31
votes
What are the standards for a good father/husband?
The other day at the bus stop I overheard a mom saying how amazing it was that her husband not only cooked dinner - pasta - but also then put the kids to bed. The woman she was talking to nodded sagely in agreement: clearly this was laudable.
Is the bar for being a good father and husband so low? What the hell?
This isn't really new to me, I suppose. I've worked mainly with women my whole life and too often I hear that the bare minimum seems to be "they provide money" and occasionally throw down a meal and play with the kids. Sometimes, even that is expecting too much.
Can I get some perspective on this?
We don't know what the family dynamic is but I would assume that the husband is likely doing much more than just one night of handling dinner and the kids.
Consider another possibility- Sometimes being a good partner is just noticing when your SO doesn't have capacity and needs you to step in to take the load off- even when you yourself are juggling a lot. Those moments, those little chores that are justifiably theirs and yet they become unburdened of them without fuss or fights are felt deep and appreciated at a level far greater than some objective measure of difficulty/effort. She could just be expressing her appreciation for one of those little moments.
After reading the other replies and yours - I see the perspective I may be missing. I do know that in both those families, neither woman works (though one is going back to school in order to up skill to a better job, props for that!) which certainly plays into the dynamics. I can see how having the husband step in to handle chores you were expecting to do, without being asked, would be a huge relief.
The bar is incredibly low. When I was raising my (now) 3 year old, every time I took him out in public by myself, for example to get groceries - I was consistently praised for being a good father. Some particular instances that stand out in my memory:
I was filling my car with gas, and I opened the car door so my son would not feel alone while I was doing this. I explained to him how the car drinks gas for energy just like we drink water/eat food. The person across from me on the opposite gas pump immediately chimed in and thanked me for being an amazing father, said that they were a teacher and wished more parents were like me. I was shocked that this wasn't just "normal"
Our family went to Joann during their final sales, and my wife was trying to decide on some fabrics to buy. To give her some time to decide, I drove the shopping cart away and was trying to buy time. I showed my son all the different price tags with percentages on sale and asked him to read what numbers were there. He was doing great - identifying 20% / 40% / 50% etc... When some other shopper randomly came over and complimented me. She said she was a teacher and that she wished more parents were like me. I was once again flabbergasted that this isn't just the norm... isn't it expected for parent to be teaching their kid numbers?
This happened many times. I received so many compliments about being a good father just for putting in normal effort. It's terrifying that this is the standard. Every time someone complimented me, rather than making me feel good it just made me more aware of how low the bar really is and how sad that is at a societal level.
For most of my life I've found myself exasperated by my parents' generation and their disinterest in teaching and training. In parenting, university lecturers and in the workplace. It culminates in stuff like the famous bean dad thread - a man who publishes a story about how coddled young people are because his eight year old couldn't intuitively understand the can opener he never taught her to use.
So yeah I might have complimented you too, not because it's amazing but because it's rarer than it should be and we want to encourage that.
I got mixed feelings reading your comment...
At first I was expecting to do the "yeah, I know, right, that's insane!" thing of massive recognition.
I have been complimented on helping out for just walking with my kid in a stroller from point A to B! Not once, many times (my kid is now in their 20s)
But then... I started to recognise myself in the people complimenting you for being a good parent instead. I do that all the time, to all parents: when I see someone doing well with their child(ren) in a way that I like I tell them, if possible.
(I do also offer kind words of encouragement in difficult situations or offer myself as distraction if appropriate.)
I wonder if maybe you are putting a little bit too much into the "not awful father" basket rather than the "good parent" basket.
I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong, you where there and felt the situations.
I'm more hoping I don't have to take a hard look at myself and how I interact with parents and children in public!
My dad tried to do this with us I think but when we were in public it was total sensory overload so we couldn’t actually engage with any sort of thing that required focus.
I think the family trips to the store stopped around the time my little brother was 5 cause at that point he became too big to just pick up and carry out when he had a meltdown.
