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Strollerderby
The blog department here at Babble is expanding like a pregnant belly! Our latest addition, Being Pregnant, gives you all the news you need about how to get by during those fascinating nine months.
In a recent post, Ceridwen Morris – a childbirth instructor at Tribeca Parenting in NYC – weighs in on how much involvement fathers can and should have during pregnancy.
Dr. Jonathan Ives of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Birmingham says “dad’s involvement in pregnancy and childbirth might actually be setting him up to fail as a new father.” Morris says the logic behind Ives’ controversial statement is this: a man is expected to empathetically experience the pregnancy with his partner, “but hard as he may try the fact is he’s not the one doing the work. So he begins to feel like a passive, useless partner and this lack of mojo carries over into actual parenthood.”
I’ve seen the same argument used to explain why some modern men develop passive-aggressive personalities: because they don’t feel like men anymore. Have we, in our struggle to eradicate gender bias, lost some of the benefits reaped by our innate differences?
I’d always assumed that the reason men of today were encouraged to be more involved in pregnancy and the birth of their children is so they’d be more attached to the baby when it was born. But Morris actually thinks Ives is onto something.
She says, “America really loves equality. For better or for worse, it continues to be the primary force behind the women’s movement. But gestating and birthing a baby isn’t something men and women can share equally. It’s a time in our lives when the differences between men and women are starkly apparent.” Continue reading »
Here’s a theory that turns modern conventional wisdom on its head: men who are attentive and supportive to their partners during pregnancy are damaging their fathering skills.
Huh?
Dr Jonathan Ives, head of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Birmingham, claims, and I’m paraphrasing here, that pregnancy and childbirth emasculate men. Continue reading »
Sandra Bullock’s estranged husband Jesse James has been in the news for months, ever since his cheating scandal broke. In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Nightline this week, he blamed his infidelity on the abuse he received as a child. After a stint in rehab, he came out saying, “I grew up with a huge amount of shame and fear and abandonment on my shoulders from a very young age and I think, you know, the way my mind rationalized [cheating], ‘Well, you know, I might as well do whatever I can to like run her off cause she is going to find out what I am anyway and leave me anyway.’”
Vicki Mabrey countered that many people who were abused as children go on to be faithful adults. So is it that there are real excuses for cheating, or do men who cheat need an excuse? British psychiatrist Dennis Friedman, in his book The Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do The Things We Do, thinks that men who were raised by nannies have a natural instinct to cheat. He believes that being cared for by more than one woman as a child introduces men “to the concept of the other woman.” Continue reading »
Today’s fathers do more childcare than our own dads probably did. They’re in the grocery stores with their toddlers, picking the kids up from school, riding with them on the subway.
But they’re still seen as special cases when they do. In his memoir, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon talks about how women would come up to him in the grocery store and gush over what a great father he is. Not because he was doing anything special, but just because he was with his kids at all doing a simple everyday task.
Stranger’s reactions aren’t always so positive. In a moving essay on Transparental, Michel – who gave birth to two daughters before beginning his transition to manhood – writes about being confronted by a woman in a cafe who took him to be a Dangerous Stranger with his girls, until the little one called him “Mommy”. After a decade of parenting as a woman, he’s seeing the other side of this sexist coin.
It’s safe to say that we parents have our young kids’ best interests in mind. And based on those best interests, we parent accordingly.
However, results of a national parent survey show that a majority of parents don’t have a good grasp of what exactly those best interests are, especially in the early years. For example, only 31 percent of those surveyed think 6-month-old babies experience fear or sadness. Meanwhile, a robust body of research shows that they can.
Wait, there’s more (I know, I know: sound the guilt trip alarm): Continue reading »
Share and share alike. Fifty-fifty. Half-and-half. Seems like a good idea, whether you’re a couple of kids at recess with a single playground ball or divorced parents figuring out custody of your kids. That’s what lawmakers in Tennessee think, anyway. House bill 2916 would require children’s time to be evenly divided between couples who cannot agree on a custody agreement.
A few days ago, my 9-year-old commented on how her brand new jeans were feeling kind of tight. When I told her that she was probably going through yet another growth spurt, she got quiet. After a long pause, she told me that her papa had suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t eat so much. I know for a fact that what he really told her was that she shouldn’t eat so much candy and that it was her teeth he was concerned about, not her weight. But as I told him later that evening, it doesn’t really matter what he said, it’s what she heard that counts. And she heard that she eats too much. Continue reading »
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