So I'm sitting here in one of those stay-at-home parent activities -- hanging with a bunch of other parents, all on our laptops, whiling away an hour and sometimes more in an activity center lobby while a child does a class in this or that.
I started thinking about various families I've known since college back in the 1980s and thinking about how much time we've all spent in various lobbies while our children master various skills. And, since in most of these circumstances the stay-at-home dad ratio is overwhelmed by the stay-at-home mom denominator.
And that left me thinking that it must be easier for married lesbians because basically once a child is weaned it doesn't really have to be their mom who brings them to all the classes while the other partner works.
And then I had the side realization that, duh, of course after a child is weaned there's really nothing a child needs from a mom that a dad can't provide as well.
But then I started thinking a little further and it sank in that an extraordinary number of women in family relationships do a really classic breadwinner / caregiver division of labor.
For that matter, very often even when the couple has multiple children it's almost always just one partner who has the babies, even though in terms of anatomy they could share pregnancy duties.
I definitely can't think of a couple where the biological mom returns to work after maternity leave while her partner stays home to take care of the children.
I don't want to make any pundit points on this. At all. The fact that I can't think of any couples where each partner has had children in the relationship doesn't mean there aren't plenty... even a majority. And while I've spent quite a lot of lobby time and parent volunteer time with lesbian stay-at-home moms I've spent plenty of time talking (and sometimes grousing, and sometimes bragging) about the nuts and bolts of housekeeping and caregiving, it occurs to me that I've no more discussed their initial decisions to arrange their families the way they do than I've discussed mine.
I don't actually know any gay-partner families so I don't know whether or how men divvy up caregiving and breadwinning.
So not only don't I know, I know I don't know.
Anyone know if this is commonly discussed in same-sex marriage circles?
I have this deeply embarrassed feeling I ought to know.
But I don't.
Yet.
I have no kids, only my two
Submitted by Jerry (not verified) on Fri, 2011-07-22 03:13.I have no kids, only my two nieces. However, two gayby couples I do know, both with young girls.
D had her baby with a known donor (family friend, who while having no parental rights per se is still involved in the baby's life). Both D & K work, but D has the more active role in childcare. It should be noted, though, that the relationship dynamic had evolved along a more-or-less heteronormative binary course well before the two of them decided to have children; in fact, if D gets her way and has more children (a real concern, given the expense of the fertility treatments involved), she will quit her job and be a stay-at-home mother.
G & R had to negotiate the not-insignificant obstacles of trans-continental surrogacy, since the gestational surrogate was a woman they had contracted with in California before the couple moved to Texas (economic pressures as well as being closer to aging parents). Curious dynamic in this relationship as well, as once the marriage was legalized in California, R changed all the paperwork so that he and their daughter (who is R's biological child) now have G's last name. The child lives in an expanded family household, wherein G & R share a home with another gay couple, K & P. Through the shared household arrangement, all four men have pooled resources. At the time that the child was born, G was doing help-desk work from home for his California-based employer while R was tech consulting (when employed, tech took the hit as hard as everything else), P was doing long-term out-of-town consulting, and K's official employment was as the household's "manny," (being the household's only biological father, through his ex-wife) responsible for the child's care from 6 AM to 6 PM weekdays. At one point, G's employment was tenuous and R & P were both simultaneously unemployed.
When K was officially "off-duty", R was the caregiver of record for his daughter, which could be clearly seen in terms of hierarchical bonding that the child showed. After R & P were hired, G was laid off, and K got a job. For a time, then, the unemployed G was the baby's primary caregiver, until G got a job at the same company that had hired R & P.
Through this decidedly unique household structure, we have quite a bit of collective parenting (including assitance from an extremely possessive Jack Russell terrier) with four working "parents" that will probably stand until such time as the little girl is school-aged.
Perhaps that last part didn't quite fit your particular question, particularly since it accounts for parenting that's a pretty good distance out-of-the-box. The child spends the most time with whoever isn't at work at a particular time (since all four guys work on floating schedules, with K having the most flexibility).
Oh, I just realized that I know of one other gay couple with a kid, and they seem to be balancing a more equal partnership as a two-income family as well, though, again, one has a bit more time than the other on any given day, being that they're running their own consultancy business together.
This may be more of an
Submitted by FD (not verified) on Fri, 2011-07-22 04:25.This may be more of an American thing actually - seems to me the practicalities of childrearing in a society with crummy pregnancy / childcaring rights in the workplace would be likely to encourage the 'traditional' model, where one parent mostly takes the career hit and the other keeps moving forward, under the idea that two disrupted careers collectively pay less than one sucessful and one disrupted.
It's also a set up very strongly societally reinforced, so I would figure that even when feasibilty improved, it would take a while for the lingering notion of 'this is how it's supposed to be' to fade.
Anecdotally, (I live in the UK) of my immediate circle, there are two non-hetero couples who have kids - one is a bi and gay male couple; the bi male divorced and got custody of their 8yd old daughter and then remarried and adopted a toddler. The gay partner has done most of the stay at home, although the bi guy took six months adoption leave when they first gained custody, and had been the SAH parent in his first marriage. They were very frank about how/why they were doing this - the SAH partner wanted the experience and they felt the six months was necessary to bond to and reassure the kid (he'd had a bad start in life). Interestingly, the gay partner, who works from home freelance partime now, had actually earned the higher salary of the two previously.
