Lessons from 15 years as a stay-at-home father By Shannon Carpenter Illustration of a man holding hands with two kids to >quizzical looks from others Illustration by Pat Thomas for The Atlantic November 24, 2023
When I first became a stay-at-home dad, 15 years ago, people didn’t know how to categorize me: I was called a babysitter, “that guy at story time,” and even a woman a couple of times by shirttail relatives and friends. Their words were patronizing and unnecessarily feminizing, but they didn’t diminish my love of being a father. Over time, I raised three kids while my wife advanced in the advertising world. She negotiated contracts; I negotiated naptime. She worked hard to bring in new clients; I worked hard to raise our children. The division of labor has benefited our individual strengths: We both agree that I’m more patient while she is more business-savvy.
Yet, after all this time, many people still can’t compute that I’m my kids’ primary caregiver. Several years ago, as I was fetching my youngest child from preschool, a kid asked the teacher why my son was always picked up by his father; the teacher explained that I was a “daddy-mommy.” As I wrote this article, I learned that I’d missed the sign-up for the same child’s parent-teacher conference because I never got the email. My wife did, even though she barely interacts with the school.
I wish I could be surprised that this kind of confusion hasn’t gone away. I live just outside Kansas City, Missouri, in a rather progressive part of the Midwest where people tend to accept those who buck traditionally gendered roles. In 2021, the proportion of American fathers who were stay-at-home parents was 7 percent, up from 5 percent in 2020; dads account for 18 percent of all stay-at-home parents. Still, I’ve come to believe that a gradual increase in the number of stay-at-home dads alone won’t alter people’s perceptions. Two problems also need solving: policies that discourage men from being involved parents, and a cultural misunderstanding about men doing care work.
Let’s start with paternity leave. Denmark offers a year of paid leave that is split between a child’s parents. Swedish parents get 480 days of paid leave between them. These systems come with their own complications. But the American counterpart is paltry: The Family and Medical Leave Act provides only 12 weeks of unpaid time off, for mothers or fathers—and applies only to certain employees at certain companies. When new mothers aren’t even guaranteed paid time off from work after birth, it’s hard to imagine fathers taking time too—in some cases, they might need to provide the family’s only income while a mother recuperates and cares for a newborn. The result is that fathers, from the very start of a child’s life, tend to be seen as the secondary parent. This too often sends the message to new dads—and to other men—that child-rearing is not the father’s main job.
For a rich country like the U.S., these parental-leave policies are a travesty. However, paid time off at a child’s birth is the bare minimum required for fathers to be active in their kids’ lives. We also need to address society’s perception of what kind of labor can lead to a fulfilling life for men.
A vehicle for this could be some of the many caregiving fields that have a labor shortage. Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the author of Of Boys and Men, and the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has advocated for a “massive national effort to get men to move into jobs in the growing fields of health, education, administration, and literacy.” He argues that having more men in occupations like therapy, nursing, and teaching would not just fill jobs but provide a broader social good, by modeling that men can be caregivers. Reeves points out that federal funding has increased the number of women in STEM professions by providing grants, scholarships, and direct aid to women. The same funding could be provided to place men in fields such as nursing and teaching. The number of male nurses has increased by 59 percent over the past decade. But currently, only 12 percent of nurses are men, and 11 percent of elementary-school teachers are men.
To Reeves, there are real benefits to men when they are cared for or taught by other men. They may be more receptive to a male therapist, and thus more likely to get help, for instance. But doing care work rewards the giver, not just the receiver. Studies show that people who actively choose to provide care may experience a decrease in stress and a greater sense of social connectedness. Dads experience caregiving benefits in specific ways: One study found that when a group of fathers cradled their premature newborns against their bare chests for the first time, they experienced a decrease in both blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. In general, when men become fathers, their testosterone tends to decrease, a change that increases empathy while lessening aggression, writes Linda Nielsen, the author of Myths and Lies About Dads: How They Hurt Us All and a professor of adolescent and educational psychology at Wake Forest University. In short, it can be both psychologically and physiologically healthy for men to care for others.
