Thread by @daniellamyoung

Happy Father’s Day to all the wonderful humans out there working hard to be equal parents.
Today, I’ll tell you about how I had to train my husband to be a parent, because society never did.
Welcome to Coffee and Culture, a 🧵

I met my husband in Afghanistan, (I know, I know, war is not a time for ‘Deployment Boos’, we were told), and we were immediately a great team from the start—which was good, because we went through the ringer to have our relationship.

From the moment he met me, he used group language like ‘we’ and talked about the future—he had none of those hangups, so common amongst today’s men, that we call fear of commitment.

Most importantly, he had no issue with me being an equal, something still hard to find on the dating marked—he had no choice, in the Army I outranked him (Captain/Warrant thing, not anything actually bad).

Before we married, we had many conversations about equality, especially as I was leaving the Army and he was staying. I had to make sure he knew we were equal, no matter who was bringing in the money. He agreed.

He wanted a kid, as did I. He even wanted a little girl (which for some inconceivable reason, society still thinks is weird for men), and we had a lovely one.

That was the moment when, no matter how hard he tried, things stopped being equal. That was the time when socialization and programming took over hard—for both of us.

Granted, I was raised in a religious cult (yes, for real, see pinned tweet), where I was taught nothing but to grow up to please men—my body should be a vessel for their desires, their babies, and to work to make them comfortable and please them.

I rejected that world at fifteen, and had been working hard ever since to unculture and reprogram myself. I was determined not to slide backwards.

That was hard to do, because while I’m completely aware that I grew up brainwashed and programmed, I’ve come to see how everyone else around me has too—y’all are just so much less likely to realize it.

We are all a product of our environment—whether we agreed with the programming or not—and the way we act, the choices we make, and so many things we blame on ‘nature’ just come down to our programming.

The truth is, women in modern American society are taught how to parent, while men are not. Then, when parenting happens, women step up while men generally fade back. When it's a baby falling through the cracks, we can't let it happen, so we step up and grab it, we just do.

To everyone involved, it seems natural—it happens almost gradually—until the woman finds she is drowning and the well-meaning man doesn’t quite know how to help.

In our case, this gender roles effect was extra exaggerated because he was a special operations helicopter pilot, gone a few months at a time for over half the year, every year, for the first four years of our child's life.

No matter how much he wanted to be an involved parent, the fact was, when he was gone, I had to do it all. When he was home, it was easier and ‘natural’ for both of us, that I just kept filling in the gaps.

I was overwhelmed all the time, constantly frustrated that I’d seemingly lost the equal partner that I had married, but I wasn’t sure how it had happened. Girlfriends, even now, ask me all the time, "how was it so equal before the baby, and so deeply unequal now?"

As I began to study group behavior, societal patterns, and the way we are all cultured to believe and behave in certain ways, I began to understand.

I’d been taught to parent, or expected, culturally, to just figure it out on the fly—the way mom’s are. I’d been programmed, like the majority of those who presented as girls as children, to care, to mother, to feed, to cook, to cuddle, while he had not.

There’s this funny thing that happens when we become parents—we are put to tests we never imagined, and our programming comes out.

In our own lives, when we are just humans, before we become parents, we have a million things to juggle, and we learn to catch the important things, and sometimes the other things fall through the cracks.

When kids come into the picture the first time, both parents are overwhelmed, both parents are brand new, both parents have no clue. But somehow, most of the time, women step forward while men step back.

Then we turn around and brief about how natural mothering comes to moms, forgetting one important things—at soon as that baby was introduced into the picture, it became something that could not be dropped, could not be allowed to fall through the cracks.

And so, when things happen, things that screw up the normal course of our lives—the kid is sick, the kid needs help for school, the kid needs to be fed, held, comforted—we know we can’t let it drop, so we step forward, of course we do.

Unfortunately, society tends to interpret this as, “women do this naturally”, or “my wife just loves being with the kids, she doesn’t care that her career has to take second.”

We tend to not see that when kids are involved, we’ve been programmed—we’ve *all* been programmed—that women step forward while men step back. This is the way it’s been in our society for so, so long, that it almost seems natural.
(more in comments)

And so, it becomes common place, it becomes expected, and we place more and more pressure on moms to meet perfect standards, while dads get away with doing far less than half, and are praised for it.

If I take my daughter to the grocery store and her hair (or mine) is a hot mess, I will get the side eye, get obviously judged, sometimes even have passive-aggressive comments said to my face—

"it sure is hard to get them to sit still for hair-brushing at this age, isn’t it?” the well-meaning checkout lady will say.

