Step #2 (for Moms): Encourage your man to be hands-on – and let him handle things differently
Moms, you now know how crucial it is for your husband to be hands-on with the baby. Some of you are thinking: Score!! Here you go, honey! But others might need to let their man be a truly involved father.
As women transition to motherhood and joint parenthood, many of us have to come to grips with a tension that may never truly abate: Ack! Why is he handling things that way?! We see our man making very different decisions than we would, handling parenting differently than we would, and many of us instinctively pull back. We don’t usually say it this way, but our subconscious feeling may be, He’s doing it wrong. But if we then signal to our man that the kids are our domain or – even worse – that he’s somehow unwelcome or incompetent to step into that domain, we invite a downward spiral.
Most of the time, with very few exceptions, there’s no actual right or wrong between how parents want to handle things – it’s all just judgment calls. More importantly, as you’ll see in a moment, some of those differences in judgment are essential for a child’s thriving.
Thus, women need to not only be okay with their men handling things differently, but actively encourage them to jump in to hands-on parenting from the earliest hours. Most men will eagerly do this, since, thankfully, research demonstrates that contemporary men usually care just as much about their parenting role as women do.
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