My hope is that policy and societal changes will benefit all fathers in the long run, no matter the particular caregiving structure in their family. But for stay-at-home dads who might feel marooned or misunderstood in their experience now, the best recommendation I can offer is joining a dads’ group. These are locally organized small associations of fathers—and not just at-home ones—who might meet regularly for playdates with kids or hangouts without them. The groups are an ideal way for men to bond over their parenting experiences and mentor one another: My group and I discuss everything from automobile engines to potty training. I have been a member for my entire time as a father; the community has both cared for me and taught me how to care for others. When I was in the hospital with my wife for the birth of my youngest son, one of the fathers in my group took care of my older kids, while other dads brought food over for the next month. Just recently, we discussed strategies for teaching my 16-year-old son to drive, ahead of his upcoming test.
For all the chaos it created, the pandemic gave many fathers more unexpected family time, even if they weren’t full-time caregivers like me. It opened many fathers’ eyes to a new approach to parenting. But too many people still see men caring for others—be they one’s own kids or a wider community—as an implausible vocation. I’d like friends, extended family, and our kids’ teachers to recognize how fulfilling being a stay-at-home dad can be. And I’d like fathers to see that caregiving can be a joy for them, too.
A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.
And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
They come and go. They’re random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that’s it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
I’m drawing a compromise with the argument that she makes content that dogwhistles right wing talking points.
Compromise is only valuable when the positions the compromise seeks to find ground between are both equally honest positions. And calling her “right wing dogwhistle content” is anything but. It’s just a dishonest excuse to discredit her for not perfectly riding the approved narrative. And just to add onto it, the guy who posted the video was immediately banned for it. Compromise isn’t the goal it seems. It’s to throw out and discredit dissent.
Leftism isnt an obligation, no, but we are on solarpunk
No, we’re on lemmy.ca. Just because the mod is on solar punk, it doesn’t mean that the community is. And lemmy.ca makes no claims of being a leftist instance, just a Canadian one.
Sorry, it’s been a tough couple of weeks and I was just frustrated. Layoffs finally got to me in the aftermath of the actors strike (leaderships reasoning, not mine because I actually saw what was going on internally).
I can’t tell sometimes if I’m trading one echo chamber for another. Reality is just bizarre sometimes. I had someone arguing with me about code in a video game. I wrote the code almost 10 years ago. I know reddit was just as bad, if not worse for that “loudest persons right” way of commenting. Usually it gets mixed in with a dash of hive mentality.
I know those points are all loosely related, I’m exhausted after working insane hours through the year with no vacation just to be dumped before the holidays. I need to unplug for a week or two I think.
Edit: Wait, about the comment I replied to? Yeah my bad. I’ve been avoiding disagreeing with people directly after I got harassed several months ago. I was really happy with that person’s comment, I was just a miserable prick at the time. I had to leave some communities and almost nuked my account when another lemmy instance unleashed their bots: every post I would walk into would be targeted and voted down into oblivion. You’d lose all visibility within a short period of time.
I’m not sure if there’s been work done since to address this, but I totally understand if they’re still not ready to tackle it. They are a volunteer crew after all. I should follow the repo on Github. Maybe there’s some small stuff I could help out with while I’m looking for work.
Mastodon will hopefully naturally grow as twitter continues to destroy itself. Lemmy might be a bit harder get people to stick with.
If they can find an instance that really fits them, or most of their communities are here, then it should be an easy transition. But if they’re missing their favorites, it’ll be tough to get them to stick with it.
You need to inform your instance that such a community exists. Usually, it's enough to type the URL https://kbin.social/m/OriginalDocuments into the search bar while logged in on Reddthat.
Ive been in a s4s with a guy for a few years after chatting on a reddit share for share community and he went dark a few weeks back so I’m looking for a new s4s partner to help bridge content....
See the pinned post in !communityPromo for some tips on finding communities. If there isn’t one that fits, this is probably the best instance for you to make that community
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
I’ve wondered wtf is up with that instance. Someone floods certain communities - apple on hardware.watch for instance - with endless tech support questions, like pages and pages of them a day. Steamdeck on hardware.watch for instance has a dozen posts in the last 5 minutes, so it’s a ridiculous flood.
A few of the accounts seem more legitimate than others and actually have a history, but most just have 1 post. The questions aren’t badly written and I wonder where they come from - don’t sound like LLM, but I just don’t believe at all that 8,000 random people signed up at this Alien instance and want to ask one tech related question and then disappear. The content doesn’t seem harmful or scammy, though, they’re all things a normal person might post. Is the content copied from reddit? Is this someone’s idea of kickstarting these Lemmy communities? It’s all a bit odd.
Anyway it’s a limited number of communities these apparent bots post to, so I simply blocked those communities.
