Someone Has Been Reading My Journal
Someone has been reading my journal, taking notes and sending them to Emily Bloch. How else would she be able to describe my and my husband’s parenting styles so accurately in her article The Daddy Way: Celebrate Parenting Differences?
Her main idea is that fathers tend to parent differently than mothers and that isn’t a bad thing. She says Fathers tend to:
Let kids take more risks
Trust himself more than the experts
Ignore the details
Act like a kid
Wait before intervening
Not make a big deal over every battle
Bloch describes the differences, what may be the source and how to deal with them.
I’m a little suspicious of generalizations about gender. So much has changed in just a few generations about what is expected and possible, that generalizations hold up less and less. They can also be limiting and harmful as men and women explore new ways of doing things.
Well, that is a grand opinion to have when almost all of the generalizations in the article so accurately described my personal experience that I changed my journal password, just in case.
It is an odd paradox really. Bloch is questioning the traditional gender-based roles (i.e., the Mom is the primary caregiver for the children) by defining new gender-based roles (i.e., there is a male-specific style of parenting). Wouldn’t it be better to just both be parents and not worry about how the Mom and the Dad are supposed to act differently? Which is more true - that there are inherent gender differences that should be explored and understood or that we shouldn’t pay so much attention to gender?
What do ya’ll think? Also, stay tuned for a related idea, my Equal Rights for Dads post is coming soon. Now I’m going to go double check my wireless network security…
I wonder how much of the different parenting styles simply relates to 2-person dynamics. Just as there can be a good-cop bad-cop, if one parent handles the details, the other might subconsciously takes a big picture view to balance things out.
Since fewer dads than moms stay at home, the supposed gender-difference may just be a reflection of which gender is most often the child’s primary caregiver. A parent who stays home with the child may view some aspects of parenthood as being part of their job, leaving the other parent alittle more tentative about intervening.
The parent coming home hasn’t been with the kids all day, and the parent at home is looking for a break - which parent is more likely to act like a kid & let little things slide?
Growing up, my mother would make the rules but my dad never seemed to know the rules or the reasons for them. Was this because my father forgot the rules or because he was at work all day when the rules were being made and my mother didn’t think to pass them on?
I would argue that gender can indirectly affect your parenting style because society has different expectations for mothers than for fathers, but that parenting styles are not determined by the roles of “mother” and “father”.