After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the [...]
Browse the web about fatherhood and you might come to the conclusion that if parenting were a profession men wouldn’t be promoted beyond middle management. The glass ceiling would kick in at the moment of birth. If it were a country it would be a dictatorship where men wouldn’t get a vote. It’s an absolute fact that the industry is heavily dominated by mothers.
Laurie Tarkan has recently written a great article over at the New York Times about the mother father dynamic: it’s a team sport, both players share an equal if different role, and it’s the teamwork rather than the individual success that gets the best outcome. This topic is growing in popularity as scientists and psychologists put forward similar points of view. Fathering skills are being recognised as equally important to a child as mothering, but despite this fathers are still very much outside the conversation.
Here’s my insight: Jeremy is 34, his wife Ally is 36. They have an 18 month old daughter.
“I get so frustrated when he offers to look after her so I can go out but then calls me constantly to ask what to do” Ally declares. “I call her constantly because when I’m with her everything I do is wrong.” he counters. I know it’s true because I’ve seen it happen between them. Ally has set herself up as the expert, easy to do because Jeremy is the primary income earner and is around their daughter less. That’s a very traditional pattern established in many families, motherhood out paces fatherhood when measured purely in terms of time served. The mother is for the most part dominant.
Which makes the reason fathers are not a part of the picture pretty simple to work out, it’s all about purchasing decisions. The advertisers and marketers have worked out that women tend to make those decisions and so they have feminisied the parenting activity.
Look at some examples: female clothing stores have child sections, mens clothing stores do not. Baby stores are all soft pastels and soft furnishings. In supermarkets baby products are on the same isle as female oriented products. Online baby stores, forums and blogs are dominated by women and those damn pastel shades. I hate pastel shades. It all serves to make me feel unwelcome as a father. It makes me want to step back and let my wife buy what she wants. So is this self fulfilling marketing? If the marketing was being targeted at men baby shops would look like hardware stores and I’d be there every weekend.
What fathers need to do is ignore the marketing, to separate the practical reality from what the marketers want us to think it is. They would prefer our partners to make all the decisions because their sales budgets are being spent on targeting the spending habits of females. The advertising, product design, product placement and incentives are all geared at influencing a womans decision. On that basis a man is actually the better equipped to make the choices, we can make decisions free from the influence of marketing professionals.
I don’t like pastel shades. I prefer power tools to soft furnishings. I couldn’t care less what buggy the celebrities are wheeling their kids around in these days. I’m a father and I can shop.
Tags: advertising, Parenting, shopping