when…” speech. i actually did this to our rabbi in synagogue when he said he was babysitting the kids so his wife could go somewhere. can one be too snarky?
My father parented me and my husband parents our kids. Neither parent the same way their wives do. This is what I think is the real struggle. I had to restrain myself with my first child at my mothers advice. He won’t dress the kids the way I dress them. He won’t change diapers to avoid rashes until he learns that it makes a difference. He won’t interact the same way. He’s not me. And that’s why he’s the Daddy. My kid’s get to experience a different style that I don’t always agree with. I think not enough women have enough restraint to let go and let the father be a father.
[...] don’t “babysit” their own kids, nor should they ever, ever be referred to as “Mr. Mom.” Are these [...]
[...] 2009 in Uncategorized There have been a lot of articles written (here and here for example, or here from the lovely Harpies) about how fathers are celebrated for parenting in a way mothers never are. [...]
[...] pain of childbirth, etc. Calling it “taking one for the team” is about as ridiculous as men who use the term “babysitting” to refer to taking care of their own children. It’s your job, dude. You don’t get a [...]