Has Fatherhood Really Evolved?

Article by Cameron Phillips
Bettermen Solutions

I am fortunate enough to know a wonderful man and fellow “dadvocate” named Brian Reid. Brian was an at home dad living in the US who started a blog called rebeldad.com.  He built the site to be a resource center and place of community for at home dads, since the world of parenting was (and still is) 99.99% geared towards mothers.

Brian has had an ongoing saga with Pampers (owners of said brand.) The source of his ire was that, even though Brian was the one to register for Pampers’ on-line rewards program, every email he ever received as a result was like this one.

“Hello BRIAN
Happy Mothers Day!
Thanks, Mom for all that you do.
On this special day, check out the tribute that Pampers has for you! Come join us and other moms on Facebook and YouTube, and take a moment to share what you love best about being a mother.”

Over the years, he sent Pampers letter after letter informing them that he was, in fact, not a mom but a part of a burgeoning trend of at home (by choice) dads.  He never heard back.  Then one day in the mail he got this: click here

Go ahead and click on it. Take a look at it. I’ll wait.

Now, if you didn’t notice, while mom is lovingly attending to her two darlings, dad is blurry in the background, ASLEEP ON THE COUCH!!!

This sent Brian into spasms of anger and got him to launch a boycott of Pampers. His boycott was partly a joke (especially since his kids had been out of diapers for years) but he wanted to make a point.  Many men and women (me included) joined in.  It grew enough

to the point that the New York Times ran a story on the boycott.  A few short months later, there was Super Bowl MVP Drew Breese hawking diapers for Pampers. 

The story is an amusing one, but it is also maddening.  I am the first to acknowledge that we still largely live in a man’s world, but when it comes to parenting, fathers are still seen as second class.  There are still not so subtle messages that let young boys and later men know that parenting is still the “natural” domain of women: from the mom-only baby showers, to pressures in the workplace, to pop culture representations of fathers as being incompetent at child rearing simply on the basis of their gender.

In short, dads today are in a unique place in our evolution as a species.  Intellectually, we have moved beyond the 50s model of what a father should be.  Men crave more involvement and interaction with their children.  There is still immense pressure, however (both internal and external) for a man to judge himself by how much money he can provide for his family.  This is the flipside of the still very real pressure a woman can feel to judge herself, first and foremost, by how good a mother she is.  Sure dad would like to be at the piano recital or the parent teacher night.  But if his colleague is pulling sixty hours a week and there is a promotion coming up, you can be damn sure he will feel he is failing his family if he loses out on that promotion.

This might sound a bit Cro-Magnon, but I’ve interviewed many a father who tells me it still haunts them.  To say “suck it up” only adds to the problem by shaming men that their feelings, if they dare to utter them, are invalid and unmanly. 

Most of the dads I know are caring, loving, and wanting desperately to be a huge part of the lives of their kids.  These attempts at full co-parenting, however, can be easily thwarted by workplace culture, peer pressure, or even inadvertently, by new mothers.  The end result can be the all too familiar swamped mother and workaholic father, who suddenly wake up wondering how they’ve fallen prisoner to traditional gender roles.

Cameron Phillips is a former CBC Radio host, a proud “dadvocate” and founder of Bettermen Solutions—a company dedicated to helping companies improve retention and recruitment by addressing the unique challenges of working fathers.  Cameron will be teaching a class called “A Dad on Dads: What Men are Thinking when You’re Pregnant" in April for the Pregnant in the City seminar at Babymoon Parenting.