The same checkout lady will rain down praise on my husband for “daring to make a grocery store trip with that child, and look at that adorable unruly head of hair. You are such a great dad!”

And most of the time, nobody engaged in those discussions realizes the programming they are under, they are repeating. How rarely we make the connection between things like the gendered study of how we judge parenting, and things that affect us in real life—the pay gap, for one.

Of course, it’s not hard to see how, under this kind of programming, moms are required to step forward, to always go above and beyond—or be societally shamed for it, one of the strongest human motivators of behavior—while dads get ‘extra credit’ for doing the bare minimum.

Parenting is literally often referred to as ‘babysitting’ when the men do it.

Fortunately, four years into parenting, and just when I thought I might lose my mind from the unfairness of it all, we made a 180 swap. It had always been in the cards for us.

When we got married we agreed that he’d serve out his last five years, retire, and then it would be my turn. I’d tried to have a career while he was still serving, but, because of the child and our particular set of circumstances, it became nearly impossible. So, I waited nicely.

When it was finally my turn, I was horrified. Why was it still so unequal? Why did he seem to not be willing to step into the gaps, to do some of the things that had been ‘mom’s job’ before? Ideologically, he was with me. He believes in the equal dignity and intelligence of women

He believes that parenting is 50% his job. He believes that gender roles are harmful. But that didn’t mean he could just escape them at the snap of a finger.

I realized that I was going to have to teach my husband to parent, because, while society had taught me what to do, it had never programmed him.

People underestimate the power of programming, and tend to talk about what we do as ‘natural’ vs. not. But programming has so much influence over our actions, all of them, almost always in ways that we don’t notice, until we start looking.

An example: I grew up in a religious cult, remember? That meant 100% of the babies were breastfed—in the rare (& it is truly rare when you are taught what to do) case of the mom who couldn’t feed her own child, someone else stepped in.

So, I grew up programmed to breastfeed in a way that almost no other American women my age our—it just isn’t in our larger culture.

When I became a mother the first time, I already knew all about latching, sucking patterns, and how supplementing with formula can exacerbate the problem you are fighting to fix.

It’s easy to say, ‘nobody taught me this stuff, I was alone with my baby figuring it out, like most American mothers’, but in honesty, I was programmed from birth, just like all of us.

Understanding this concept and a little of how it was working on our ‘natural’ parenting, Hubs & I set about to undo the programming—starting with having very open & honest conversations about just what is all the unpaid labor that women in our society tend to just do ‘naturally’

It’s been a long process. We’ve had many starts and stops. It was great that finances and careers, me landing a national book deal in this case, forced the issue. He has had to become the primary parent, and he’s doing it with gusto.

And we’ve grown because of it, as a family. We never would have known the depths of how fractured his relationship with his daughter had become, from all the distance and absences as he went off to war, until they started spending real time together.

We never would have known that dad is a boss at packing cute and creative school lunches, while mom struggles to get the basics ready, if he hadn’t just begun doing it.

He never would have known the pride of learning a new hairstyle on Youtube and helping his five-year-old daughter figure it out, if he hadn’t been put into that position.

A few months ago, he said to me, “you know, I’m still just reeling with the realization of how much work actually doing 50% is!” and I laughed, because he is so right.

Unpaid labor has largely been women’s work, and as we’ve become a society where women also tend to work outside the home, our load has barely lessened.

Women still do, on average, three times as much unpaid labor in the home as a man who works an equal amount of hours outside the home does. And, of course, we earn less.

We feel lucky to have put ourselves through the hassle of switching roles, of really digging in deeper to what we’ve actually been taught, the values we’ve actually absorbed, rather than just saying we believe in equality but continuing to live in outdated & unfair gender norms.

We’ve learned so much about ourselves and our culture, and what we know and don’t know.

This Father’s Day, I’m so grateful for the man who is the father of my child. The man who has done the work to become a feminist dad, to raise a little girl who is not just told she can be anything she wants—but is being shown it, too.

I’m so happy to have found a man who is willing to let himself be taught, to constantly examine the structures and strictures under which we have all been raised, and to choose what works for us, and discard the rest.

Happy Father's Day, @HubsYoung , thanks for being willing to do the work, for being willing to work harder than most to be truly equal partners, and for getting in this fight with us to smash the patriarchy.

Thanks for choosing to do half the unpaid labor, rather than just bragging on me as a 'wonderful woman who does it all." Thanks for sharing the load, and the joy, of parenting fully. The women and girls you love will be the beneficiaries, and we are so proud of you.

Thanks for reading along, follow me for more thoughts, random tweets, and the process of becoming, and writing the book, #UNCULTURED. @threadreaderapp, please unroll.