So I think its a mix of being a good parent, but also having kids who aren’t totally off their rocker
It may feel to you like you're doing the bare minimum, but I think for a lot of parents, they may feel so tired and generally harassed that they don't necessarily have the frame of mind to use things like gas stations and shopping trips as "teachable moments", and so that is pretty cool! (And good parenting advice.)
Re Joann's: I do a lot of crafting and so I'm in craft stores frequently, and it's my personal hobby to count how many boyfriends/spouses are either hiding in the parking lot with the truck or following sadly in their partner's footsteps as she joyfully goes craft shopping. (My spouse falls in the latter category :) ). I don't know if it's a temporary reversion to childhood and being dragged along with Mom on errands, or just a screaming internal voice that tells them not to go into the "girl store", but I can tell you that men seem to just really try to avoid going into or acting normally in a craft store (and I have seen this happen in multiple countries, so it's not just a local thing). So yes, that is genuinely unusual, and yes, the bar is terribly low for reasons that I don't fully understand but frequently experience myself! Just out of curiosity, did you amuse yourself in craft stores before becoming a parent, or did the addition of a kid change your outlook at all?
A good partner is one who makes your life more fulfilling, less stressful, more intimate, and less lonely. Anything else is just details on how to do those things because the “how” doesn’t matter nearly as much as the “why.”
The right partner doesn’t just tick off boxes or follow rituals, they actively create the conditions that let you thrive. Whether that’s through encouragement, shared laughter, physical affection, or simply cooking a meal and putting the kids to bed, the details are just vehicles. What matters is the outcome: you feel supported, energized, understood, and genuinely less alone in the world.
Everything else, habits, love languages, routines, hobbies, finances, is just the scaffolding that each couple builds differently to serve those core functions.
To be a better husband I try to ask my wife what would make her life easier today, and then I see if that's something that's easy for me to do. I know that cooking and planning meals is hard for her so I try to do that without putting the mental load of "what do you want for dinner" - I just get up and make something I hope she likes.
Well said. Spending bandwidth on identifying the fundamentals and working from there rather than endlessly litigating the surface details is an underrated lifehack. And a big part of being a good (anything).
I'm a dad to a five and two year old. I do feel that the bar is low for dads in some circles, but in many others it's fairly normal. It leads to whiplash where you'll feel like a superhero just for being present, then in another setting you're just one of the dads (which feels more natural).
So rather than responding to whether or not "the" bar is that low, I'll agree that there are many circles in which the bar is that low (and of course shouldn't be).
We're also in the middle of a cultural shift (in the US), where past generations expected men to provide and women to be mothers. Men watching kids were "babysitting" or "helping mom". That's not the reality for many families any more, and I do think men get disproportionately credited for their part in the new shift, which I think goes to simple optics. The new dynamic is towards (1) fathers are now more likely to be present and (2) mothers are now more likely to be working (thus necessarily less present). So fathers embracing this dynamic are easy to spot and compare against past norms, but it's pretty rare for a mom to get credit for being on the clock (from my very limited perspective as a man).
Unrelated to sex, see a lot of parents these days being ridiculously non present. There are many parents who wouldn't think to open the door and talk to their kid because they're distracted by their phone and simply not thinking about it. Empathy (even for our kids) requires some effort on the part of the empathizer, to stop and wonder "what is my son feeling in there where he can't see or hear much?". But it's easy to just not do that when you're scrolling a feed, lost in other people's thoughts. I find that most people around me lack any kind of curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of the people they brush up against in life.
I think a big factor is also proactively identifying and stepping up to do random chores. I've seen posts about households where the husband is "willing" to help but has to be explicitly asked every time, like programming a robot. Unfortunately, I've also known more than one family where that's the case. That's just crazy to me!
So personally, beyond a fair division of the contributions to the household, that's where I draw the line for a minimum standard. (And it's something my spouse and I have been trying really hard to instill in our kids; they shouldn't just wait for someone - i.e., one of use - to ask before pitching in.)
