The Untold Truth: Why CoParenting is so F@#%ing Hard, Part I
Understanding the Tangled Journey of Shared Parenting and Why It Sometimes Feels Impossible
More than anything, when our boys were infants, I wanted to put them to bed. Life had other ideas. Our boys exclusively breastfed, and whenever I’d start to put them down, they’d inevitably cry. When my wife heard the sobbing, her sleep-deprived instincts would kick in. She would come into the room and take charge. Our couple’s therapist would say she was being a ‘momma bear.’ I had a couple other words for it. Seven years later, my resentment is nearly dissipated. (sorta, kinda, maybe).
In hindsight, my wife and I both see the concessions we didn’t make. For starters, we didn’t make a conscious decision together to support my efforts in figuring out how to sooth our baby. It would have taken time. Equally difficult, my wife would have needed to transition to pumping earlier, and our little guy adjust to a bottle (and me!) sooner. Instead, my partner leaned into what came naturally to her, and became the only person who could put our son to sleep for the first four years.
Why is coparenting so f@#$ing hard?! Because it genuinely is. It’s a complex ecosystem where each challenge is new and every decision you make has downstream repercussions you may not anticipate. As first-time parents, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had no experience to draw from. The word coparenting doesn’t even formally exist for couples living together. The concept comes from divorce. When googling for support on how to share responsibilities, (and God forbid design a strategy to do it well), 90% of the content focuses on separated parents. Today, coparenting is defined as two or more adults sharing in the activities and responsibilities of raising a child. But its original context, which dates back 60+ years, seems largely unchanged.
Not only is there little published on how to coparent well, but according to a 2017 Boston College Center for Work and Family study, while two-thirds of fathers believe caregiving should be divided equally, only 29% think it actually is. By a margin of two to one, mothers are overwhelmingly filling the gap. There is no doubt that the majority of fathers want to coparent. But so much stands in the way. Society, family culture, work culture, in-laws (yes, I’m talking to you, Diane.)
We teach collaboration on school projects from the earliest ages now. Even my 1st grader has a lunchbox team with shared responsibilities, and I suspect, shared desserts. Yet, it’s crickets when it comes to non-traditional insights on the most difficult partnership we’ll ever face: collaborating and compromising on raising these little humans that we have a deep emotional attachment to.
Once Again, Why is This so Hard?
For a glimpse at the challenge of coparenting, we needn’t look further than a sampling of survey questions about the topic where parents were asked their opinions on a 1-10 scale of agreement.
“I usually just give in to the other parent so we do not argue”
“I get annoyed easily about the mistakes that the other parent makes with our child”
“The other parent undercuts my decisions”
“We have similar hopes and dreams for our child”
“We generally agree on how to discipline our child”
What stands out to me the most in these questions is that we can easily encounter a situation related to all of them on any given day. And if you’re like me, examples quickly pop into your head of being on both ends of the scale. This means we may be emotionally triggered every single day. And as I wrote about in my article on emotional (dys)regulation, we’re still catching up on managing these powerful, daily emotional charges.
So fundamental disagreements - around values, learning, discipline, food and sleep, and so many other areas of daily childrearing are just waiting to trigger us into our less than best selves. We all have different starting points, and we all love our children deeply.
Getting Real about the Tradeoffs
At the moment, I hope, no one can argue that pregnancy and childbirth are the domains of our female partners. There is a physical bond. If the baby breastfeeds, that exclusive bond deepens. Meanwhile, the great majority of dads don’t have paternity leave and 70% are back at work within two weeks. Those of us with more time, still rarely match our spouse’s “disability leave” (an expression which should draw the ire of anyone with a conscience).
Dads start at a disadvantage in the coparenting partnership. Even if our partner wants us to do night feedings, most mothers still need to be awake and pumping. It is not easy. And if your partner is going to breastfeed exclusively, what things can we do exclusively as fathers? I decided bathing our sons would be my expert domain. Bath time became a theatrical production. It included more toys, magnets, bubbles and surprise chocolate floaters than I ever cared to admit.
Coparenting involves a lot of intention and a lot of tradeoffs. Conflict inevitably arises when there are topics one parent cares more about than another, like family time or screen time, dinner time or cleanup time. The other unspoken truth is this: For one parent to lean in, the other parent must lean back. If you want to have two parents who know how to care for a child, then both parents must spend time leading in that care. We need practice, even though it often feels like it’s bottom of the 9th with two outs.
All this is to say we need to be talking in detail and often about what coparenting will look like with our partners. Even when our children become tweens and teens our individual roles can change quickly and create imbalance. Ambitious Dad Rens stated it best, “Since our son was born, I've been very deliberate. I wanted to know how to do everything in terms of co-parenting - from feeding to diapers to whatever - so as soon as he was done breastfeeding, I could step in completely. My wife and I had very intentional conversations about not falling into a pattern where only she does things.” When I asked Rens what enabled them to plan it out so well he explained, “My wife is very independent and worried about things changing too much in her life. This spurred lots of important conversations. But so did seeing some of our friends struggle to figure this out early and fall into patterns of the mom doing much more.” He also highlighted a core underlying belief, “My my job and my wife’s job are equally important.”
So how do we have these conversations before and during parenthood? This will be the focus of Part II on this topic, which I’ll share next week after returning from my daddy-son ski trip. And then in Part III (oh yes, this is a meaty topic!) I want to explore what we can do at work to support and enhance our colleagues in this much overlooked space. Stay tuned!