Ep #75: How Patriarchy Shows Up in Parenting (And What to Do About It) with Margaret Mason Tate


Whether you are a died-in-the-wool feminist or you have never heard of the patriarchy in your life, this episode is for you. We’re going to talk about what it is and how it shows up and what you can do about it to make your life a lot easier. Stay tuned.

Welcome to Parenthood Prep, the only show that helps sleep-deprived parents and overwhelmed parents-to-be successfully navigate those all-important early years with their baby, toddler, and child. If you are ready to provide the best care for your newborn, manage those toddler tantrums, and grow with your child, you’re in the right place. Now here’s your host, baby and parenting expert, Devon Clement.

Devon: Welcome, welcome back to Parenthood Prep, the podcast where we talk about parenthood. Today we have back one of my favorite guests. I would even go so far as to call her the part-time co-host, Margaret Mason Tate. How are you?

Margaret: I’m so happy to be back. I love talking to the Parenthood Prep folks.

Devon Clement: And we love talking to you. And in fact, before we started recording, we started like riffing on some stuff and I was like, no, no, save it. Save it for the recording. This is too good. Also, we have an exciting announcement.

Margaret: We do. We have a very exciting announcement, and you should stay tuned because we’re not going to do that announcement.

Devon Clement: We’re not going to tell it to you till the end.

Margaret: But we do have a cool topic that I talk about a lot without having a mic in front of my face. Just talk about it all the time.

Devon Clement: Yes, it’s something that we talk about all the time and really wanted to dig into. I think it’s something that we’re going to begin talking about today, but we’ll probably revisit multiple times as well as it being sprinkled throughout a lot of what we talk about. And that is parenthood and prep are two of our favorite P words, but a P word that we really don’t like is patriarchy.

Margaret: Patriarchy.

Devon Clement: I know. We’re going to talk about what it is, in case you don’t know. I didn’t know until a few years ago. Turns out you can blame a lot of your problems on it, which is great.

Margaret: We love that. And a catchall for blame is handy.

Devon Clement: Really? And it’s true. It is genuinely the cause of a lot of your problems. So we’re going to talk about that. But first, let’s chit chat a little bit since we haven’t talked to the people in a while. What’s going on with you?

Margaret: Well, with regard to parenting, my new challenge right now is trying to help my child be happy that they’re doing well in school, which never in my life did I think that this would be something that I would have to be doing because I was so happy to achieve. But this one is very put off by achieving and then getting “rewarded” by putting it, putting them in advanced classes and in more challenging scenarios, and they’re like, when does it end? When will it be enough, right? So, that’s kind of my new challenge, which boy, what a champagne problem after the last few years, yeah?

Devon Clement: Seriously. Seriously. I was just talking to a friend yesterday who has a pool in Manhattan, because these are the kinds of people that my partner works with. And the pool has a bit of an issue and he’s like, it is really hard to get someone to come look at your pool in Manhattan and yes, I know I don’t have real problems. And I was like, listen, I talk all the time about all of my major problems that I have. For instance, we get so much natural light that it’s hard to keep our apartment air conditioned in the summertime. Boohoo. I’m thinking of starting a telethon.

Margaret: Yeah, no, you should. And also, use some of that telethon money to buy more plants, because the thing that does help is just more plants.

Devon Clement: Yes. Well, and they just do amazing with the amount of light that we have, so much that it makes me look like I’m excellent at plant care when I’m really just average.

Margaret: You know, I have plants still growing from little snippets that I’ve taken from your plants. And I think that’s beautiful and symbolic of this relationship, my love.

Devon Clement: Propagation is another fun P word that we really like.

Margaret: Pancakes. I had a pancake.

Devon Clement: Pancake. Potatoes. Oh, yeah. Potatoes. So my little challenge that I’ve been dealing with recently is that I have gone back to the mines, as it were. And I’ve been working with a baby, which I haven’t…

Margaret: The swaddle mines.

