I remember once on a playground, my brother was there with his son, doing what you typically do with your kids – running around the playground equipment, encouraging them to try the slide, general dad stuff. I was there because I was hitching a ride to a cousin’s wedding, but given that we were travelling with a little kid we naturally had to take a bit of a break.
Another family was at the playground, this one with a young girl around my nephew’s age. They ran around doing kid stuff. At one point, when my brother was helping his son with some playground feature, the little girl shouted at them, “stop looking at me!”
“I’m not looking at you!” he shouted back.
It was funny in the moment, but in some ways spoke to a bigger problem in parenting. Dads taking their kids to events, to the playground, and to other family events are sometimes seen as being strange in some way. As my brother explained, he wanted to make it very clear that he wasn’t looking at the other kid just in case someone else in the playground was getting suspicious of him. What he was doing was normal, he was just a dad with his kid, but he still felt as though he had to make sure everyone knew that.
The stereotype is that dads don’t typically go out with their kids, founded on years of pretty rigidly enforced gender roles. In the 1950s, sure, the dad wore suits, looked stern and went to work. Mom wore dresses and took kids all over the country. It’s no longer the 1950s however, and we are at the point where having dads at parenting programs, on the playground, and other places where kids congregate should feel natural.
Given that both parents typically work, it should not be quite so weird to see a male parent taking their kid to the park. After all, the person caring for the kid is typically the person who can, rather than specifically the mom or the dad. Given that the makeup of families is shifting around a lot more now than it was in the 1950s, it’s getting progressively stranger that we have clung to the stereotype that it’s the domain of mothers to do the majority of the work in a child’s life.
But, in Yorkton at least, there are signs we’re moving on from that mindset. The Family Resource Centre is starting a program for dads, and they do have a core group of fathers who visit regularly. It’s important that dads have a place to go where they don’t feel weird for doing something that should be the most natural thing in the world, spending time with their kids. That there was even risk that they might feel out of place in a family center shows that we need to appreciate our nation’s fathers more.
At the very least, they shouldn’t be accused of being out of place when on the playground with their kids.
