As a stay-at-home-dad (SAHD) I can’t help but feel that even today, even with the amount of SAHDs increasing, the world of daytime childcare just isn’t built for us. In the US, it’s still very much assumed that a child’s primary care taker is a woman. The SAHD is not uncommon, but it is still considered somewhat of an oddity. It still sometimes feels odd to me. Especially when I’m out about town. The world of day time childcare didn’t evolve to accommodate stay-at-home-dads.
The local library hosts a story time for children in the morning once a week. It’s very cute and attended mostly by mothers and their small babies. I’m usually the singular SAHD at the event. On one occasion I observed some of the moms break the ice with each other. Before long, they were trading stories about motherhood including particulars of breastfeeding and other peculiarities related to childcare. While I could relate to a lot of what they were talking about (minus the breastfeeding part), it didn’t feel right for me to join. Anyways, what is a man going to do in mother’s friend group anyway? It was an odd feeling of simultaneously feeling left out, but also having no desire to join.
On another occasion, I was sitting in the play area of the library when another baby approached me and my daughter. The baby waved hi to us and looked like she wanted to play. I waved back, and beckoned my daughter to try to wave to the other little baby (with limited success). Before long, the mother appeared. She glanced at me, gave me a brief hello, and escorted her baby to another corner of the play area. This interaction left me feeling somewhat slighted, but again I wondered what an alternate version of this interaction would be? Maybe the mother never comes for the baby and me, my daughter, and her have a cute moment of play. Maybe the mother, comes and joins us, we have a brief conversation about our respective babies and we part ways. But under no circumstances would I want or expect some kind of lasting friendship to form between me and this mother based on that interaction that would otherwise be more likely to form if I were a woman.
Interactions like these made me realize that places like the playground and the library are primarily women’s spaces. These are spaces designed for children to interact and play, but a natural byproduct of that space is an opportunity for women to meet and form friendships and communities. As a SAHD, I can participate in what these spaces offer, but only to the extent that they benefit my child. Obviously I’m not banned, or not welcome, but the spaces don’t benefit me in the way they benefit mothers. It’s similar to aerobics classes and group workouts at gyms. They’re predominantly occupied by women. Men can come and participate in the workouts, but the activity and the space is not for them strictly speaking.
As you can tell by this whole essay I’m writing about the subject, I’m not bothered by this at all but it does make me wonder what I really want? Do I really want to live in a world where playgrounds are predominantly occupied by other SAHDs? In a world of stay at home dads, are the mothers out working? Is that a good thing? That’s a separate can-of-worms I’m not qualified to answer. Would women really want their spaces dominated or encroached upon by men? Perhaps the feeling of discomfort I feel out in public as a SAHD is the system working. It’s meant to uphold a status quo—a status quo that’s telling me I should be working and my wife should be staying home to take care of the kids and if not her, then a nanny.
Then one has to wonder: If there were separate spaces for SAHDs what would that look like? Maybe it’s a playground with a bar in the corner. Or perhaps it’s a playground with an adult gym on the other side. To be sure, communities of fathers exist. They center around sports and scouting for example. For fathers of younger children, they exist as stroller-walks. However more often than not these activities exist only on the weekends. The rest of the weekday belongs to the mothers, the nannies and the daycare workers. The idea that a group of SAHDs would sit around and talk about being SAHDs while their children play is precisely what a woman would imagine we’d do. But it’s not. Male friendships aren’t generally built around relating and talking. They’re generally built around a common activity—like sports and hobbies. This tension points to masculinity and male-friendships being less suited to the type of community forming that women otherwise experience around childcare. I don’t believe there ever will be a robust community of SAHDs, at least not comparable or equal to the kind of communities formed around motherhood because of this.
Sometimes as I navigate the world of weekday, daytime childcare, I wonder if the discomfort I feel is something similar to the way women felt when they first entered the workforce—the feeling that they don’t belong there. A truly equal society would see an equal representation of men and women in the workforce and in childcare spaces like playgrounds and libraries too. We as a society place a lot of emphasis on having equal representation in the workforce and to a certain degree have achieved it. However if that’s the case, then why are these spaces still occupied by mothers? Why am I almost always the only SAHD at these places? Until someone figures out the answer to that, I'll be at story time next Monday—still the only dad there.