One of the first things I noticed when we embarked on this great adventure was just how tailed to Mum everything seemed to be.
I get it, they’re likely to be the ones doing the majority of the caregiving, but still, as a hands-on dad I couldn’t help but feel a little…pushed out by things. Nothing massive for sure, but little things like how a good chunk of the online resources are written as if Mum is reading exclusively. Or how pretty much every baby group in my area is advertised as a Mum and Baby group. It’s far from the end of the world, but it can be pretty intimidating and unwelcoming to a new Dad.
Mother and baby groups were definitely a gripe for me. I’m a part time worker who has 2 days a week on dad duty, and trying to find things to fill these days was a challenge. Almost every group (and certainly all the free/cheap ones) were explicitly mum socials which I wouldn’t have felt comfortable gatecrashing. The groups I did find, which weren’t explicitly “mum” groups, were still entirely mums other than me, so that took some getting used to (and some iffy looks).
Nursery was a bit of a pain for a while too; they’d basically never talk to me. I remember once when my lad got ill at nursery, and they tried to call mum but couldn’t get through as she was driving a long way away for work. I was working from home that day 10 minutes from the nursery, but they never bothered to call me. I was furious when I went to pick him up at the end of the day and they said “we’ve been trying to call mum but we can’t get through”. Like, you’ve got my number, what do you think it’s for?
Hope they brought themselves into the 21st century after that.