Some other instances that have come to mind: slrpnk.net - Seems like something of a natural fit considering they are also the home of !twoxchromosomes which is roughly the same size and number of active users lemmy.world - This is a fairly general community and so it makes some sense to be on a fairly general instance
I was on GitLab for a time (and still keep the account for following stuff and maybe contributions), but felt it wasn’t as free and community focused as I would have liked to, so I decided to move away and went to Gitea (the hosted instance), shortly after I discovered Codeberg which aligns with my ideals even more, so I went to try it and it stuck.
The UI isn’t that bad in my opinion and it’s more responsive than GitLab’s, so I appreciate it.
Not to say that it’s the perfect platform of course, at least not yet, I miss GitLab for the easy actions/CI and deployment of pages, but I’m hoping that Forgejo actions will land soon enough and make things better.
Note: recently I found out a userstyle that tries to modernize the UI by following a Material You-like interface called Gitea Modern, don’t know if it’s still holding up since it’s been archived
I think it’s due to lemmy.world defederating from some of the louder instances that I’ve seen way less content of that nature. Not 0 of it, but at least it’s not shouting over the top of every single post I see while browsing the All Communities list.
Funny thing is… you can still find it with duckduckgo, search.brave.com, qwant, searx…
plus even on google, you can click any of the first several links - including wikipedia - and the link is easy to find. sadly ‘reddit pirate bay’ is easy to find TPB link from but ‘lemmy pirate bay’ doesn’t have TPB link without more searching (and even more sad, the first result isn’t dbzer0 but a community on the ml instance)
If I can’t go to Risa from .world, I’ll just change instances. Risa is one of the most important communities for me. I’m a moderator on Lemmy Shitpost, which I wouldn’t be anymore, but I was made one without being asked anyway, so that’s more their concern than mine.
I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:
It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.
Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.
A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.
And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.
As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.
Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.
This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.
You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).
So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.
Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.
And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.
What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:
the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.
e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.
IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]
NOTES:1. Since this is already a huge wall of text I didn’t go deep on each of those claims, but I can do so if desired/requested. 2. It’s sweet but poisonous. 3. Because in Reddit you can’t “migrate your sub to another Reddit instance”, and the only instance there happens to be administered by arsehats who give no fucks about you or your sub. It’s a dirtier situation that warrants dirtier solutions. 4. Anecdote exemplifying this claim: from 2020~22 I had multiple trolling accounts in Reddit, to shitpost in cooking subs (for some puzzling reason they’re cesspools). Guess how many times this sort of “you need more karma to post here” barrier locked me out? Zero. It’s simply too easy to comment some shitty one-line in a big community (I used r/askreddit for that) and amass 500, sometimes 2k karma points in a single go. 5. If instance admins do not have access to the IPs of the users engaging with their instances, regardless of where they registered in, that should be fixed.
If someone is feeling sad about the normalization of ChatGPT posts, it’s understandable that they might be expressing concern or disappointment about a change they perceive in the nature of discussions or interactions involving ChatGPT. Here are a few things you might say:
Acknowledge Their Feelings: Start by acknowledging their feelings. You might say, “I understand that you’re feeling sad about the normalization of ChatGPT posts. It’s okay to feel that way, and I’m here to listen.”
Encourage Communication: Encourage them to share more about why they feel this way. Open-ended questions like “Can you tell me more about what’s bothering you?” can invite them to express their thoughts.
Offer Understanding: Let them know that it’s normal for people to have different perspectives on changes, and it’s okay to express their opinions. You might say, “It’s completely okay to have mixed feelings about changes, especially when it comes to how ChatGPT is used.”
Express Empathy: Show empathy by expressing that you understand their concerns. For example, “I can see why the normalization of ChatGPT posts might be disheartening for you. Changes can be challenging, especially when they affect something we care about.”
Highlight Positives: If there are positive aspects or potential benefits of ChatGPT posts, you can share those as well. For instance, “While the normalization of ChatGPT posts might bring changes, it’s also an opportunity for diverse discussions and perspectives to emerge.”
Suggest Alternatives: If applicable, suggest alternative platforms or communities where they might find the type of content or discussions they prefer.
Encourage Adaptation: Remind them that change is a constant part of life, and adapting to new circumstances can lead to new and positive experiences.
Remember to approach the conversation with empathy and an open mind, allowing the person to express their feelings and thoughts freely.
Good thing I checked, I was going to just insult you.