Devon Clement: Exactly, which I haven’t consistently done for a while. But for a variety of reasons, I’ve stepped in with this client. We’re doing a live-in with them. They have a lot of responsibilities with work. They have a toddler, so they want around the clock support with their newborn, just so that they can make sure that he’s kind of, settled and cared for and they’re not stressed about it. So anyway, I have been part of the team of four that have been working with this baby around the clock, and it is four of our most experienced, most, and when I say like four of the most experienced, I pretty much mean the four most experienced, like absolute best freaking people on my team, myself included, I flatter myself to say. And this baby is humbling all of us.

Margaret: Well, and back up, because you told me a minute ago when we were just chit chatting as girlfriends that like between the four of you, we counted it up and it’s like how many years of combined experience?

Devon Clement: It’s about 80, conservatively.

Margaret: 80 minimum of experience and this baby is really kicking our butts. Letting you know that you don’t know every single thing. There’s something still to learn.

Devon Clement: We don’t. Sometimes I feel like I know it all. Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all, you know, hundreds, thousands probably of babies that I’ve interacted with in some way, and I feel like there’s nothing that’s going to be new and then I get a curve ball. So in some ways it’s a fun challenge.

Margaret: I mean, it makes you feel young.

Devon Clement: It does. And I’m really glad that they opted to have this support. They didn’t get the support because the baby was difficult. They had the support lined up and it just happens that the baby is very challenging. And I am really glad that they have us and aren’t trying to like navigate this themselves with their toddler and their work commitments and everything else, like totally alone. I’m really glad they have the additional support because it’s taking everything that we have, which is also why it’s a team of four, because it’s so intense to be with him that we really kind of burn out after a couple of days and just need to need to step away.

Margaret: Well, I love that and I’m, you know, I’m certainly not glad that you’re being humbled, but I love to see you back in action because you are so damn good at what you do.

Devon Clement: I would like to think so. Well, and then it’s funny because you know, Audrey, my dear friend’s baby, my egg baby, she is about a couple weeks older than this guy, and she is just a dream. She is so easy, so chill and just the comparison between the two, it’s just interesting to see how much is like just personality and not, you know, care, not nurture. How much is nature and not nurture?

Margaret: Yeah. It’s just so much luck. These babies have similar support systems. You know, they had similar kind of birth experiences. They weren’t traumatic. It was like kind of all the stuff and still they just couldn’t be more different.

Devon Clement: They couldn’t be more different. And not for nothing, you know, I love my friends and I love my clients, but I think first time parents caring for a baby, sometimes you don’t know what to do. So if a first time parent tells me their baby is colic or is high needs or whatever, I’m like, are they or are you just not great at getting them to go to sleep? Are do you just not really know what a baby needs or wants to be responsive? And in this situation, we have a baby with first time parents, you know, Audrey who by all rights could be clueless, could be making I mean, they’re doing a great job, but they’re sort of if we’re looking at it like as a scientific experiment, like we’re the control group.

We are doing the right things. Like he’s getting plenty of sleep. He’s eat, you know, we’ve we’ve addressed possible cause it like all this different stuff. So you know that it has nothing to do with the care that they’re receiving. It’s just genuinely that he’s just a tough cookie. Yeah. But we’re seeing as he’s getting older some glimpses. I think some babies, I have a few kind of weird takes about babies, but I hope you’ll indulge me. I think some babies are just frustrated to be babies.

Margaret: Oh my gosh.

Devon Clement: I think they’re like, what the fuck is this? I can’t walk, I can’t talk. I can’t do a goddamn thing. I want to be like doing stuff. And I just have to lie here like a lump.

Margaret: So it’s crazy that you say that because my child is eleven and a half, but has told this story several times throughout his life that their memory, I mean typically we see children start to develop memories when they become verbal, right? And you know, those things are tied together in brain development. But Hamish has a memory that did actually happen before they were verbal. And the memory was like being really frustrated that was coming out and that we could not understand because they felt that they were communicating very clearly. And we were responding with. And you know, has described this several different times. So you might be on to something with that one though.

Devon Clement: No, it’s true. Our other friend’s son, who I think I’ve talked about before, he turned 3 yesterday, he did not, I know, he’s so grown up. He did not speak until he was about almost two, like eighteen months. I remember at my birthday last year, he was babbling still, but you could tell, especially me as a person, you know, very well versed in child development, a previous like special ed teacher and like all this stuff, you could tell that it was in there, like that he was so receptive. He understood when you said things to him.