The comic you linked really resonates with me on a number of levels. I had many of the husbandly attitudes early in our marriage, and without meaning to excuse it, I will say the social conditioning is very strong and very subtle. It took me a long time to realize the ways I was trying to help weren't helping the real problem. When I look back on it, the blind spot I had for the mental load seems huge and amazing.
One framing that helped me was "if you're asking to help, you're not taking ownership of the task. You've already admitted that you think it's the partner's task."
To be honest though, even though my attitude and capability improved through the years, I don't think I really "got it" until I was a stay at home dad. And I had it relatively easy because our daughter was not a helpless infant or a clinging toddler.
Ironically, during that time when my wife went back to work, she really abdicated the home responsibilities, and it cause a big rift for us (that we have since worked out).
Which brings me around to the idea that while I think the role of the stay at home parent often gets minimized, and that is wrong, there is also a way that the role of the working parent gets minimized. I don't have eloquent words for it. It's something like the demand of "being on" plus the lack of control you often have over when and how tasks get assigned to you, how they are prioritized, when they are due, etc. Maybe it's just capitalism gonna cap, but these demands don't know or care about what's going on at home, what you or your family need, etc. That demand is very draining and dehumanizing, and it's hard to overstate the exhaustion I feel at the end of a working day.
In the end I think it comes down to what all human relationships require: being willing to listen, to empathize, to have the imagination that another's experience could be different than the way we think it is. Once we look past the socialization and the stereotypes to see an actual person with individual needs and try to start meeting them, we finally have a real chance to connect.
There is something to be said for the usual distribution of chores on this front. I do the cooking and my wife usually does the dishes. She also has very-important-to-her rules on how the dishwasher is loaded that I do not understand despite being married for like a decade now and trying several configurations. I am willing to do the dishes but, yeah, she has to ask me to do it and sign a waiver that she is okay with them coming out clean even if it isn't the correct configuration.
Otherwise I agree, if you have the wherewithal to go do a thing and the thing needs done, go do the thing.
I also have very important rules for the dishwasher that get ignored and thus permission must be asked before anybody else loads.
Because if there is a sink full of dishes, everyone else gets maybe half of them in if they don't follow my rules. I'll get them all in and they'll be cleaner and dryer.
The big pasta bowls go in the bottom-left, because that's where they take up the least space with no gaps while not ending with stuff baked on. Putting them anywhere else makes them clang loudly.
Plates go biggest to smallest, left-to-right, though this is flexible. What is not flexible is that a tiny plate needs to be used on the left if you're slotting in the meat cutting board or you have a plate-shaped spot where it didn't get washed.
Each pot has a more or less designated home based on what set of dishes are being used. If you put the pot that cooked rice in the wrong spot, it doesn't get the good sprayer that actually hits the bottom.
Forks/Spoons/Knives go in the top silverwear rack, divided into roughly sixths, small and large for each. It adds trivial seconds when loading and eliminates all sorting to put in drawer later. They also conform nicer so they can be crammed tighter with no residue.
Tall cups and containers are on the perimeter, short in the middle. If you put some of the lighter stuff in the wrong place it flips over and you open the dishwasher to a giant cup of sludge water.
The lunchboxes get stacked at ~55 degree angles alternating the 'big' sections so they don't collapse into each other. If you lay them flat instead (as my spouse tends to), it eats up space from 10 other things.
All of this to say: I spend 30 extra seconds following all the arcane rules I've discovered to avoid major flaws, which insures that when I go to unload the dishwasher at 6 in the morning, everything is clean, dry, and minimizes my mental load when I have fewest active brain cells. Adding "dry the dishes because the cup that collected water kept the humidity too high for stuff to dry" is super annoying.
THAT is how it's done. I need a cigarette after reading that.
This is a great joke, made me laugh this morning, thanks a lot!
Jon Richardson - The Dishwasher Demon Returns
The diswasher-specific bit starts around 2:20
:) programming a robot has a loop function. My mom called it pushing over a woodblock: one push only gets you one roll.
