Tag Team Parenting

If you are lucky, you have an active, involved, supportive, everyday parenting partner. Even if you don’t, you have many other partners among your family, friends, and community.

So, go ahead and tag-team with your partners! They help you learn and vice versa. Before you can be a full tag team partner, however, you may have to surrender some stale ideas about what Daddies are supposed to do.

Yes, Daddies do do dishes—and diapers and laundry and cooking.
Outdated attitudes about dividing things up by “women’s work” and “men’s work” simply don’t cut the mustard if you want to be a truly involved dad getting the most out of fathering. The only parenting task you cannot do is breastfeed. You’re capable of doing anything and everything else.

So, take on an equal (if not a bit more than equal) load of the everything else that must be done.

The two of you are putting your primary energies into the baby herself, as you should. But meals still need to be cooked, clothes washed, dishes done, and floors vacuumed. You are all better off if both of you can handle the most essential tasks around the house.

Do half the work, all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. You’ll need to figure out with your wife what this means. I hate doing laundry and she hates cleaning the bathroom and mopping floors. So she does most of the laundry and I clean the bathroom and mop the floors. Change half the diapers. Give half the baths. Do half the feedings—if the baby isn’t breast-feeding, of course. Do half the night time rocking chair / baby walking duty. Always be a parent, never be a babysitter. – Chris

Adapted from The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Being an Expectant Father by Joe Kelly and used by permission.