He would do these things, like one day I was I was babysitting him and I was dressing him and he was holding the diaper cream in his hand and I put his one arm through the sleeve of his shirt and he passed the diaper cream to the other hand to put the other arm in the sleeve, which I think to a lay person you wouldn’t necessarily think is like this very advanced skill. But I was like, whoa. Like this kid was I think it was like his eighteenth month birthday and he was doing that. And that’s a pretty advanced motor planning skill.

And I remember being shocked by it, but he was also not talking. And he was, you know, just babbling and then I don’t even know what triggered it, but it was like a key unlocked and he started speaking in full sentences. Like he went from barely saying mama and just babbling to speaking in full sentences. And I know that they were like formulating in his brain, probably very similar to Hamish. And then they just – they just came out.

Margaret: Yeah, it’s wild.

Devon Clement: She had actually scheduled a speech evaluation for him, which I had, you know, encouraged her to do among along with other people, but it took a little time to get to it. And by the time she took him to speech evaluation, the speech therapist was like, why are you here? So sometimes it can just it can just happen that quickly. I also sometimes will see, like if I’m sleep training a baby that’s really challenging, I remember one time I was with this baby that was just a spitfire. And I happened to see, I went into like a different room of their house on like day three and I saw his newborn picture from the hospital, and I looked at the picture and I was like, oh, it all makes sense now. Like eyes wide open, like so much going on. And I don’t know what I believe about the afterlife or whatever, but some babies have been here before. Like they absolutely have and they are pissed to have to start over. And I saw that picture and I was like, oh, okay, yeah, he’s been here before.

Margaret: Yep.

Devon Clement: Not me. I was a peaceful little sleepy kitten from birth.

Margaret: You’re brand new.

Devon Clement: I’m brand new. I was just like Joey. Yeah. No honey, you’re brand new.

Margaret: Oh honey.

Devon Clement: No, Alex is brand new. I’m just I think have been around the block a few times and have reached anyway. We should talk about the patriarchy. We should talk about it. So first of all, like what is it? Because I think it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot and people don’t necessarily know what it means or think it’s just a buzz word or, you know, something that those crazy feminists have made up.

Margaret: Sure. Yeah. Those crazy man haters. No, and so the gag is that patriarchy is actually very harmful to everybody and everybody includes who? Men. So, you know, it’s certainly not a position of man hating and I don’t think that either one of us could ever be convicted of doing that. We happen to love a great deal of men.

Devon Clement: I hate some. I hate plenty but not, you know, as a rule.

Margaret: Sure. I mean, but I love and like enough to pretty much mitigate any of the man hating. Anyway, patriarchy is a commentary on the systems that are in place that disenfranchise and disempower women on the whole. So think about things that are set up to enable men whereas they are literally set up and created and designed to disable and disenfranchise women. One of the examples of that is that our mothers couldn’t get credit cards in their names. They couldn’t get mortgages, small business loans. I mean, these changes were being made well into the 80s. It’s nuts.

They couldn’t get divorced. Yeah, they couldn’t get divorced. Assets. I got into this when I got divorced, but you know, thinking about why was China, fine China, so important to the women in my family. And when I dug into that, it’s because silver and China and things like furs or diamonds or jewelry are assets that we could have in our names. So just thinking about that. But so, you know, the framework of systems such as voting, laws, the fact that crash test dummies are sized to be, you know, a commonly male body.

Devon Clement: Women weren’t even included in medical studies until the 90s, the 1990s.

Margaret: Correct. And so, you know, when you think about just is this intentionally, you know, some sometimes it really is insidious and intentional, genuinely honestly on a systemic level. But a lot of times it’s just the default. And the default itself is a result of what we’re talking about, patriarchy. But what I wanted to talk about today was a whole bunch of stuff and then we realized that just the first bullet point was juicy enough to have an entire episode. And that bullet point was the way dads are treated versus the way moms are treated. Devon, what was the first thing that you mentioned?

