Why do men get away with doing so little in child-rearing?

The other day I came across a piece by a mom, Ashley Miller, about parenting. It wasn’t your typical mom-blog, though, talking about how tough it is for moms who must balance kid(s), kid(s)’s school, the cleaning-up after them, their careers, the laundry…. This one, instead, focused on how important dads were to the parenting process and how fathers who took an equal role in the child-rearing process always got short shrift for their efforts, let alone appreciation.

The point she was making was that there are enough fathers out there who take active part in child-rearing but are never seen as ‘real’ caregivers; instead, the focus is almost entirely on mothers, including in advertising. Her key message? “…good dads need to be part of our language of parenting.”

But who’s a ‘good dad’ anyway?

That piece was written by a Western woman, so clearly the problem is universal but in India, it goes beyond that. If you take too keen an interest in child rearing — how keen is anyone’s guess — you are likely to be seen as a bit weird because, as any fool knows, bringing up the child is the mother’s role. A man’s role is to bring home the bacon. Or the paneer. Whatever.

A man needs to do the manly stuff — get the plumbing fixed (by himself, if possible), get the electrical work done (by himself, if possible), do the gory and boring shopping (read meat and aloo-pyaaz), go to work, and generally hang around the house like a manly man, aloof from the magic happening around him, and shout out for help when the child wants to poop.

And so it was that I found myself the object of some admiring comments from moms in our society the couple of times that my wife was out of town on work and the nanny had quit and I balanced a flexible work-from-home option and a couple of days off. Most couldn’t believe that I was taking care of a two-year-old all by myself, from the time she woke up to the time she went to bed.

And that is what bothers me (even if I did feel a bit chuffed when I first heard it). Being a parent is one of the greatest things and possibly one of the greatest challenges. So why is that men get away with doing so little? Worse, why is it that men who do are seen as some kind of strange, as if they are not ‘supposed’ to be doing all this, for their own child(ren)?

This idea that raising a child is a woman’s job is even more debilitating to men than to women. We are raised to believe that men must behave a certain way, as husbands and as fathers, in ways that strip what is most joyous about those relationships from their souls. That is incredibly tragic in this day and age, and even more so in cities where you would imagine an education would have broken down some of those walls.

Why do I still see men in restaurants, scarfing down their food while the mother is struggling to get the child to eat even a few spoonfuls. Why must men in the supermarket walk ahead of their wives, who are struggling five feet behind with the kids in tow, while I push my three-year-old in the shopping cart, trying to keep her just out of reach of the chocolate shelves. I still find myself one among may be half a dozen or so fathers at school outings. I still often find myself the lone male in the lane that has babycare products at the store.

I suppose it’s something I could pat myself on the back for; instead, it makes me incredibly sad.

But I know I am doing something right when our domestic help tells me “Bhaiya, not even Didi, you are the only one she doesn’t cry with while going to the bathroom when she wakes up.”

(Tanmaya Nanda is the father of a three-year-old )