Gender Roles and Outdated Family Models

I've been doing my best to read as much as I can about raising twins.  Actually, I've been reading about pregnancy and carrying twins as well.  Most of these books are written by women, for women.  But I've ignored the "I Am Mom" message and tried to focus on the ideas rather than the words.  I've read only one book, so far, that focused on being a dad.  The book was titled, "So You Are Going To Be A Dad".  I should have checked the publishing date before I tossed it.  I'm pretty sure it was written between wooly mammoth hunts, by the light of a roaring fire, deep inside a cave.  It frequently repeated the idea, that after the children were born, life as we knew it, was over.  And though that statement is in fact true, it never made it sound appealing.  It was written in such a way, that made me, as a father-to-be, feel I was giving up everything rather than gaining anything.  The author actually stated that it wasn't until his third child, that he realized he should be taking his turn with night feedings.  With his first child he didn't help at all, but he felt bad about how tired his wife looked.  With his second child, he woke up when his wife did, but found that wasn't the solution either.  It was just leaving them both exhausted.  Finally, with his third child, he came to the conclusion that he should let his wife sleep through a feeding, and handle the bottle, the changing and play time by himself.  I was a little shocked when I read that.  I don't understand how a man can be so inattentive, or worse, uncaring about his family.  I didn't think that there were men still like that...at least, not until I started to attend our prenatal class.

My wife and I took a course designed for families expecting multiples.  I don't know if it was because of our circumstance, but we didn't cover a lot of the things I expected to.  We never sat on the floor and practiced breathing techniques for example.  Instead, one evening, our instructor turned on a CD of a baby screaming and had us practice changing, dressing and swaddling a doll.  I think it was supposed to prepare us for a simultaneous melt down of the twins...I'm fully expecting evenings in which everyone in my household will be lying on the floor and crying together, so that exercise was good preparation.  I, along with most of the other guys, did our best.  But there was one father-to-be who treated each activity with disdain.  On the first night when the men of the group were asked to say something about their wives and children, he just rolled his eyes and waved off the question.  When asked to dress and swaddle a doll, he stuffed both its legs through a single pant leg and then rolled it in the blanket like a burrito.  In one exercise, we were divided into two groups, men and women.  We were asked to come up with an hourly schedule for the sixth day at home with our twins.  His suggestion was the gym at 7AM and then a full day of work.  As we filled in our timeline with tasks like, feed the babies, or do the dishes he made snide comments about "cramping his style".  Here was a man that most of those daddy books are written for, a clueless neanderthal, self-centered and oblivious of others.  I honestly felt sorry for his wife and kids-to-be.


Clearly delineated gender roles, in my mind, is an idea that died in the 1950s.  I don't understand why so many of the parenting books I've read, are written just for mom, or just for dad.  Out of the eight couples that attended our prenatal class only one of them appeared to still be carrying about that outdated family model.  When I was a child, my mother and father both worked (as an emergency nurse my mother often took evening shifts to ensure that there was always someone home with us).  They both cooked and did housework.  Growing up, I think I saw my father standing behind the ironing board more regularly than I did my mother.  I don't know why there are not more parenting books written with that lifestyle in mind.  They should leave out the labels, the "mother" and the "father".  Write about parents...write about the people that are going to work together to bring up their children.  That's how my parents did it, as a team, they still are, and they raised one amazing child as well as my brother.