Devon Clement: The patriarchy shows up so much in parenting, just in so many ways, particularly, obviously, if you’re a cis straight couple where one person has been socialized, raised as a female and the other has been socialized, raised as a male because there’s these traditional gender roles that we are sort of forced into. And like it doesn’t mean that you can’t have those roles or that you’re bad if one of you, you know, female partner gives birth and breastfeeds and whatever and the male partner like goes back to work and like there’s nothing anti-feminist about being a stay at home mom if you want to, but there’s also nothing wrong with being a stay at home dad. And something that I think maybe people don’t realize until they become parents is how much leeway, credit men get for doing any amount of parenting tasks versus how much critique, judgment, pressure women get for doing every parenting task and like it’s never enough.

Margaret: This starts in healthcare.

Devon Clement: Totally.

Margaret: This starts in the hospital. I mean, if we’re before even baby’s born, but after baby’s born, the person who’s just given birth is essentially now being, I don’t know, I don’t want to say interrogated, but really like, you know, are you going to are you going to breastfeed? Are you going to do this? Are you going to it’s very kind of combative. And then the flip side of that is, oh, dad took off his shirt. That’s so brave and vulnerable to take off your shirt in a hospital to hold your baby. I mean, yay for dads who do that.

Devon Clement: Which just to clarify is for skin to skin, you don’t like have to take off they’re not just taking off their shirt for funsies in the hospital.

Margaret: Yeah, it’s not like a goal celebration, although I got to tell you, that would be amazing.

Devon Clement: That would be amazing.

Margaret: You know, like if you take off your shirt and like the initial is of the baby is on the chest, they painted it and like did – listen, I’m ready. I’m ready for that. You really you really think you like Alabama football, how much? How much? Prove it. Yeah, but like dads are not they’re given this like huge grace period, this like learning curve. And then you counter that with something, you know, that in feminist critique is called naturalization where uh it’s kind of emphasized that women are natural caregivers and naturally know exactly what to do and how to do it. And then when we don’t, it makes us feel like shit.

Devon Clement: Yeah.

Margaret: They don’t have that. It’s not like you should already know your dad.

Devon Clement: And that we don’t know how to do it right away. And I’ve said this before, but something that I think is so interesting is that when I have witnessed a situation, and sometimes it’s many years down the road and I’ve been told about it or I see it in person, where for some reason the mother is physically unable to care for the newborn, usually because of some complication or some health issue or some thing, and the dad has to learn, like real fast, they do.

Margaret: They sure do.

Devon Clement: They do and they’re great. And a lot of the time those are the families where the dad has a more equal and even primary caregiving role because he was forced to learn the way moms are typically forced to learn when they’re, you know, when they’re in the picture. And something that I say a lot of the time is like the baby doesn’t necessarily want mom or she doesn’t necessarily know best, but she’s the end of the line. She has no one to turn to and say, okay, he wants he doesn’t want me, he wants you. The dad can say, oh, he wants you. And then you have to fucking figure it out.

Margaret: Yeah, you can’t pass the buck or pass the boob as it were.

Devon Clement: I mean, actually that being said when we’re there, they pass to us, which is great. I love that. Like I know what to do. Exactly. Generally, not with this little – but we got to be humbled.

Margaret: We got to be humbled.

Devon Clement: We got to be humbled.

Margaret: So like dads are, you know, they’re not being critiqued and they’re not being told to tough it out. You mentioned a really interesting connection with the Tylenol thing. I mean, are the president of the United States told pregnant women to tough it out as long as they could.

Devon Clement: Well, and it starts with pregnancy, right? We’re so willing to say, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this because there’s some level of possibility that it might harm the baby. You already couldn’t take any other pain reliever. Tylenol was the only pain reliever available to pregnant people and now they’re going to make you feel guilty for that too.

Margaret: Based on just nothing at all. I mean, you know, based on what they’ve chosen to base it on. It’s pretty absurd and nobody’s, you know what I mean, nobody’s blaming like, you know, they’re talking about Tylenol and the rise of autism. It’s just the diagnosis. It’s really that easy. I promise you, my father, born in 1956, I promise you was very autistic and I don’t know what all my grandmother medicated with during her pregnancy, but I got to tell you, it was around way before way before any of this. I promise you that.

