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Life with Chinese characteristics: We are here, living with attitude
vol.10 Full-time fathers who take on the responsibility of childcare
"The most useless mother and baby product in the world is Daddy."
When "Strange Story" produced this golden sentence, it became a necessary stem for mothers to complain about for a while. "Widowed parenting" is like the norm in most families, and the absent one seems to be always the father.
However, in recent years, I have made some different discoveries:
Mainly in first-tier cities, some men began to make different choices - suspending their careers, supporting their wives to enter the workplace, actively sharing most of the child-rearing tasks, and becoming a full-time father who was "male and female".
Our Marriage
Don't go out to earn money to support your family, cook at home every day with a baby? Is such a full-time dad a representative of soft rice, or a pioneer light?
When I was a stay-at-home dad, I knew,
It's so much harder to take a baby with than to work!
@Gaga Dad is the second | Coordinates: Beijing | Rental area: 140㎡
Becoming a stay-at-home dad: 1 year and 6 months
Xiao Er decided to become a full-time father when he was still more than two months away from his wife's due date. The company was crumbling because of the epidemic, so he resigned naked at home and took care of the mother full-time.
Despite the risks, he didn't see it as a sacrifice, just said: My lover loves her job, and I don't want her to give up. Now God has helped us make a decision, which is a good thing.
In short, in a family where the elderly on both sides cannot help take care of it, letting one of them stay at home full-time is a choice that Xiao Er and his wife must make.
Before giving birth to a baby, Xiao Er was very concerned about the family, and the housework was not less worrying. I thought that with a baby, housework was just a doubling of things. Who knew that when the child fell to the ground, he realized that he had greatly underestimated the fatigue of "parenting".
He said: The degree of hard work is unimaginable before, and there is no moment of idleness from the moment you wake up. When The baby is awake, he should take care of his eating, drinking, and playing, and when the baby is asleep, he should prepare for his eating, drinking, and playing.
Small two schedule: My lover can leave work at four o'clock, is coordinated with the unit to leave work two hours early every day, of course, the income is also reduced, this is no way.
The hardest time was the first time of fatherhood. From anxiety, to fire to anxiety, in the face of his son's tearing heart and lungs crying, Xiao Er was often helpless.
The days of the seconds were like years, and he deeply experienced it at that time. One minute, two minutes, three minutes... In his words: Counting the minutes through the day, I hope that my lover will hurry home.
In order to make it easier for the lover to run less and to facilitate the feeding of the child, the xiaoer family simply rented for rent, rented out their own house, and rented a new home near the lover's unit. It only takes 15 minutes for your lover to go from work to home.
Coupled with the spacious area of the new home, the climbing mat that could not be put down before finally has room to be displayed in the new home. The second child said: The place is big, and the child quickly learns to climb.
· Even if it is a rented home, Xiao Er is also well packed.
In the year and a half of being a stay-at-home dad, there was a lot of pressure. The lover's salary has to bear the daily expenses, coupled with the pressure of the mortgage, there are indeed times when the income is not enough.
But fortunately, Xiao Er has received a lot of support. The lover fully affirms his full-time performance, and his parents also believe that parenting is a shared responsibility for both husband and wife.
"The Master's Apartment"
In the face of praise, Xiao Er did not look too seriously, but responded lightly: My lover is not easy, working a day during the day, taking over the child after work, and having to breastfeed at night, in fact, she is much harder than me, I still try to do more is some.
Suspend the work of tens of thousands of monthly income,
I became the only male in the Mom Group.
@Dudu | Coordinates: Guangdong, Guangzhou | Rental area: 147㎡
Becoming a Stay-at-Home Dad: 1 year
Before becoming a full-time dad, Du Du lived in Beijing as a beauty shop owner and led a team of 7 people.
Because of the birth of his daughter, coupled with the epidemic, he closed the Taobao store and disbanded the team. With the transfer of his lover's work, he came to live in Guangzhou, while receiving individual customer orders, while concentrating on taking the baby at home.
In 2015, Dudu was also on a TV show because he worked as a beauty shop, and his monthly sales had reached hundreds of thousands.
Due to the fact that he only did the business of regular customers, Du Du's business was reduced from nearly 100 orders a day to more than a dozen orders. The economic income has lost a lot, just enough to subsidize life, but Dudu believes that such a choice is just a matter of course.
He said: My daughter-in-law is in the advertising industry, and leaving too long is not good for her career development. She likes to work and doesn't like to stay at home, so I'll take on the full-time parenting job.
For Dudu, the most insufficient thing for a stay-at-home dad is time.
His day's schedule is densely packed, starting with breakfast at 8 o'clock, and when the family goes to work, work and baby are constantly alternating, and there is almost no time to stop completely.