The other couple is an ex of my brothers, who met and fell in love and married a lesbian, and now also identifies as lesbian, (although she still cheerfully expresses attraction to men which headfucks a lot of people. I suspect that's why she does it, although I have not asked.) They have three kids, all body births, which they took turns at and took time off to care for alternately too. The ex had the first and third, and again they're frank about arrangements; she liked the pregnancy / baby care / SAH bit better so that's why she had two and that's why she's going PT till they are all at school.
Now that I think about it, at
Submitted by Jerry (not verified) on Fri, 2011-07-22 04:29.Now that I think about it, at the same time, both of my nieces come from unmarried heterosexual parents; I have two nieces but I've never had a sister-in-law. My eldest niece is in a joint-custody arrangement between my brother and his ex-girlfriend, both of whom work full-time (he as a personal fitness trainer, she as an ER nurse), so it can't really be said that there is a homemaker per se, and my niece lives and flourishes between her mother's apartment and her father's house.
My newest niece (as in born within the last three weeks) is a different animal, in that her mother and my brother are living together now, so there's a different dynamic that my brother's older daughter is plugged into when she's in my brother's care. So...
For what all that's worth, anyway.
(Oh, and realistically, in the House of Bear situation I mentioned earlier, I guess you could say that K is the homemaker, because he was the one whose de facto unemployment through most of the child's infancy was facilitated by the employment of the other three men in the household.)
Thinking over the lesbian
Submitted by Ginny (not verified) on Fri, 2011-07-22 09:27.Thinking over the lesbian couples with kids I know, the two I know about have shared, or plan to share, pregnancy duties. (One couple has two children, one borne by each mom, the other has one but they're planning to have the other mom birth their second child whenever that comes.) The other couples I know from teaching their kids at school, so I don't know the details of the kids' births.
The point about career progress makes sense. Aside from that, though, I'm guessing couples mostly decide based on each person's desire or aversion to being pregnant and giving birth. Most women I know have fairly strong feelings about whether they do or don't want to bear children, so I would guess those feelings override career considerations and social norms. Both women want to bear children? They take turns. One does and one doesn't? Then one does and one doesn't.
I know I've read some
Submitted by Kaija (not verified) on Mon, 2011-07-25 09:13.I know I've read some interesting study blurbs and can't place them right this minute, but this NYT piece from 2008 seemed to suggest that without the pressure of the traditional gender roles, same-sex couples feel freer to pick an arrangement that suits the particular individuals in the family and that same-sex relationships were more egalitarian, which I think speaks to your point and blows away some of the biological determinism hypotheses about who does what.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/health/10well.html?pagewanted=print
I also have to agree with the commenter who said that the gender division of labor in hetero families may be an artifact of US culture and the lack of support for families and childcare. Here in Canada, where the government policies (not only health care but child care provisions and year-long parental leave) and cultural values are different, there doesn't seem to be as much gendered assignments of roles and responsibilities and more individual arrangements.
Being a lesbian mom (I
Submitted by Sheila (not verified) on Fri, 2011-07-29 20:09.Being a lesbian mom (I birthed our daughter) I don't think there's any way you can generalize about how two-mom families handle the caregiver/breadwinner thing. Of course, if you have an only child, then you only have one birthing mom, but I know a lot of families where that decision was made based on known or suspected fertility problems rather than on one woman having more desire to be pregnant--though in our case if I'd had fertility problems, A. has so little interest in being pregnant that we would have adopted. I know a number of families with more than one kid where the moms switched off childbirth--that seems at least as common as having one designated breeder, though, again, if we'd gone on to have more than one kid, I would have continued in that role in our family. Regardless of the number of kids, there does usually seem to be one parent who does more of the childcare, but I think the point about how our economy penalizes part time work and breaks in employment history is right: it's even harder to get by financially when both parents have taken the career hit. In our family, I do most of the childcare in the school year because I'm self-employed, and in the summer A. takes over because she's a teacher. I'm not as entirely "off" in the summer as A. is in the school year, so I do more overall, and I compromise my hours at my business because part of the purpose of starting my own business was to have flexibility for childcare, but we do understand how much A.'s higher salary (WAY higher salary) has the potential to distort the power in the relationship, so we try hard to work against it.
Thanks all! As I said I was
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2011-07-30 01:02.Thanks all! As I said I was concerned I was suffering from confirmation bias and it sounds like I was. Shelia's point about single-child families necessarily also being one-mom families makes sense. The handful of two-mom families with more than one child just isn't a large enough sample -- in my case they're all one-mom families too but the sample's too small for me to extrapolated.
figleaf
I know one lesbian couple
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-09-28 01:21.I know one lesbian couple well, in a non-US western country. The birth mother stayed home for the first six months, and then the non-birth mother took over full-time care. She's looking for a job now that the kid is almost school-age. (The donor was a married friend of the family, with his own slightly older child, and he isn't in a parenting role at all.) The mothers are both listed on the child's birth certificate as the parents. The birth mother was chosen for a large number of reasons -- lack of nieces and nephews, younger, more physically robust -- but the non-birth mother was the one who wanted to spend all her time with a baby and toddler.