Shared Parenting or Hired Hand

I read a great article today ... Here are some highlights... for even more colorful opinions check out the reader comments - WOW!

"The idea that Mother Knows Best for all things home and family is deeply ingrained and complicated by gender roles, socialization and culture, experts say. And now new research is beginning to help make sense of that maternal angst."


"For women who insist they have the gold standard around parenting and housework, men just tend to walk away," says Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco and Oakland. "They feel their own ideas about how the house should look or … how the children should be raised aren't given equal share."


"I don't want to be nagged or reminded," he says. "If I'm watching TV or going to play tennis, she has to trust me as a person living up to my responsibility. I'll get things done. She does not need to worry about it."
That's not what happens in many homes, says Andrea O'Reilly, associate professor of women's studies and director of the Association for Research on Mothering at York University-Toronto. "She might delegate to her partner, but if you have to do the remembering and the organizing, the planning and the worrying, that's not equality," she says. "The intellectual labor of running a household — that work is still done predominantly by women."

"I have certainly felt ambivalent about relinquishing control over what my daughter wears or eats. There are times when my husband dresses her in an outfit and I think, 'What is he doing?' I try to bite my tongue," she says. "The way your children look, a lot of mothers feel like it reflects on them.

"The way I would describe it is, in the end, society is still not going to come down on the father," she says. "Society is going to come down on you."