Men can stay at home too

The internet is an interesting place. I find you can find out what people actually think when you look through the comments. It’s the main reason I’m starting to hate digg, but that’s a post for another day. Anyway, I recently came across a poll asking “Is being a stay-at-home dad manly?” Here is my response to come of the comments being made:

As long as he’s not being lazy: Anyone who thinks there is anything lazy about staying at home with the kids is crazy! It is a lot of work to take care of a child. I was on maternity leave for only six weeks, and I was glad to return to work because I needed a break from taking care of the baby.

Gender roles have been there for thousands of years are there for a reason: This was true. The thing you have to remember is our culture moves quickly and the rules change. There was a time when it made sense for the woman to stay at home with the children. She has to recover from giving birth, she had to breastfeed the child, and men made more money. But with the advent of bottles, formula, breast pumps, maternity leave, and the ability at earn as much as a man, there really is no reason for these gender roles to be so rigid.

Men have ambition and need to work outside of the home to fulfill that ambition: This is all fine and well except it implies that women do not share this same ambition. More and more, we are seeing women rise to the top of their field- in all areas. There are now more women in college than men. It’s about time that we ask men to make the same sacrifices that women have been expected to make for years.

Women are more nurturing: This is probably the best argument, but it still has some problems. First, it depends on what you consider nurturing to be. As another commenter points out, perhaps “turning our kids into germaphobes,” and “making play dates” isn’t the best definition of nurturing. From what I can tell, the only thing that would make women (as a whole) more “nurturing” is that they are more adept at language (both verbal and non-verbal) and more empathetic (probably due to being able to read people better). But does this really equate to being more nurturing? If you have a child that is constantly getting into trouble, isn’t better to discipline the child (typically a dad behavior) than to emphasize with the child? The other problem with this argument is that it speaks of women as a whole not individually, so it will undoubtedly fail in certain situations. Case in point: Britney Spears.

The vast majority of women could not respect their man if he stayed home making domestic daddy while she hacked it through the corporate world: Perhaps this is true for the older generation, but from what I’ve seen from the younger generation (including myself) this does not prove true. It seems to be about even.
and the only women who prefer this situation are control freaks who want agreeable beta males that defer to their power: actually giving up ultimate power over how the children (the most important thing in most mom’s lives) are raised seems the exact opposite of control-freak.