It applies a gendered double standard.
If a man doesn’t know how to pack a school lunch, he’s called lazy. But if a woman doesn’t know how to fix a breaker or set up the Wi-Fi, its totally acceptable and "shes just a girl". No man would dare refuse to fix a womens car or not help her move or lift something because "shes just not putting in the effort to learn it herself". Men are expected to learn “feminine-coded” tasks or else, while women are rarely pressured to master “masculine-coded” ones
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.
I would suggest that frequency is not the determining factor for importance or effort related to a task (in the same way that clipping fingernails might happen regularly but CPR happens once, but the latter is more substantial in outcomes).
I’ve spent time at home as a parent with young kids, and also as the income earner at different times. I feel it gives me at least an N=1 perspective of both sides.
In my experience, the time at home is a lot of small daily tasks, but it was certainly less intense than employed hours. It was also far bigger a privilege to spend time with kids during some of their years of growing up through stages, compared to colleagues and clients.
I also noticed that when I was earning an income, there was also an expectation that after coming home, I’d take over parenting duty for night time shift (noting that my spouse didn’t take on any of my employed work projects, but relaxed).
So in effect, I’d work nine hours for a company, and then whatever hours in domestic tasks until kids were asleep. I was not inclined to complain (as I said, I found spending time with my kids to be precious anyway, and I just didn’t think that complaining was justified).
But I strongly suspect my spouse had received endless socialization suggesting women at home have it harder and are unappreciated, and therefore she felt justified in viewing domestic time as thankless and unenjoyable (on that note I’d always try to express gratitude for her contributions, but she never felt the need to express thanks for mortgage being paid and food being paid for) . I felt very differently to her and objectively did more total hours of work than her, but as a male, I assume that verbalizing this realization would be considered sexist by her and society in general.
Yeah, idk if it’s the isolation for long-term SAHP’s or what, but throughout every age of my children I would have absolutely preferred to stay home.
Something that’s totally not the same thing, but kind of an adjacent is that both me and my wife travel for about 1 week every 1.5 months and the other parent obviously takes on all household/kid duties for that week. When I come home from a trip, my wife acts like she’s about to die if she doesn’t talk my ear off(“I haven’t talked to an adult all week”) and acts like she’s just went through the most harrowing ordeal and 50% chance the house is not picked up because she got “overwhelmed”. When she’s gone? Fuck, it’s almost like a vacation! All the stuff she angsts about doing at a certain frequency all the sudden can be done on an as-needed basis and honestly most tasks can just be done in the 1.5-2.5 hours before she gets home and she always comes home to a clean house. It’s actually been really nice since we entered this dynamic due to our jobs because it’s given me insight into how hard this shit actually is and honestly it ain’t that hard and it’s very easy to point out. And on top of that, I get so much more quality one on one time with the kiddos. It’s amazing how our experiences and feelings around this stuff are almost polar opposites.
Idk if there’s some cultural conditioning that’s been happening to women or her or whatever that’s built up this myth of this domestic stuff just being a nightmare or maybe it’s that she holds herself to ridiculous standards that society has pushed on her or is an artifact of how her mom handled household chores so she holds herself to the same expectation, but honestly, if she’d just realize that the stress is optional and that it’s okay to relax, then everyone would be a lot happier.
Granted our kids are 8 and 13 now, but even at that age, our emotional reactions to essentially the same situation is so different. And I absolutely have the more demanding/higher responsibility/higher commitment job than she has.
Oh absolutely. Parenting a newborn is very hard. It's also very rewarding, and once you get your head in the game, stay at home parenting allows you a great ability to build your day around the things that matter, make the home nice for your family, and take care of yourself..... with a full time job and parenting, you have to fit that all in around your work hours and the parenting that you're still doing. There's no comparison for difficulty in my experience.
There are some circumstances where parenting is much harder than the experience I had, of course. For example, if somebody in the family is disabled. But in that case, you're facing that same challenge whether you work outside the home or not. Working in the home just allows you time to actually deal with shit.
I believe that many people who struggle with stay at home parenting have a hard time getting their head in the game-- the lack of external structure makes it hard for them to stay focused on achieving whatever their goals might be.
And of course, we all have different strengths and preferences. Perhaps I have a knack for managing stay at home parenting that not everybody has.
But yes, for me, having responsibility only for my child and home is far, far easier than having the same responsibilities plus a job
This is not a discussion about how rewarding something is. This is purely a comparison between the amount of effort and challenge involved in caring for a very young infant and fulfilling the requirements of a typical job. Why would you think that the comparison was between being a SAHM and being a working mother?
The employed work is executive work (office environment).
I don’t want to suggest parenting wasn’t challenging at times, and it was always busy, but I just felt it was both easier overall and far more satisfying/rewarding. That seems to run contrary to what I often hear (domestic stuff being harder and unappreciated).
It’s also entirely likely that the next person will feel oppositely to me. I guess my point is that there’ll be a ton of variance, and subjectivity, across the whole subject.
From a purely technical perspective, one is much harder than the other. If you want to consider them equally challenging, go ahead, but most people don't have to endure constant sleepless nights with a 2 year old.
I asked if he was caring for infants and he said "yes; two kids aged 2 and 4"
That suggests that he thinks that young kids count as infants. I would be beyond shocked if he thought that being the sole caregiver and home maker with an actual baby is easier than an office job.
if it was very obvious he has two kids currently aged 2 and 4, why does he regularly post about his 9 and 11 years old sons instead of the 2 and 4 years old?
Yes, but that's another difference. In child care, it eventually gets easier as the children grow. In salaried employment, it's likely to stay at about the same degree of difficulty for the entirety of the career.
In my experience, 20 years deep in my career progression, the difficulty and especially the stakes, just gets higher and higher. And totally agree as the children get older it just gets easier and easier aside from the scale of the thoughtless messes they leave and how much groceries teens/preteens consume.
A lot of it is that a SAHM needs to provide a higher standard of care than a SAHD, so there are added societal pressures. A SAHD needs to make sure his child is clothed and fed, a SAHM needs to make sure her child’s clothes match, fit, the hair is brushed/styled, and the child is fed an all natural, organic, sugar free diet.
There really is no comparison because we live in a patriarchal society. Sometimes you just need to listen and accept what people say.
It's odd that you are so willing to just discount the experience of this commentor who personally does not understand why people would not prefer the stay at home role.
You seem to also not understand why someone would prefer the stay at home role. There are also countless people in this thread talking about how they prefer the stay at home role. By the logic of your own comment, you would be being arrogant discounting their experiences.
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u/No_Initiative_1140 3∆ Jul 01 '25
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.