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“We hardly ever give credit to moms. Yet, at the same time, dads will do the smallest thing at home and find themselves immediately celebrated for it, because we don’t hold them to the same standards.”
- Kyle Smith, Product Manager at Out of Office
At Out of Office, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re calling the “work-at-home dad”. That’s partly because we’re keen to dive into all things remote working culture, but also because our team includes several work-at-home parents itself — our very own in-house role models of what true work-life-family balance can look like.
Today, we wanted to take a closer look at some of the stigmas and expectations levied against work-at-home parents — and see if we can better understand when a dad becomes more than just a dad.
Psssst. If you’re interested, you can read our first article on the work-at-home dad here.
When is a dad more than a dad?
*A lot to unpack here:
As you might’ve noticed, we’re not sociologists; nor do we have a full doctoral paper at hand that could do the sheer depth of this blog’s subject justice. Instead, what we’d like to do is break down our insights into three main categories, and share our honest feelings on them. Here’s how we’ll do it:
- Expectations for work-at-home parents
- Expectations for sole breadwinners
- Expectations for fathers
Just like us, you’ll quickly notice the many overlaps and connections between these categories, and how they inform broader stigmas in society and working/parental environments specifically. That’s what makes them so vicious, and also difficult to dismantle over time.
Expectations for work-at-home parents
At the risk of repeating some of what we’ve covered in our last blog, here’s what we’ve noticed people think working from home as a parent is like:
Firstly, people assume it makes the remote worker's life easier. To that, we say: why would it? It certainly doesn’t reduce your work, or make it any easier to complete. Additionally, you’ve now got several new distractions to balance, and expectations to meet at home — as any remote working parent can attest who has had their child kicking down their door asking to play games.
Secondly, people assume it makes your spouse’s life easier when you’re working from home, the idea being that now you’re around to help out with the kids — but are you? To a certain extent, yes, because you can certainly jump in for emergencies and also repurpose a bit of time that’d otherwise be allocated to commutes or lunching with colleagues. But raising a child takes a lot of work, most of which you still won’t take on, not to mention the additional work stress you’re now bringing into the house and transmitting over to your spouse as well. Yikes.
What working from home does do is to allow you to be closer to your family, catch additional, invaluable moments with your children, and be a more active, appreciative participant in raising them. Because of this, every parent on our team deeply believes that switching to working from home was the best career choice they’ve ever made, even if it has its challenges.
“You know what sounds easy? Escaping to an office because you want to avoid your kids until they’re already in bed, then taking all the credit for running the family. I bet we all know a parent or two who fit that description.”
- Johannes Lorenz, SEO Lead at EngineRoom
Expectations for the sole breadwinner
People don’t measure “parenting success” — what people do identify (and quickly) are expensive cars, fancy clothing, nice houses, and similar status symbols. There, credit is readily given to the so-called bread-earner of the family, or whichever parent is considered to play the dominant role in securing the monthly income.
The above leaves us with two glaring implications that make us really uncomfortable: one, that it’s commonly assumed that household work and raising children aren’t “real” work. Two, that providing income is the more important task, often connected with “having the say in things”.
Society generally isn’t good at recognizing the value in activities that you can’t put an immediate price tag on — that goes for spending time on a hobby or on taking care of yourself just as much as it does for parental tasks. That aside, juggling household chores and raising children really is work! It’s hard and exhausting, and it takes a million superhuman skills to do well. Parenting can’t just be split up into siloed responsibilities either — being the main source of income in no way removes your basic, elemental parental responsibilities, and it sure doesn’t do so in relation to the money you bring home every week.
Expectations for fathers
Maybe it’s because dads typically are expected to be the “breadwinners”. Maybe it’s because dads are men, considered to naturally be less “the emotional type”, or just generally tend to have the cards stacked in their favor on a societal level. Maybe, it’s all of the above and more — point is, we hardly expect anything of dads, and then reward them for the smallest successes as parents.
Not only are mothers automatically assumed to take on a million parental duties, but they are hardly given any credit for it. Many people won’t even blink at seeing a mom be a good mom — yet we’ll regularly stumble across some so-called “super dad” on social media being hailed an icon and role model for, as our Product Manager so accurately put it, “just being a bloody parent.”
While we’re happy to see a new lens put on the possibilities unlocked by dads doing actual parenting, we’d love to stop loudly celebrating dads’ fulfilling the most basic of parental duties and start talking about all those fathers who fail at them all together — especially when they’d normally get away with it based on their gender or income or otherwise.
“I remember sitting at a restaurant terrace with my wife and getting up to change my daughter’s diaper. An elderly couple next to us promptly said to my wife that she must have me well-trained. The expectations for dads are just so entirely skewered, it’s hard to wrap your head around.”
- Kyle Smith, Product Manager at Out of Office
To put it in a nutshell
Phew — that was a lot! As we said, there’s a lot to unravel here, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface. But why all the trouble?
Truth is, there’s a lot of stigma out there, as well as misplaced expectations for parents. These complex systems of misinformed ideas transcend specialized jobs and localized spaces, and because of this, they hurt parents, children, and families as a whole, across countries, cultures, and generations. Frankly, this sucks.
With the rise of remote work, we’ve been super excited to track the positive change we’re seeing for work-at-home parents and their families everywhere. To be part of this trend, we’d love to help further break down negative misconceptions about work-at-home parenthood — and hopefully, stop focusing on dads who are good dads, rather than just good parents.
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