It's Fine To Thank The Father Of Your Child, Obviously

Anti-dad-ism is just another way the internet is trying to make you a miserable person

Writer and thinktanker Inez Stepman has gotten a lot of flak this week for taking to X to thank her husband for doing a morning shift with the baby when she had a headache. For context, he had also done the late night feed the night before, and the morning would’ve usually been Inez’s turn. Some explicit or unofficial system like this – “you cook, I clean” – is a perfectly normal way for a married couple, or even for roommates, to make sure no one person is doing too much at the expense of the other. You can’t reason with a baby after all, and doing things this way, I can tell you on my daughter’s six month birthday, is just a practical way to make sure they’d both gotten sufficient sleep.

The comments under Stepman's tweet were nothing short of nuts. It was a cascade of scathing, judgmental remarks that seemed to encapsulate the very worst of online dad discourse, which often treats dads as the butt of the joke about how useless and thoughtless they all are. One of them reads, "We've been divorced for a while at this point, but still every day I feel gratitude that the father of my children loves actually being a father and I never once have had to ‘thank’ him for simply participating in parenthood." It's a wonder why they got divorced, right? But in all seriousness, Inez’s husband seems like a wonderful father. And she seems like a wonderful wife for recognizing that, in their shared parental duties, he picked up the slack when she was unable to. And then she shared that feeling of gratitude online, like so many people share their throwaway thoughts.

Among the hundreds of snarky replies, mainly about how us women should never thank men for doing their fair share with children, was one Emily May, who said, “actually the problem is that most men are not good and helpful in comparison to women. We just want men to be as helpful as we are,” adding, “we just want a helpful and attentive partner who wants to make our lives easier, because that's what being a wife means to us.”

Since becoming a parent six months ago today, one of the most surprising parts of being a mum is how much I’ve learned it must suck being a dad. They can’t win. When I was pregnant I was warned by other mothers about how much I would probably hate my husband for the first few months, because they did. This ranged from being resentful about how the father can’t be physically helpful with breastfeeding, to the fact that having a husband is “dead weight,” with some mums telling me it felt like they had two kids to look after. And while this wasn’t my experience, I was in no way perfect in those first few weeks in how I treated my husband.

When we brought our baby home, the physical reaction we had to our infant’s screams was so different that I literally couldn’t understand why my husband wasn’t as freaked out and heartbroken as I was whenever she cried. There was about a week there where I got mad at him whenever she cried for not crying too, like I was. It turns out that he wasn’t wired to; that was my job.

And then I realized that he was changing in other ways. The house was always clean, the fridge always full, and he became my personal assistant for the next few months. We split night feeds and have always tried to do everything totally half and half. But when that wasn’t possible, the other one stepped up. And you’re damn sure that we thanked one another when that happened. I remember a time when my baby was a few weeks old and I was writing a book review with a short turnaround. My husband spent the whole day bouncing a screaming baby at the other side of the house while I tried to muffle the noise and do some work and my thanks was complaining to him that I could hear her crying.

As for Emily’s comment about men not being helpful, I think that as modern mothers we have fallen into expecting men to be like us. Most dads now are very involved in their children’s lives, something that wasn’t the case as recently as twenty years ago. I know stay-at-home dads who got more paternity leave than their wives. But that doesn’t mean that they think like us, and it’s a mistake to expect them to.

One fight my husband and I had about a month after Daphne was born was over a car. My husband is a lifelong Car Guy, you see, and he long ago learned that whatever they may say in movies and pop songs, women don’t actually care about fast or fancy cars. So he knew I’d be annoyed when, with both of us already stretched to the limit trying to adapt to our new lives as parents, suddenly he told me a new sports car was showing up on a truck. What the hell? I asked him.

Turns out, in his male brain, it had been driving him nuts that we only had one reliable car, our pickup truck, that could get down the long dirt road we live on. His car from before meeting me, a fun little hatchback, had popped a tire the day after we brought the baby home from the hospital and was sitting, unusable, in the driveway. What if our one vehicle was dead or stuck, and the baby needed to get to the doctor? Or what if one person was out, and that left the other without transport? Boy solution to this “problem set” (as he would put it): a sports car with a back seat.

Other boy concerns: he’d been arranging things with our house’s HVAC system upgrade, and our household finances, and seeking a raise. He had been training the mouthy one-year-old dog not to bite even gently, because she needed to be able to be trusted around the baby. He’d been thinking about babyproofing for when she starts crawling. He had not been complaining online that “women are not good and helpful in comparison to men.” He’d just identified problems as he understood them, which was very differently from how I did, and working on them.

Men and women are different, and that’s not just OK. It’s good. I’m glad my baby has a man looking out for her, and her mother. Thankful, even. I still think the sports car is stupid, though.