Parenting Like a Man

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

As the father of two girls, the phrase "you throw like a girl" makes my skin crawl. Boys have no intrinsic advantages in tossing a baseball. The only real difference is that boys tend to be handed baseballs more often than girls. Girls -- strong-armed as they are -- are taking back the phrase as a source of pride, and you can now get all sort of athletic apparent emblazoned with the "throw like a girl" motif.

Along the same lines, "parenting like a dad" has long had a derogatory ring that harkens back to a stereotype -- cemented into the collective unconscious in 1983 with Mr. Mom -- of the bumbling fathers. But now we are also beginning to take the phrase back.

The latest in this welcome and overdue effort comes from Men's Health, which is running a lengthy piece titled "Raise Kids Like a Man."

It's written in the typical Men's Health style, with a breathless tone and an ample dose of sports metaphors. The underlying message is crystal clear, and one I can get behind 100 percent -- real men can parent on their own terms.

The advice dispensed, stripped of tough-guy rhetoric, is solid whether you're a mom or a dad: Teach the kids to do laundry. Give them time to solve their own problems. Learn to grocery shop really, really fast.

But what bothered me, actually, was that to establish a new paradigm that makes fathering something to aspire to, the author built all kinds of stereotypes about how moms parent. The strawmen (or strawwomen) he conjures don't hold up very well. I don't know any parent, regardless of gender, who likes to futz around Giant for an hour and a half. And the idea that mothers are somehow more tolerant of crocodile tears or more resistant to befriending their children borders on silly.

There has been some legitimate research to suggest that fathers may -- in the aggregate -- parent a little differently from mothers, but that research tends to emphasize that "different" doesn't mean "better" in any qualitative sense.

So with Father's Day on the horizon, I'm left wondering if there is really a "male" style of parenting or if the whole deal is mostly a well-intentioned effort to get men more involved. The longer I do the kid-rearing thing, the fewer distinctions I see between the sexes. Good parenting is good parenting, regardless of whether you use football metaphors to explain it.

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

By Brian Reid |  June 7, 2007; 7:40 AM ET  | Category:  Dads
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