Millennial parents are experiencing something mothers have known for a long time | Gaby Henslev
CMen really have it all? Obviously a silly question. A loaded assumption that women have spent years climbing out from under. Moms have worked long and hard to dispel the myth that anyone should be able to juggle a job, kids, a happy relationship, and a meaningful life on their own without breaking a sweat or (more importantly) needing help.
And to some extent we have succeeded, according to a survey of 5,000 British parents published this week by the charity Working Families, which found Three-quarters now say so They really want to share the burden of parenting equally with their partners. However, it seems that the outside world has not caught up yet.
One in five men said that when they requested time off from work for family reasons, they were asked about the whereabouts of their wife or partner. Translation:Isn’t that? Ha job? And perhaps in a hushed voice: If this isn’t her job in your house, what kind of man does this make you? Most of the other hurdles mentioned by the men — like being challenged about whether a family crisis is really urgent, or worrying that their boss won’t belittle them when they ask — would be fairly familiar to most working mothers. But I’ve never been asked why I can’t make my husband do everything, in a way that suggests there must be something wrong with me if that’s not the case.
The battles of working fathers are the same and also subtly different from those of working mothers, and therein lies the faint air of suspicion lingering between two camps fighting essentially the same war. (The lazy assumption that mothers are the default parents, who only have to put down the tools if the child is sick or in school, is toxic for both genders because it undermines women’s careers and also men’s attempts to be good fathers.) However, it can be difficult to see similarities at work when you’re fighting each other at home, competing over who’s more tired, or who gets to play softball. Where were you when we were doing the heavy lifting?, women think grimly to themselves, when they hear a certain type of man talk out loud about how proud he is to be truly there for the kids. Oh now MEN ARE INTERESTED IN FLEXIBLE WORKING: Now that the pandemic has completely normalized working from home more or less acceptable, it’s just a matter of actually using the legal rights that women fought for like tigers? When some new male Labor MPs began campaigning hard for better paid parental leave and being vocal about taking it themselves, they did not always endear themselves to female colleagues who had been on those barricades for years, even though fathers stepping up were always the last piece of the equality puzzle.
But someone has to show men that it can be done. The lesson from the introduction of shared parental leave – which means couples can theoretically split up to 50 weeks of leave between them in their child’s first year – is that many parents are uncomfortable with the new rights afforded to them because they still feel pressure to be the main breadwinner. The government has already pledged to review parental leave more widely, this summer at the cross-party Equalities Committee in the House of Commons. Argued in the report And that paid paternity leave should be a priority (currently many men are stuck with the legal minimum, frozen at less than half the national living wage). But even this will only change the rules of the game if men feel they can accept it without being punished.
One solution presented at the Parenting Equality conference this week in London, where the Working Families research was discussed, was a campaign for men to “Parent Loudly” by taking their full vacations and openly putting nursery supplies on their desk calendars, rather than pretending to leave early for a vaguely important meeting. If nothing else, this might open up a conversation about the pressures that some men seem to hide.
It seems that parents are not necessarily well. An in-depth survey of British men’s attitudes towards masculinity Published this week YouGov paints an encouraging picture in many respects, suggesting that – contrary to popular belief – young people are not all angry at misogynists who have been radicalized online. (Only 13% of Gen Z now hold a positive view of the notorious influencer Andrew Tate, although that’s arguably 13% too many.) But it does point to a surprising streak of bitterness in millennial men, a group now in their 30s and 40s, likely in their teeny-boob years. They are the age group most likely now to say that women live in society easier than men, or that the gains made by women in recent decades have been at the expense of men. Although these are still minority views, held by less than a quarter of millennials, YouGov finds widespread belief across generations that life was better for men 25 years ago.
Maybe these are just the voices of people left behind emotionally, scarred by years of dating app rejection. (Millennials were also the age group most likely to say women are only interested in high-status men.) But could it be that at least some of them are men stuck between partners who are angry because they’re not doing their best – which some of them still frankly aren’t, judging by the statistics that show men still aren’t. Spend only two-thirds of the time Women spend on unpaid childcare – and fear of professional failure?
To be sure, the Working Families Survey indicates that many young parents are feeling torn, to an extent their parents may not have felt. They worry about missing major milestones in their children’s lives, but they also worry about being a burden on their colleagues if they take time off. A third did not take as much parental leave as they would have liked, and nearly two-thirds regularly felt judged at work for putting family commitments first. Nearly eight in 10 believe the resulting stress puts pressure on them, their partners or their children’s well-being.
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And yes, of course, it’s nothing working moms haven’t dealt with for decades: in that sense, welcome to the club. But specifically because We know what it was like – how angry, exhausted, guilty and resentful it sometimes felt – for women to be able to feel solidarity. That’s the thing about having kids: After that, you’re really in the trenches together.