Devon Clement: For sure. I saw a great video about how we wouldn’t have the sport of baseball if it were not for autism. And that started in the 1800s.

Margaret: So nobody’s walking around with all that shit up in their head without – and I say that, you know, I say this as the – my joke is that like I’m a walking ASD test because any man I’ve ever loved has ended up being autistic, including my father and all of my male friends. So, you know, that’s kind of the joke. I say this with so much love. But we’re blaming women taking Tylenol on the rise of autism. And y’all are not going to mention the old sperm that’s making a lot of these babies. I mean, that there is a correlation there too. So we should at least address.

Devon Clement: Well, and something that I wondered about that we don’t need to make this a whole podcast about Tylenol and autism because frankly I’m sick of it, but we know there’s a genetic component and they talk about the old sperm. I wonder if it’s that or is it that men with autism have a hard time finding a partner and becoming parents until they are older and have time to learn more social functioning or maybe they don’t want it or need it until they’re later in life. So I think it’s a mix of factors.

I know something a long time ago that was true, like when I first became a special ed teacher in the early 2000s, one of the only like sort of factors that you could attach to autism was socio economic status, like it was much more prevalent in middle class and upper middle class. And I wonder if that’s partly because people with autism tend to be able to be good at jobs. Like you know are the people that are getting through medical school and becoming scientists and computer geeks and all these things, bankers and things, have a little bit of autism. A whole touch of the tism.

Margaret: Yeah. And you know, love that love that for NCI. It worked it worked to their benefit.

Devon Clement: I mean, Alex’s company is pretty much just a bunch of autistic math nerds. God love them all.

Margaret: Well, thank God for Tylenol then.

Devon Clement: Right. But anyway, going back to that, just the willingness to just be like, oh well women don’t can’t have pain relief. That’s it. You’re fine.

Margaret: Tough it out. Tough it out. Tough it out. Be in pain.

Devon Clement: Meanwhile, they ended that study on birth control for men because they were experiencing headaches and mood swings. So what are these poor babies? Poor babies.

Margaret: Whoof. Yeah. No. No, thank you. No, thank you to any of that. Well, so when you think about patriarchy and parenting and you’re looking at your own parenting experience, there’s a few like teeny tiny little things that I personally chose to think about that I would like to encourage people to think about that can kind of get them out of this the matrix and kind of get them kind of going against the flow of it. The first one is, you know, is your pediatrician male? You could counter that by finding a pediatrician. And I, listen, I know how hard it is to find a good pediatrician. I get it. If you have an amazing relationship and this person is an egalitarian medicinal practitioner, great. This is really just for people who have the option, etc. Find a woman who has a pediatrician, please and thank you.

Devon Clement: And honestly, it’s not that hard because another way the patriarchy shows up is that many, many women who become physicians go into pediatrics because that’s what they’re sort of shepherded into. OB. I don’t know what the exact statistics are, but I know it’s many women who go into medicine go into family medicine in some way because of that socialization and that push to do that.

Margaret: Yeah.

Devon Clement: Also, pediatricians are one of the lowest paid. Coincidence?

Margaret: Wow. You know what? I did not know that. Thank you for sharing that. That sucks.

Devon: I mean, think about it. Like when you think of like well paid doctors, what do you think of? Plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists. Not pediatricians.

Margaret: Not pediatricians. Not really. No.

Devon: And it’s hard. You have to know so much like such a broad amount of knowledge.

Margaret: And relating to kids and their parents at the same time is incredible. A good pediatrician.

Devon: Same thing with lawyers, a lot of female lawyers are in family practice or things like public defenders.

Margaret: It’s insidious.

Devon: It’s insidious. That’s what we’re talking about.

Margaret: Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, pediatric dentists, if you can find your medical practitioners basically, finding your experts, if you’re going to, if you feel that you need to find experts and listen to professionals and stuff like that, consider having them be women. Consider having them be women who are specifically making choices to come at parenting through an egalitarian lens. We love that and appreciate that.

