by Abby W. Schachter
Source: shine.yahoo.com
Over at Slate, Melinda Wenner Moyer has written a stinging rebuke to parents who are reluctant to have men care for their young children.
Her column, “In Defense of the Manny,” recounts how “many parents are uncomfortable, or at least much less comfortable, hiring men for child care positions, even if they have the same experience and qualifications.” Following up on this assessment, Moyer asks why this should be the case. “But is this cultural uneasiness fair? Is it based in fact, or is it the product of fear (of molestation, of male ineptitude)? Is it sexism?”
There’s no challenge in listing the possible reasons for this bias against male childcare professionals, right? Moyer includes suspicions of sexual abuse among male daycare workers, along with misunderstanding why any man would want to take care of small children for their “day job” as well as the prejudice against men’s ability to care for their own children let alone anyone else’s.
As the mother of three small girls, I can certainly attest to the fact that Moyer is quite right about this last explanation. In my experience, responses to tales of my husband actually caring for all three girls at once by himself, even for short periods of time, are usually met with stunned silence, then mouths falling open and finally a burst of “What?” and “Really?”
Suspicions that sexual predators are in the habit of finding employment at daycare centers are overblown, Moyer correctly notes. Though she underestimates the terrible costs that still infect our culture when it comes to the legacy of the epidemic of false claims against male (and female) daycare workers from the 1980s and 1990s. See the heroic work of the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz on the subject to gain some understanding of what tyranny has been wrought.
Moyer’s conclusion is basically that everyone should get over it:
The best thing we can do as parents is to stay open-minded about whom we hire and also be thorough in our background checks of all potential child care candidates. For my part, I know I can’t control what my son thinks, but I can change what he sees, and I want him to see a world in which, yes, women and men can both hold high-paying executive jobs. But they can both teach preschool and babysit him, too.
Here, I have to disagree with her too-simplistic, sun-shiny solution.
We would be doing a much better job as parents if we worked toward changing our current fairly prevalent anti-father prejudices. Moyer admits this prejudice when she complains that “My son is about three times more likely to come home from the playground with a bloody nose if he goes with my husband than with me.” (She grudgingly adds the fact that how Dad interacts with the kids may in fact help them with very important life skills like independence and resilience.)
Overall, the perception is that Daddy isn’t as careful with little Johnny as Mama. There are too-many-to-count pop culture examples of critiquing the way dads do things, even from the dads themselves. Two small examples are: 1) Mo Willems’s series of “Knuffle Bunny” books where, in the first installment, the dad misses the reason for his daughter’s distress when it only takes a second for mom to realize the favored stuffed animal has disappeared; and 2) the commercial for laundry detergent featuring a couple folding their triplets’ clothes. At the close of the ad, the wife declares, “You suck at folding.” These are just two random examples of a trend regarding fathers. We know they are so important to our children’s development but we denigrate their way of parenting and housekeeping skills by judging their skills to be deficient as opposed to mom’s.
Moyer wants to live in a world where equality–men and women performing the same tasks, having the same jobs–means sameness. But it doesn’t mean that, it means equality. We should embrace the notion that men and women will parent differently (including housekeeping). And that’s as it should be.
Abby W. Schachter is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and blogger. Follow her on twitter.com/abbyschachter
