Over at Psychology Today there's a special collection on 'The Power of Fathers'. This includes an interesting piece on how involved fathers diminish mothers' self-confidence.
Even though they still spent almost three times as much time care giving
as their husbands, the mothers' self-competence ratings
dropped--essentially "the more time their husbands spent engaged in
skillful care giving, the lower the self-competence of mothers sank."
That's certainly not my experience: as ever, I would be interested to hear the views of others.
It isn't my experience either. My experience is that mums who never let dads care for their kids and often snipe and undermine them whenever they DO try and change a nappy/intervene in a squabble / pick up a crying baby. I appreciate that this starts in babyhood when most mums can make a baby stop crying quicker because they spend more time with said child, but if you don't provide the space and time for dad to learn, he can feel alienated. I found this hard, so I left the house until Dan felt confident. Which had other benefits! I think this issue destroys many marriages and undermines the role of the father and I think both sexes can be responsible, in differing amounts in different relationships.
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