daycares want to deal with the mom, not the dad

When my husband and I began touring day-care centers for our baby, we brought along a list of questions. We asked about outside time and whether screens were ever used in the classroom; we asked about teacher turnover and discipline policies. One question we didn’t ask — the answer to which would be the reason we withdrew our son, after only his second day, from the day care we waited months for a spot in — was whether they explicitly supported equal parenting.

On my son’s first day, the director added me to what I assumed was the family text group. She shared pictures of the children playing with toys and a video of them playing outside. Later that evening, while cooing over our sweet babe and wondering whether he’d enjoyed the day after the brief jag of crying at drop-off, my husband said he hadn’t received the messages. Assuming an oversight on the center director’s part, I sent her a message asking her to add my husband to the communication. She responded that the communication was only for mothers. I could screenshot and send him anything that was relevant, but she would not add him to the thread.

After much back and forth, the director held fast: She sent messages only to mothers, it was how she’d always done things, and she was adamant that her policy would not change simply because our family didn’t like it. My husband and I decided to remove our son from her care.

Fathers today are more engaged than any generation in history. Fifty-seven percent of them (compared with 58 percent of mothers) say parenting is extremely important to their identity, according to the Pew Research Center; they spend three times the amount of time on child care than fathers did in 1965. Yet mothers still spend significantly more time physically caring for their children than fathers do — 14 hours per week vs. eight for men. Family circumstances and personal preferences play into how parents split up the work, but deeply ingrained biases toward women as caretakers and men as breadwinners make it nearly impossible for women to avoid the role of the default parent.

In our situation, the day-care director was explicit in her belief that moms should be the ones receiving, interpreting and remembering information. For many families, the onus placed on women appears more covertly.

Megan Thibeault, who works in the dental industry and lives in North Carolina, says the institutional assumptions that she would be the primary parent started early. “For most of my kids’ lives, my husband has been the one at home or working from home, so he knows their schedules much better than me,” Thibeault says. “When we would go to check-ups together when they were infants, the doctor would ask me questions and, after I referred them to him to answer, since he was the one at home, they would continue to address me as if I knew more than him.” Her husband, Jacob Thibeault, who is self-employed, says, “It often feels like if the nurses or doctors do talk to me, they’re talking to me like I’m on babysitting duty.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-child-has-two-parents-why-does-day-care-call-only-me/2018/09/25/6b6e46b0-b076-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html?utm_term=.c45f3ff61d15