It wasn't until the family arrived home at 7:30 p.m. to take over that Du Du was able to go into the kitchen to make some hard dishes. He said: No exaggeration, if I am really tired, I will have to save the bowl for two days and then wash it.
For this complicated life, Dudu described it as "difficult but not difficult, it is hard. What's worse is that it makes you feel like you're busy at the end of the day, but it's like you're not doing anything."
Japanese drama "Male Copywriter, Take "Parental Leave""
In order to regain a little time of his own, after the family members go to bed with their children at 9 o'clock in the evening, Dudu will stay in the study, read, write articles, or hang out with friends.
This year, he was used to going to bedtime with a must-see episode of The Simpsons and not going to bed until 1 a.m.
· Lee Seung-hyun has also expressed the same feelings in variety shows, consuming a lot of time, but it seems that nothing has been done.
The identity of a full-time grandfather has allowed Du Du to completely subvert the way of life in the past.
He said: I used to be unable to stay at home, I had to socialize every day, I couldn't cook without housework, and I wouldn't help the oil bottle when it fell. With my daughter, it has changed completely, I cook and do housework, offline social networking is gone, and the new people I know are almost all the mothers of the community.
· Taking her daughter to early childhood education classes alone
Du Du is like a maverick being, as the only male, breaking into the bao mama group, exchanging some parenting experience from time to time, and pulling some business to his beauty shop.
For the earth-shaking changes in himself, Dudu feels that everything is developing in a better direction.
He confessed that his daughter had greatly improved his patience and concentration. When he was a dad this year, he finished "Erya" at a rate of 2 hours a day, and the intimacy index also rose sharply. Because he was too intoxicated with the baby, he could not spend the 3,000 yuan of pocket money given by his family every month.
· Self-study of "Erya" at night
We must say what "shortcomings" are that he fell in love with Meng Tingwei this year. He suddenly understood the love songs of those idiots and others. Waiting for people to go home is sad, and this year can also be experienced.
He said with a smile: Last year, the song list generated by NetEase Cloud Music for me was all Meng Tingwei's songs, which used to only feel good, but now there are a lot of mood resonances.
Du Du's NetEase cloud music song list at a glance
Became a stay-at-home dad,
I have a deep understanding of the difficulty of women.
Compared with the baby, the most difficult moment for DuDu is actually the pain of the lover's fertility.
In the third trimester of pregnancy, the lover caught up with the painful and unbearable pubic separation phase II, and it was so uncomfortable that it was difficult to even turn over. At that time, Dudu had to get up in the middle of the night to help her turn over.
"Kim Ji-young, born in 1982"
I thought that I would finish unloading the goods, but I had a heavy bleeding after childbirth.
Dudu recalled, "Just after giving birth, I was bleeding heavily, 1300 ml of blood, and people almost died!" For the first time, I saw blood gushing out like a toddler spring, and my legs were so weak that I slipped out. Scared, so scared that I can't cry."
· Dudu's lover is in postpartum rescue
Dudu, who witnessed the suffering of childbirth, took on most of the housework in later days.
"I still remember when I was confinement, the child cried loudly, and when the mother's emotions also collapsed, she was also crying on the side. I could only appease two people at the same time and slowly began to take on most of the parenting responsibilities," Sayudu said.
Also thanks to the experience of stay-at-home dads, Xiao Er also seems to be closer to women.
He said, "Stay-at-home dads, as a minority, will inevitably get more attention and more likely to get praise." I was also in the middle of it, and I knew how difficult invisible stay-at-home moms were, even harder than dads. Hats off to them."
Even if the "full-time baby" thing is full of hardships, these full-time fathers seem to have a sense of lightness.
As one stay-at-home dad dissected:
When a woman becomes a stay-at-home mom, people are more certain of her husband's financial responsibilities than they are about her efforts. Just as when a man becomes a stay-at-home dad, people see more of the "sacrifice" of being a man than they do about the women who walk alongside him. Most stay-at-home dads are active choices, while most stay-at-home moms don't.
"Parenting is a shared responsibility of both parents", such a universal statement sentence, in fact, also hides too many invisible prejudices.
Prejudice may not disappear immediately, but I'm happy to see another possibility in these stay-at-home dads – seeing women, caring for women, and breaking the solid narrative that "mom is the main parent" in practice.
Talk Show Conference
These men, who broke through the traditional family division of labor, are undoubtedly a brave minority. And I always believe that when a small number accumulates, perhaps one day, the division of family roles will no longer be full of stereotyped gender biases, but only sharing, understanding and understanding, and sincere choices made according to personal will.
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