Are Moms Really Ready For Change?

I think the woman you are talking about will change her tune once the baby is born. Before my first child was born I wasn't sure exactly how much time off I would need, and quickly realized any estimation I had needed to be doubled...at least. You can't know how significantly having a child will change your priorities, and your life, until you've had one. This is the ongoing dilemma with getting general support for paid family leave. It isn't until you're a parent that you realize how desperately you need paid leave, but by then you're too tired and busy to advocate for it. This is why your site is so important. We parents need to band together to make family-friendly policies like paid leave a reality. Then the woman you talk about in your post can just benefit from what those who've gone before her have already learned - having a child will change everything and you'll want to be there to experience it. And...you'll want help.

I just finished a conversation with my husband, who is a part-time working, part-time stay-at-home dad. Being the one who brings home the bigger paycheck with the health benefits has been a huge adjustment for me, and I was starting to feel like I wasn't living up to society's expectations of a mom. My husband finally said, "Look, you would HATE being a stay-at-home mom." And he's right. He's better at it than I would be.

My husband is a fantastic dad, but it's hard going against the grain of how "we are supposed to do it". It's like we must rewire our brains that, yes, men can be fantastic and involved parents. Yes, men can change a diaper and calm a baby as well as a mom. And yes, every family is different and the system needs to be flexible enough to recognize that fact.

This is an incredible subject to dig into and one that I think is of critical importance if families in America are to grow stronger.

I'm American and my husband is Canadian. Our daughter was born in San Francisco and, while I was able to take six weeks off, he had to take leave without pay and vacation days to get 10 days off. He was shocked as, in Canada, dads have options for as much as 6 months of paternity leave.

It's been so ingrained in American society that fathers do not need to participate in the child rearing process that I don't think women even consider the option of having their husbands at home sharing the load for a while.

An empowered family is one that has those options.

Change that paradigm and a whole new world will open up for families.

Perhaps it was the fact that our first children were twins, but my husband and I jumped into parenting together from the beginning! My husband did take off about four weeks when our twins were born, but it was at a job where he just had to make up the work later, which created its own stress. I had the luxury of 17 weeks off (not all paid, though). Having more time together to adjust to our new family would have been great, but we were thankful for having as much time as we did.

With respect to shared parenting, from the beginning there were some things that were my primary responsibility (breastfeeding!), but my husband took over others (baths - I don't think I've given any of our kids more than four or five baths a year!). Now that the kids are older, we may squabble sometimes about the division of labor (he says he does more of the cleaning, I say I do all of the scheduling / appointments, etc.), but there is no doubt that we equally share in the parenting of our kids. I have to believe that this is better for our kids, because they are learning different ways to communicate and solve problems from our different parenting styles. And I know that our shared parenting is better for us, because it would be impossible for us both to pursue our careers and manage the chaos if were weren't sharing the responsibilities at home.