Is Child-Care A Woman's Duty? 86 Pct of Indian Men Think So

Bangalore: 86 percent of Indian men believe that changing diapers, giving kids a bath and feeding them, is a woman's job, revealed a recent Times of India survey. Almost an equal number don't contribute in household work.

The survey revealed that even men in Rwanda, among the least developed countries in the world, are comparatively fair since 61 percent considered child-care a woman's duty. And, almost half of the men interviewed in all other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Croatia and Mexico, said they played an equal or greater role in one or more domestic chores.

Indian men and women too, still think that the horrific bits of parenting can only be done by women, or probably assume that women have some special gene that helps them to handle baby poop and sick kids. The fact is that women don’t enjoy cleaning poop or wiping snot either, as anyone else. They just grit their teeth and get on with it as it’s a part of their duty.

Most Indian women if confronted with the sight of a man changing a diaper insist on changing the child themselves and often term it as “He’s a man and he doesn’t know how to do it!”

So a man can handle business operations for the whole Asia Pacific region, he can understand complicated tax laws, he can drive across the country, but he can’t get a child to sleep or wipe their bums?

Women are often to blame, as well. Most mothers have this overwhelming desire to control the way their children are parented, and tell their men what to do, how to do it, when to do it and so on. They behave like control freaks that can’t let go. Invariably, women drive men crazy, and men end up making that behavior an excuse to avoid the hard stuff.

The solution is quite simple. If one wants her husband to parent, then she needs to let him do it his way. Even if that means returning to a messy house, where the kids have eaten more chocolate than is wise, and gone to sleep in their school clothes as men often have different priorities than women, sometimes preferring to do the fun stuff rather than clean up the puddles.