Devon: Because I think a lot of the time, even when they’re working full-time as a pediatrician, if they’re also parents, they’re doing a fair amount of parenting. You know a lot of doctors, especially these like older men doctors, like they see their patients at work, but they’re not parenting their kids nearly as much. Like some of the authority figures, Dr. Sears, whatever, like he was at the office all day seeing patients. His wife was the one breastfeeding and co-sleeping and baby wearing and all those things that he says. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. Those things are great. I just would love to hear more from her about what her life was like when her kids were small.

Margaret: Well, yeah, because there was a baker’s dozen of them for one. And for two, it’s one thing if you want to opt into that. It’s very different if there’s a man in authority as a doctor and as their father telling you that you have to do this in order to be correct in your parenting and mothering specifically. That’s a little different. I mean, and we talk about, you know, I know we talk about the thorough thing, but I have a BFA and if we don’t talk about it, I will have wasted every bit of the money that I paid for it.

Devon Clement: This piece of information is what radicalized me and like changed my whole worldview about everything.

Margaret: Which I love. Well, and if you can, yeah, and if we can apply it to parenthood, you can never unsee it, right? So, you know, Henry David Thoreau is known for writing a work called Walden on Walden Pond. And you know, it’s it’s this uh really canonical work of American literature and you know, went to live in the woods and to separate from kind of humanity and really get back to the marrow of life and to, you know, immerse himself in all that was good and living. But the reality is that Walden Pond was a stone’s throw away from his mother’s house and his mother would routinely bring him sandwiches and fresh laundry and little picnic baskets of things and care for him in this way.

Devon Clement: And it was, I think on his parents’ property.

Margaret: Yeah.

Devon Clement: So like he wasn’t paying rent. He didn’t build this little cottage. He went in a tree house in his parents’ backyard and wrote a manifesto, while his mother did his laundry.

Margaret: Suck out all the marrow of life, as it were.

Devon Clement: Must be nice.

Margaret: Must be nice. So when you think about that, for one, don’t be Thoreau’s mom. Don’t be doing these people’s laundry. We talk about that a lot. But for two, look for the thoroughs in your life. Ask yourself, are you measuring yourself against a yard stick that was created by a little boy who has his mom doing his laundry for him? And if so, readjust your yard stick, please and thank you. And think about that, like when you’re impressed with someone or comparing yourself to someone like who does their laundry?

Devon: Yeah. Especially men. Especially men. And the thing about the patriarchy is that this these systems are built so that men don’t even think about it.

Margaret: Yeah, for sure. Which makes it really easy to pass on to kids. And so an insidious way that the patriarchy is in our homes is being the default parent. You know, if you both work full-time, you both do all the things and you’re still the default parent, shifting that with intention of I don’t know where your cleats are. I don’t know. Ask your dad, shifting that with intention.

Devon Clement: I have been saying that to men just generally, because I’m a problem solver, I’m a caretaker, I’m a helper. So like people will ask me questions and if I don’t know the answer, I will try to find it. And over the weekend, we had friends down to our house and one of our friends wanted to go get some fresh seafood at like the seafood market. This was like in the evening. He wanted to go the following day. And he was like, where should I go? And I recommended a store. I said, oh, we really like this. This is the good like seafood store. And he goes, cool, what time do they open? I was like, I don’t fucking know. You have access to the same Google that I have access to. What would make you think that I would have that information? And I didn’t give the impression that like we shop there all the time, we’re very familiar with it. I was just like, this is the store to go to. And like, you know, whatever, it’s fine to like ask a question, but I didn’t say, oh, let me find out for you. I said, Google it. Figure it out.

Margaret: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know where your cleats are. I don’t know.

Devon Clement: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Margaret: I don’t know is a good is a really good – I don’t know.

Devon Clement: I don’t know.

Margaret: Because you didn’t need to know. You certainly are not going to be ever be at a seafood store when they open. I can’t imagine a situation in which you are ready to ready to be doing seafood shopping.

Devon Clement: I mean unless I was still like out partying from the night before and drunkenly got the idea to like buy fresh scallops because I’m sure they open fucking first thing in the morning. I don’t know.

Margaret: Yeah, they’ve got to.