I realise it’s Lemmy so while the majority of my comments are sharing information or suggesting people consider and respect other perspectives, at least one person will slice it up, misconstrue it, go hard on straw man fallacies, and then try place me in a tribe they’re at war with, all the while doing their best to appear righteous. Suddenly I am a person that has these wild opinions and thoughts I didn’t even know were a thing. Some of the effigies created are disturbing and it’s a concern that people’s minds do that, and they’re oblivious to it and therefore their behaviour toward others.
Bonus points if they actually agree with me without noticing—happens a lo— because reading and digesting comments isn’t something people do on a platform that reinforces tribalism by design (instances, communities, anonymity). Assuming agenda, bias, or opinion and never input, discussion, or information, is a trait of a Lemmington. The cascade runaway of pointless voting systems are a controlling factor. The opportunity to feel like Jesus to four other users, always just around the corner.
So I post it anyway because I don’t give a shit and, anthropologically, it.clearly fascinates me. Plus I don’t want the eggshells of people that have socially stunted themselves to impact my liberty to discourse. At the least they may manage to pull their head out of their arse and learn to respect other’s.
and I will not ask for the meaning of 20047 or the Englishy greenish color 😉
It’s NO in ASCII and I’m not a native English speaker… and this thing doesn’t have auto correct, underline or suggestions 😒 (Jerboa).
The correct way to share a community on Lemmy (so that apps recognize it as a Lemmy community) is with an exclamation mark, as in your last example. The search in Jerboa (as is with other apps) is broken, doesn’t work like it should. Use the web UI search on your instance, you’ll find the community.
You put “quotes” around “feature” as though it is a bug. My instance (the user you are responding to is also a member of Blahaj) does not support downvotes and it is one of the reasons I signed up for it. So, I do feel it is a feature and not a bug.
Here’s a long explanation about why I feel that way:
I think people should be allowed to be wrong on the internet without having a huge negative number hovering over their head. If they’re wrong, people should go to the comments and say why. People absolutely care about that dumb number, and to pretend they won’t or shouldn’t is just not how humans work.
If a comment is controversial, it’s upvote/downvote will be neutral and it’ll get lost. Controversial comments should be read so discussion can form around it.
If the post should be downvoted to oblivion because it’s toxic or offtopic, it should be removed instead.
I feel that downvotes are only useful if the community needs to collectively use it to moderate (I’d argue it had a purpose on Youtube, before they removed it. It could be abused, but it was useful to fight misinformation or product marketing disguised as content).
Lessons from 15 years as a stay-at-home father (www.theatlantic.com)
If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing (fosstodon.org)
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
What is the point of small instances?
They come and go. They’re random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and that’s it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
Tradwife stereotypes are making male loneliness worse (www.salon.com)
Microchips (i.postimg.cc)
Is there a Lemmy stats site?
Is there a Lemmy stats site?...
Bringing the power of books to the fediverse (lemmy.world)
Aye mateys, I wanted to share this with you as you may be interested in a discussion on having annas-archive linked to the fedi....
OriginalDocuments - the actual thing, without editorializing (kbin.social)
Original Documents...
Sneaking more Babylon 5 references into risa, please ignore (programming.dev)
Making my first Lemmy post because this moment in my DS9 rewatch made me think of you all....
We need to stop attempts to normalize grind/hustle lifestyle (literature.cafe)
Most people are killing their selves with third jobs to share apartments.
is there a Plex S4S community
Ive been in a s4s with a guy for a few years after chatting on a reddit share for share community and he went dark a few weeks back so I’m looking for a new s4s partner to help bridge content....
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
Discussion on moving to another instance
I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while of moving to another instance for a while for two reasons:...
India blocks GitHub, after lobbying done by copyright trolls (torrentfreak.com)
Who cares if nobody can work, the important is that those illegal streams are blocked
Weapons of Gas Production (lemmy.today)
Pirate Bay URL Disappears from Google Knowledge Panel in 'Blocked' Regions (torrentfreak.com)
deleted_by_author
Please reconsider removing user aggregate scores from the API (github.com)
Is your proposal related to a problem?...
Finally, someone who understands me. (lemmy.world)
At least you didn’t post it (i.imgur.com)
Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook?
Hello,...
Linus does not fuck around (lemmy.one)
An oldie, but a goodie
OpenSSH is about to change. (For the better.) (youtu.be)
OpenSSH’s ssh-keygen command just got a great upgrade....