:-) :-) :-)

He may agree with me on this particular thing, but I don’t intend to buy his book. Among other things:

“He believes men have the divine obligation to lead their families, and women have the divine obligation to submit to their husband’s authority” (Wikipedia)

He also believes that homosexuality can be “cured”, that “tolerance and diversity” should be avoided, etc. He’s really wacky on any number of issues, and really ought not to have the influence he does.

I wish I had my sociology textbook handy to look up some of the figures here. It is probably deep in a storage unit right now.

There are a huge number of single-parent households out there, both in the US and Europe. The vast majority of them are single-mom households. So it is true that, overall, moms are more inolved in children’s lives than dads are. Even in two-parent households, that is probably still the case since there are still more men that work full-time than women.

Research also shows that children benefit greatly from having two parents active in their lives. Given that we already have a problem with not enough fathers being involved, I’d have thought that people would be more excited to see dads involved, rather than sometimes more hostile and even afraid.

As for movements to promote the role of fathers in their childrens’ lives, in the United States at least, they all seem to be intertwined with other things as well, some of which I find distasteful. For instance, there is the Promise Keepers organization, which promotes strong marriages and involved fathers. But it also promotes the idea that wives should submit to husbands, takes a stand on abortion, etc. Some others are focused on equal rights for men in custody battles after divorce — an important thing, sure, but not really related to promoting fatherhood in intact families.

As a woman, my issue has always been sort of different — the assumption that women are all maternal, nurturing types is what I find offensive, but it is refreshing to hear your perspective on this.

I’m loathe to use statistics that I’m not sure about as a metric, but there does seem to be a higher percentage of men who aren’t involved in their children’s upbringing than women. Your experiences may not bear out these statistics, and it’s entirely possible (maybe likely?) that they are a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think at a basic level, the numbers are the numbers. I will see if I can actually dig some of those up later. :)

In any case, I have often wondered about men’s movements (or fathers’ movements) and why the ones that exist seem to … not actually try to improve men’s standing in this regard; or at least, why so few men seem to be involved.

I suppose about 2/3 of the people that ask about Jacob are women.

I think that maybe 50-60% of women don’t ask me about Jacob. Terah thinks the number is higher — more like 80%.

It’s more difficult to estimate how many men ask me about him when we’re both there, since there aren’t that many that come up and ask questions when we’re together. I think somewhere between 10-25% of men only ask Terah about Jacob.

With all of this, we don’t figure in people that only know one of us, or only have the opportunity to see one of us regularly (such as coworkers).

Two random questions out of curiosity. First, of the people who ask about the baby, what proportion of males to females would you guess at? Second, of the people who ignore you and only ask your wife about the baby, what proportion of males to females would you guess at? I would tend to suspect a few things leading to this result: first, that more females than males would tend to ask about the baby, and females might tend to ask a female rather than a male about the baby; second, that of the males who ask about the baby, while I suspect a higher proportion of them will include you, many of them might tend to ask a female about the baby, whether through stereotype, instinct, or prejudice.

Also, One random useful source for baby clothes mentioning fathers or just parents generically: ThinkGeek.

Also, these things that you see are clearly societal gender stereotypes.

For as long as I can count, these have been spoken as fact:
women are the ones who have the baby
men are the ones that work (and sometimes leave)
Men are the ones to discipline the kids.
Women nurture the kids
etc.

It will take a lot to make American and other societies think differently. It was only within the last 20 years that the ‘stay-at-home’ dad was born. Still courts favor women for custody because of these stereotypes. But it takes folks like you to keep the revolution alive!