Devon Clement: I don’t know. That’s actually – it’s funny because I joke sometimes that I wish I did not know so much. Like Alex will be like, where’s my blah? And I want to say I don’t know, but I actually do and then I have to, it’s in this place. Like I should start lying and saying I don’t know. Or just changing the subject. Where’s my thing?

Margaret: I like lollipops. like just okay. So I do just have two more quick really quick suggestions before we go and before we tease our little announcies.

Devon Clement: Well, I just want to say something quickly before you say that. I think one of the ways for me that I see it showing up in parenting a lot is with school. The mom is the default parent for school, no matter what. A good friend of mine who you also know, she lives out in Denver. She has two kids. She works full-time. Her husband is very much the primary parent, is a teacher at the school that their children go to. And when there is something that a parent needs to be brought in on, called or emailed, they call her despite her saying multiple times, please call my husband first.

Have my husband on the email, not me. He is a teacher at the school and they still do not get that he is in charge of that kind of stuff. And that assumption, I think patriarchy is a lot of assumptions. It’s a lot of assumptions of who’s going to do the laundry, who’s going to take care of the kids, who’s going to stay home from work because the kid is sick. Yeah. You know.

Margaret: And I think that having these conversations, especially if you’re both working, having the conversations about what’s our plan? Because especially if kids are in daycare, they’re going to get sick. So like what’s our plan? Are we going to take turns? Are we going to, you know, does it depend on your work’s policy versus my work’s policy? Like have those conversations because waiting and having it blindside you is like the worst possible plan of action. I think that people are like wanting to buy all the right stuff, but they’re not wanting to have the right conversations. We could probably write an entire book about the conversations that people should have before they get pregnant. Maybe we should put a pin in that.

Margaret: I just wanted to say before we wrap up, that none of this should like make you mad at your partner. That’s not our intention in any way. It’s really to show you there’s some ways that this is going to pop up. There’s some things you can do to combat that.

Devon Clement: Well, because as we mentioned in the beginning, it affects men too. So the way that the patriarchy shows up for men is like it’s unmanly to take care of a baby. Mhm. Fellas, is it gay to get a woman pregnant? Like what? Yes. Like I saw, I remember that uh when like Rihanna was pregnant for the second time and they did that cover and like ASAP Rocky was like walking behind her and people were men were like, whoa, he’s, you know, who wears the pants or whatever. And somebody commented, fellas, is it gay to get Rihanna pregnant twice? I was like, what? Like literally what’s wrong with you?

You know, it manifests as men feeling like they always have to immediately be good at something. They can’t try and fail, they can’t be bad at it, that it’s not for them to do the laundry or to do, you know, to do any of these things. So then when there’s like this expectation on them and they are not prepared in any way to like even have the capability to learn and be open to being bad at something. And I will say like it’s getting a lot better in my experience of witnessing this, like dads are much more willing to try things.

Margaret: I agree.

Devon Clement: Have a harder time with it. Actually, it was cute. Friends of ours that we saw over the weekend, they’re recently married, they’re thinking about having kids. and she was saying that he, because I think his dad remarried and he has like some much younger siblings, is very comfortable with babies. So with friends’ babies, family members’ babies, things like that, he just holds the baby, he just does the baby stuff. She’s like, I have never touched a baby in my life until recently and so when we have a baby, I’m going to have no clue what to do. And I’m going to defer to him, which is tremendous.

Margaret: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think we could probably close on what’s the most powerful thing you could probably do? Have your sons hold your friends’ babies. Have little Steve, are we are we naming babies Steve right now? You know, have a little you know, little Steve also be into that.

Devon Clement: In my classroom, I had baby dolls, I had kitchen, I had cleaning stuff, and the boys loved it. They were always pushing strollers around and taking care of the babies and I, you know, of course I wasn’t like, that’s for girls. You can’t have that. I don’t know what their parents were telling them at home, but they want to do these things. Something else I saw that I thought was interesting was somebody said, you want your partner, you want your husband to help with cooking and cleaning, but you won’t give your son a kitchen set. Like how do you think these men are going to learn to be helpful if they’re not taught from the beginning like we are? You know, last year on Thanksgiving, there was something that was like, if you ask your daughters to help, ask your son like make your sons help too.