It's coming, but yeah there's a lot of generational stickiness to the attitude of "you just had to ask".
We can still see this "women's
worthwork is worthless, or at best worth less" reflected in the attitude towards careers in childcare, hospitality, cleaning, stocking shelves, driver, and providing meals: these are some of the lowest paying jobs.Edit: typo for worth/work.
I'm not sure what the norm is, but I think my partner and I contribute relatively evenly. We don't have a system — we both just kind of do tasks as we notice they need doing and we feel up for doing them — although there are some tasks he tends to do a bit more (like cooking, dishes, and grocery shopping) and some that I tend to do a bit more (like laundry, home repairs, and putting random things away).
If he notices me doing a chore, he'll generally jump in and help me with it. If I do a chore on my own, he generally notices and thanks me for doing it. If I'm having an off week and don't get much done, he picks up the slack. (I do these for him as well, of course.)
On the whole, I'd say I'm probably a little neater than him and have slightly higher standards — although there are exceptions — but I rarely have complaints. We're pretty good at meeting in the middle.
I suspect we work so well together in this area for two reasons: We both have experience living alone (so we're both familiar with all the chores involved in running a household) and we're both people pleasers (so we readily show each other appreciation, and we're motivated by each other's appreciation).
I think the people-pleasing trait is particularly important. We've been living together for nearly 15 years, but we still thank each other several times a day and we still do as many of our chores together as we can. It's basically a bonding activity.
I feel everyone else has said it, and probably better, but the keys comes down to support. I know a woman whose husband literally only had to work and mow the back lawn for her to be happy. Granted, he was working 60-80 hour weeks at the time on a project so she picked up the slack.
I know another who essentially does all household chores, cooking and caring for the children while still working 40 hours a week and, to quote another coworker of mine, "he does everything women tell me they want me to do and still has problems to bitch about." You can bring as much water to a grease fire as you want, it ain't gonna quench it.
Women, all across the globe, have a cultural expectation about what a man should do and a personal expectation about what they want. Sometimes, it can be easy to make a generic person happy but you can't really tell a lot from overhearing a conversation.
The answer to this is going to be highly dependent on the demographic you're looking at - age/generation, education, socioeconomic status, religion, country and regional culture, etc. A group of young, well-educated, dual-income households in the city is going to be very different in general than the older, blue-collar, single-income household in a small town, for example. Those demographics, plus gender, will also have differences in both how and what they complain/comment about, especially publicly, further effected by the group dynamics in which the discussion is happening.
On an individual household level, a lot of the issue comes from lack of communication around priorities, expectations, and personal preferences, as well as minimizing or not even noticing what the other party is handling. I've seen plenty of couples who both parties think they're pulling not just more, but the majority, of the weight because of how the value and see (or not see) the tasks being done.
In my experience, the social circles I've been involved in, the default is an equitable divide in household work and involved, hands-on parents across the board. In several cases, it even tilts the opposite way, where a career-driven wife has a husband (also working) that takes on more household and parenting work to support her ambitions. With my own kids, I never got any "special dad" praise when went out with them myself for daily walks in the park as infants or actively played with them at the playground as toddlers. Classes with parents sitting-in and school trips with parent chaperoning always have plenty of dads.
It really is low. But I also think the word's progressively more out via social media around how stupid a low bar is? Parenting groups, forums, etc. make it clear it's wrong when some mom is asking shit like how they should apologize for not vacuuming one dirt spot while the toddlers had a meltdown, the baby had a poopsplosion, and the teenager crashed the car or whatever. Unfortunately some people find support for these things after marrying shitty partners, and it turns into resignation. But I think the internet is starting to break the mold a little. (Then tradwife bullshit takes me down a notch.)
iunno. I take the dad role in our relationship; I work, my wife doesn't, and I feel that (aside from any health concerns) I need to be able to support work first during my working hours to make sure the kids have the roof over their head and bread on the table. The second I'm out of that zone, I try my damndest to get both my wife and I to feel we're taking on equal work. I wake up with the baby to give my wife extra sleep and have extra time with her, I take the dogs, I cook a lot, I handle all the kids' meals that would trigger her allergy, I try to use work breaks to do dishes or clean up, I cover the kids some weekends so my wife feels she can get out of the house just like I would sometimes like to... Some people call that "InVoLvEd", or whatever.
