It's hard to be excited about becoming a parent when I've got bills to pay

Men have been taught to look down on parenting and other forms of care work, which is our loss.

My partner and I have started trying to have a kid, and the loudest voice in my head isn’t love for her or excitement about becoming a father (though those voices are there too), it’s anxiety about money.

Do we have enough? Should I be working harder right now to save up for paternity leave? (Yes, I am.) What about the super expensive daycare I’ve heard about? What if the housing market craters? Is the economy about to crash?

These are valid questions, of course. We all need cash to put food on the table, because, you know, capitalism. And, you know, capitalism is an especially volatile economic system.

But there’s panic in that voice. An irrational level of worrying. An assumption that there’s some amount of money that will guarantee me and my family will be okay no matter what. An ugly, jet-black cloud covering the love and excitement I’m also feeling somewhere deep inside but struggling to actually feel.

Again, it makes sense to worry about money in a capitalist society. More and more of life is being commodified. Massive corporate monopolies, Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and billionaire-backed tech companies are destroying ways that humans banded together to meet our collective needs for thousands of years before capitalism. This Instagram post from a poet nails what we’re losing as AI is being rammed down our throats:

“It starts with a grocery list / a meal plan / “give me recipes for a family of four on a budget” / I think about asking my mother / what meals she made when funds were tight / but she probably won’t remember / this is quicker … I remember a time when / I had a community / felt closer to people / but this is faster / easier / more convenient / so it has to be better, right?”

So-called “traditional” gender roles aren’t traditional

It makes sense, but there’s also a way of thinking—an ideology—that many men assume is “natural,” “biological,” “traditional” for us to think. We’re supposed to be the provider, the protecter, the one who holds it down no matter what. The stoic, steady, solid, sturdy leader. Cavemen hunted and brought home the woolly mammoth bacon while cavewomen watched the kids and cleaned the cave, right?

No. Before a few hundred years ago, men and women worked alongside each other doing most of the same tasks. There wasn’t a strict divide between work done at home and work done at “work.” Parenting, caring for elders, tending to the sick, cooking, housecleaning, and other forms of domestic labor were often done communally by all members of a household, which often included people not in the family by blood.

This was true in both indigenous societies in the Global South—where it continues to be true in places capitalism hasn’t fully taken hold—and peasant societies in Europe. For example, before they were colonized, the Māori people indigenous to New Zealand gave fathers much responsibility for caring and nurturing kids.

It wasn’t until capitalist industrialization in the late 1800s when many working-class men were forced to work away from the home that so-called “traditional” gender roles became the expectation. Men went from working in and around the home beside women and kids to “sometimes [only seeing] their children on Sunday, and their wives for only five minutes a day,” as historian John Gillis writes in A World of Their Own Making. Men spent “very little time at home beyond eating and sleeping, preferring to pass the time after work with male friends in pubs and clubs. Those who involved themselves in housework were widely considered to be eccentric or effeminate.”

Think Don Draper from Mad Men. Tony Soprano. John Wayne. Clint Eastwood. The sitcom dad fumbling to change a diaper. Men’s men. Either earning money or hanging with the boys. Not seeing the house as a place where work is done, because changing diapers and folding laundry is “women’s work.” Seeing it only as a refuge from the “real” work out there in the rough, dangerous world of men. And judging other men who help at home—like most of the countless men who ever lived before capitalism—as “effeminate,” “queer,” “metrosexual,” “gay,” a “soy boy,” a “cuck,” or [insert the latest trendy misogynistic, homophobic slur here.]

That’s when our so-called “traditional” gender norms come from. Not the eons of human history but a relatively recent time in a very particular place, the late 1800s to mid 1900s in Europe and the U.S.

With men in far-off factories, fields, and mines, someone needed to stay home to do all that work previously handled as a family and community and raise the next generation of workers. This is when many women were cut off from public life and trapped in domestic duties. If they pushed back, they were told that changing diapers and cleaning floors was their feminine destiny. That they were naturally, biologically, traditionally meant to be soft, caring, and relational, skills that just so happen to be the ones needed for parenting and other care work at home.

Becoming a father with healthy perspective

How does all this help me today, when the reality is we live in capitalism and the little public investment in families we have in the U.S. is being taken away?

It shows me that how I think about spending time—what is valuable and what is worthless to be doing—has been distorted by an economic system that goes against my values.

It shows me that my tendency to focus on “real,” money-earning work over work at home, in my neighborhood, at my local public school, in the community is ideological, not natural or traditional.

It shows me that my resistance to helping change my niece’s diaper isn’t because it smells bad but because modern men have been taught to look down that kind of work.

It shows me that I’d be missing out on a challenging yet meaningful part of the human experience when I have a kid by overemphasizing my role as provider for my family.

Most of all, knowing this history gives me perspective. We’ll need money, yes. I love the work I do, yes (because I’m one of the lucky ones). Raising kids while both of us work full-time in a society not designed to support families will be really hard, yes. Folding laundry and cleaning baby puke and washing tons of dishes and constantly putting away toys and doing all the other tedious tasks of having a kid aren’t going to be fun, yes.

But the relational stuff, the calming a screaming baby, the play times, the meetings with teachers, the singing and crying and laughing, the birthday parties, the coordination with my partner—that stuff has tons of value. Even if society tells men otherwise.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments (or email me: jeremy@mohler.coach)—how do you feel about having kids? If you have kids, how do you balance work and parenting? What’s working for your family? What’s not working?

— Jeremy