Margaret: Yeah, you know that’s I can’t even – I literally cannot even fathom like not in my trailer park, babe. Now, on this kind of same note about just eschewing the normative way of doing things and really reframing and refreshing our mindsets, do you want to tell the people what we’re doing?

Devon Clement: I do. I’m very, very excited about it. So, we are launching a class. And it is going to be talking about what is the one resource, the one thing that every parent needs more of, that every person needs more of, but particularly every parent.

Margaret: Time.

Devon Clement: Time. We are going to help you magically, scientifically find five more hours in every day, at least every week, to do whatever you want.

Margaret: Yeah. To do all kinds of things.

Devon Clement: Is it going to be us telling them that they need to hire a part-time nanny?

Margaret: Oh, no. Wouldn’t that be crazy if we were really just pitching. Wouldn’t that be nuts if we had people pay for a product and then basically it was just us pitching like a nanny service or like a

Devon Clement: I mean, that is going to be part of it. We are going to talk about how to get more support, whether that’s professional or family or whatever. That is going to be part of it. But it is so robust. We were actually going to launch it months ago and we just keep adding more and more and more to it because it’s so freaking good.

Margaret: And that’s on me. I’m sorry.

Devon Clement: It’s on both of us, honestly. We just keep coming up with more stuff to say and teach and it’s not – you don’t have to like do the whole thing to learn anything. It’s going to be very manageable, very bite sized because what you don’t have right now is a lot of extra time.

Margaret: Yeah, pop in an earbud.

Devon Clement: We’re going to make it really easy. It’s not videos. There’s some little videos, but it’s just audio. Honestly, something that’s been my saving grace with this tricky baby is just having an Airpod in, listening to podcasts or audio books or something while I’m sitting holding him in the dark or while I’m bouncing him.

Margaret: He has listened to like I’m not kidding, 18 hours of Game of Thrones, the series, the book. 18 hours.

Devon Clement: I listened to all of Jane Austin for like the fourth time, except Mansfield Park because it’s terrible. And now I’m on Agatha Christie. I’ve got the entire Agatha Christie collection on audio and I’m just working through it.

Margaret: And just working right through it. Well, I hope that, yeah, we’re you know, we’ve created something that’s like bingeable and kind of kind of cute, kind of bite sized but super, super helpful and literally if you apply even one of the things that we suggest or say, you’re going to benefit, your life will be better. I’m so excited to get this thing out. What should they do if they want more info about it?

Devon Clement: The first module is going to be free for everybody. Oh snap. I forgot about that part. It is so good. The first module is going to change your life and then if you want more and you want the rest of it, you just pay for it and you get access to everything. We’re going to have some calls that you can hop on, you can ask your questions. You’re going to be able to email questions. We really want to hear your feedback.

Right now, if you have questions or problems or things where you’re trying to find more time in your life, let us know. Shoot us an email, send them on Instagram @happyfamilyafter, @Margaretmasontate, let us know what you want to know. And we’re going to be doing some social media posts asking for your questions and your problems and things like that so that we can incorporate those. But we also think we’ve already addressed a lot of them. So finding time.

Margaret: You’d be amazed at how common those things are. Like the commonalities between the seemingly really intricate issues, they all kind of come down to the same few pieces of advice. So we really dig deep into that and apply it. I’m jacked about this. It’s like one of my favorite things that we’ve done in a hot minute. If you want to hit the link in the description, we will have that’s our email list. Sign up for that and you will be notified before anybody else about what we’re doing with this product. Finding time.

Devon Clement: I love that. Also, I have never said this before, but our emails are pretty cool. So, you might want to get on the list for those. You want to sign up and get into that business. So we are so excited and now that we have announced it, we are held accountable to finishing it and putting it out there. So we need to take our own advice and find some time, but we are really looking forward to that and we can’t wait to share that with you. And I want everyone to just have a wonderful day, week, month, year, enjoy the fall weather before it gets gray and rainy and disgusting, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Margaret: Thanks for having me, Devon.

Devon Clement: Always.

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Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Parenthood Prep. If you want to learn more about the services Devon offers, as well as access her free monthly newborn care webinars, head on over to www.HappyFamilyAfter.com.