Who Wants a Cookie?

Well, bless his pea-pickin’ little heart! I was browsing the CNN website this morning when I came upon this little article, Working from home: Not for every ‘Mr. Mom’ by Josh Lubin.

He correctly points out just how difficult it is to accomplish anything remotely like work while caring for a newborn. That’s because caring for a newborn is work.  He gets first-hand experience in just such when he agrees to work from home for a few hours while his wife goes to an unspecified early appointment. In the midst of his work requirements, other requirements pop (or poop) up: diapers need to be changed, tummies need to be filled, crying needs to be interpreted.

Then he says this:

“I realize that the ability to work and be a nanny simultaneously is a skill requiring practice.”

Did he just say “…be a nanny…?” Why yes, he did! Does he equate parenting with being a paid help? Does he consider what his wife is doing, presumably on her maternity leave, as nanny-ing? Obviously, judging simply by his choose of words, he considers caring for his child being a nanny, while I consider it being a parent.

I don’t deny that different parents have different parenting styles, but I find this tendency to refer to those times when fathers care for their children by themselves as “babysitting” or in the author’s case as “be(ing) a nanny” infuriating to say the least.

And what of articles that praise the massive amounts of time (6.5 hours per week) modern fathers spend with their children, relative to their own fathers (2.6 hours per week)? Well, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book The Second Shift neatly puts them in perspective. When mother goes back to work, the majority of parenting and household tasks will be her responsibility. But no one will ever consider the performing of her responsibilities as being “a nanny” or a housekeeper; no one will ever give her a cookie for doing her duty.

Not that Mr. Lubin is asking for a cookie. I just hope that this instills in him a measure of appreciation of the shear amount of hard work his wife will face in the ensuing years and inspires him to contribute his share during that second shift.

And I would love to tell him that this, too, shall pass. More quickly than he can imagine, and sooner than he wants, his child will grow up. He might want to re-address the idea of working from home in a few years. Eventually, she will be able to sit on the potty by herself and get her own snacks from the kitchen. Then, before he knows it, it’s off to school and, inevitably, she will be all grown up and he’ll be wondering how it happened so fast. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she cried in the middle of his conference call and cracked everybody up?

Enjoy it now, Mr. Lubin, this time will not come again.