Are you sick and tired of having to do everything? And your husband just doesn’t carry the load? And – on top of that – when you try to talk about it, you guys just end up fighting! No fun, hey?

Sometimes we even hear wives describe their husband as another one of the kids she has to take care of. That’s really sad. It is also understandable given that some husbands are completely disengaged in relation to domestic duties.

We learned this week though, that everything may not seem as it first appears…

What spawned this topic was a conversation Caleb had one day with a disengaged husband. After digging a bit, Caleb found out that when their first child arrived, his wife kind of parked him to one side and he felt that she said, “You don’t know what you’re doing, I’ll take it from here”. He bought into that and chose to go along with it.

So, we’re going to speak to both wives and husbands because we believe it takes two to tango. We’ll try to keep it fair. Wives, this post is for you, and husbands, your turn is coming next… We’re hoping that these articles will promote some useful conversations between you and your spouse so that you can restore a healthy balance, both feel engaged and involved and together as a couple and as parents, and both feel like you are contributing in your marriage.

Why Is He Not Engaged?

Here are some observations from a study in 2008 entitled “Withdrawal from Coparenting Interactions During Early Infancy”.[i] They found that if the husband is invested in the status quo and a child shows up he may well withdraw in order to avoid change. Additionally, they found that first-time mothers who were unhappy with the division of childcare labour escalated their demands (along with their stress!) resulting in more pronounced demand-withdrawal patterns in the marriage.

This demand-withdraw pattern is a classic, common pattern. To sum it up, the more a wife demands, the more the husband pulls back (or the more a husband demands, the more the wife pulls back). What is ironic is that they both are acting in their respective ways to save the marriage. She wants to be close to him so pursues, he doesn’t want to get into an argument so withdraws, and the cycle keeps on going.

The study also found that new fathers often feel excluded by the developing mother-infant bond. Some men respond by pressing their wives for more time, others channel their energies into the baby, while others progressively distance themselves from the mother-baby dyad. But what kind of men pulled back or withdrew?

Fathers who withdrew were less ego resilient (not open-minded or perceptive, not interested in understanding why others behave as they do and not open to viewpoints other than their own), and more likely to be in a marriage that was already showing distress signs before the baby arrived. These men also felt less respected as a parent by their wives which leads us to the subject of maternal gatekeeping.

Maternal Gatekeeping

Maternal gatekeeping is a phrase that refers to the beliefs and behaviour that a mom shows to discourage or restrict father involvement in childcare.[ii]

Given that research has shown that greater father involvement in children’s lives has been found to be associated with benefits for parents and children alike (more about this next week), this sense of maternal gatekeeping seems to be unhelpful.

Generally, the more domestic demands you place on a father and the more his ability to respond, the more he will contribute to childcare. Maternal gatekeeping undoes this because in an effort to maintain primacy (take first place) as mother, the wife ends up monitoring and restricting their husbands level and type of involvement in childcare.

This is more common among working-class employed mothers who are caught between gender role ideologies and the financial necessity of working full time. That’s a hard place to be – caught between this messaging about how you should be a stay at home m...