All my friend group parent couples seem pretty well-balanced. But they're also all dual-income - and that's another thing, I wouldn't be surprised if dual-income parents split responsibility well out of pure necessity. Considering modern economics, more equitable parental workloads may be more common among the younger parent generation?
What you're doing is a far cry from the previous generation's standards, that, because the dad works 8 hours a day, the dad is already done and the mom should take care of the rest of everything on her 24/7/365 shift. Which becomes even more hilarious when they retire + empty nest and the dynamic continues.
Which is actually an improvement upon the previous gold standard, of a man with passive income, and oh hey he doesn't beat her most nights, so she's so grateful and do handicraft to pay off the only occasional gambling debts, and turn a blind eye to the infidelities plural.
Not that I think you're making this point, but just to pile on about how dumb it is, it's worth pointing out that it was always a bad take. Even in a world where everyone is a female homemaker or a male provider, a lot of jobs are simply less stressful than watching very little children. They may be more demanding in other ways, but the mental tax of a job where you work with adults, are given breaks, and have a predictable workload is much less (IMHO) than spending 8 hours (plus commute time) alone with toddlers that afford none of those things.
Anyone deserves a break after that kind of haul, and they did back in past generations.
Most jobs. Working a warehouse job for 8 hours is less exhausting than mediating fights beteeen a 4 year old and an 8 year old for three.
People whom work primarily with children under 10 should be making CEO money. Not CEOs.
I couldn't agree more that we underpay childcare professionals (and educators).
And I'm a primary school teacher - which makes me gag when other fathers don't play a larger role in their children's lives.
Not that you're making the counter point, but I guess there was once upon a time when the gentleman (as in wealthy landowner, not as in mannerisms) has a passive income and he just smokes and collect rocks, and they have house help plus wet nurse and nanny so the lady just visits and (shrugs) collect female rocks. So no one is watching the kids except the servants. And kids just go ride their horses and whatnot and isn't expected to be supervised. And meanwhile men and women both worked on farms with no one watching the kids other than older kids. And while the men at working at say a mine or a brewery the women are wash women and someone else's servant or wet nurse nanny.
It's only been a recent invention that the lower and middle class men go to comfy indoor safe jobs for 8 hours and then come home to pretend to be a gentleman. Meanwhile there isn't money to hire help for the pretend gentleman home so the pretend lady has to be all those things plus being pretty and presentable when he comes home.
I hadn't considered the timeline of it before, but what you're saying makes unfortunate sense.
It's important to negotiate who does what so that both of you feel like you're pulling your weight and that the other knows and appreciates it.
Support for the partner and being an equal caregiver has been said already, so I'll say the next obvious thing that's dad/father only.
Don't flip out. Control your anger.
To me, dads and men growing up always had temper issues and outbursts that didn't come with explanations or changes in behaviour.
Give your kids a heads up when you're going to go and lose your shit, or explain after that it's helpful to get frustration out and that this is how dad does it.
I'm a father of 2, a 8.5yo, and a recently turned 7yo, and happily married. I'm honestly appalled by how low of standards the seemingly average person has of men regarding raising their children.
Im complimented by my family, on both sides, for doing things that I consider utterly basic or required of a fatherly role. Men, and fathers specifically, BE BETTER! For better, for worse, our kids idolize us, we should strive to live up to that.
It's more than just keeping them fed, and housed, or the money I contribute to making those things happen. It is as much my responsibility as my wife's to make sure my kids grow up to be emotionally mature humans, with the capacity for empathy and critical thinking.
My wife and I differ in how we go about those things because of our own idiosyncrasies and neurodivergences, but as long as we keep that last bit in clear focus we can make it work.