How do I start?

Thinking about raising a child who goes into adolescence and adulthood with good social awareness, it’s difficult to map that idea to the early time in that child’s life, before we’re able to have these conversations with words. Ideas like social justice and gender equality don’t seem relevant when the baby’s world consists of eating, sleeping, and diaper changes. Still, it’s important for me to start trying to foster these ideals as early as possible so he has consistent exposure to them through his childhood. The way I believe I can do this with a newborn is through modeling the behavior I’d expect from a good man.

The most visible way to do this in a child’s life is by breaking rigid gender roles in housework. Many men enter marriage expecting their new wife to do all the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry while they themselves are responsible for cutting the grass and maybe taking out the trash. Reasons for that vary from somewhat innocent (but still unacceptable) “I don’t know how to do all that stuff” all the way up to the ridiculous notion that it’s “women’s work” and it’s beneath men to engage in it. Whatever the reason, the practice of the wife doing all the housework is deeply entrenched in many heterosexual households by the time there are children in the home. With that pattern firmly established, those kids see their mom making dinner, their mom doing the laundry, their mom cleaning the bathroom, their mom doing the grocery shopping, and their dad...maybe cutting the grass and taking out the trash sometimes. Kids mimic the environment they see as normal, so if they grow up only seeing women doing housework they’re probably going to believe only women should be doing housework.

If I want my son to grow up recognizing that household work is the responsibility of everyone in the household, he needs to see an equitable division of labor in our own home. Growing up my mom was a stay at home mom (another situation men exploit to get out of housework) and she did the grocery shopping and cooking and many other things. She did not wash dishes or do laundry – those were my dad’s responsibility. Growing up and seeing that as normal, I was baffled by the realization that there were men who didn’t know how to do laundry. One roommate I had in college attempted to do his laundry once, couldn’t figure out the dryer, and had to send his clothes out to a laundry service after they sat molding in the corner of our room. That was illustrative to say the least.

In our house pre-baby, I do more of the cooking (although we often cook together) and all of the dishes (because my wife’s dry skin is awful if she’s dealing with hot water regularly). Laundry is also split with slightly more in my direction because I do a lot of it while watching sports on weekends. I don’t mention these things to get a pat on the back. The bar for husbands is already so low, it’s pathetic. We don’t need to be celebrating men who do the bare minimum to contribute to a functioning household. It’s important to mention these things because what I’m already doing will contribute to my child’s awareness of how household labor should work. These are not tasks that only Mom does. Cleaning tasks are split between the members of the family and he will eventually be included in that split. Household work has no gender, and I want to make sure my son sees that growing up.

One stubborn variant of this problem is the idea that a man is helping his wife when he does housework. Referring to this as helping her out or giving her a break firmly plants housework as her responsibility and suggests he’s doing something nice for her by contributing. Indulging in this framing means that even in households that have a reasonable split, domestic labor is seen solely as the woman’s responsibility. Reducing a man’s contribution to his own home to merely helping the person who’s really in charge minimizes his autonomy and responsibility and puts more pressure on his partner. She’s still expected to have everything perfect even though some of the tasks aren’t her job. Men are capable and pretending otherwise just makes it easier for some to get out of doing their fair share. This is work they would have to do for themselves if they lived alone, so it’s unreasonable to frame it as helping out their partner if they do.

I’ve seen a few people on social media talking about this specific problem who say they don’t thank their husbands for doing housework. They view thanking him for doing dishes or cleaning a bathroom as an acknowledgment that he’s doing something for her, like saying “thank you for cleaning the bathroom so I don’t have to.” From that viewpoint, expressing thanks is unnecessary because he’s expected to do this housework, so he shouldn’t be praised for doing what’s expected of him. We view this differently – we thank each other for doing housework all the time. I’ll thank my wife for cleaning the bathroom or she’ll thank me for washing the dishes even though these are our normal responsibilities. In our house, “thank you for cleaning the bathroom” means “thank you for working to keep our home running.” We can recognize and appreciate the effort going in even though that effort is an expected contribution to our home.

I thought it would be difficult to figure out how to approach these topics in the newborn stage, so it was a relief when I realized what I do now can be a good baseline. If I want my son to see the importance of men and women sharing domestic labor, he needs to see us sharing that work. This will, in some ways, be some of the easiest teaching I can do as a parent because I’m not trying to change my habits or develop a new routine from scratch. The things I’m already doing will model what I think is right from the very beginning.