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Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

As a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding.

As for the whole 'my kid is so amazing', yeah i have that feeling as well with my kid. seems like it's just a paternal thing. but damn man kid is fucking cute and EVERYONE says hi to her. This doesnt happen with all little ones right? Our kid is smiley as shit, waving, laughing and basically a smile generator. IF you dont smile as this kid you have no soul

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I wondered when our first one came out and looked pretty damn good from, literally, minute one, just how powerful those my-own-kid-is-cute hormones must be. I mean even cute kids are a bit ugly for the first week or two, right? Certainly the first hour. Figured strangers were just being kind when they said (several times) that we should try to get her in commercials or something ("the pictures", one old guy said, hahaha) when she was still under 90 days old.

Then we had two more and no, it wasn't the hormones. They both had the usual newborn uglies and even we could see that. Our first one actually was remarkably cute. No one ever told us we should contact acting agents about either of the later ones.

Having more kids makes it easier to tell where your kids truly fall, absent parental bias, on the cuteness or cleverness scale or whatever. Sometimes they actually are unusually cute or unusually smart or unusually well-coordinated, and that's not just parent-insanity talking.

"As a newish dad this is relatable but not as much as for my wife. There is so much pressure and she is constantly telling me she feels like a bad mom. I say listen , who cares about the media or twitter. There is always some person posting on instagram about how they make a gourmet vegan meal for their baby. As a male, an alternative dude, and a bit of a stoner with open mind I can pretty easy filter out all the crap and focus in on what matters. Not as easy for the females, i have mad respect for all the moms out there grinding."

Might I suggest one of the aspects that you may be missing is that mothers are judged as mothers first and humans second in society (at least in America where I live). Often times a woman who doesn't mother as vigorously as another woman is considered less worthy as a human being and less deserving of respect, care, comfort, etc.

I would compare this to ask if men are judged the same way as fathers. For example, if a male CEO doesn't take the day off to nurse his sick infant, is he considered a bad human being and judged as morally a less worthy person?

Or, in my experience, if my male friends are letting their spouses handle taking care of the child for the evening, they are not casually discussed as allowing malnutrition and unkemptness the way women are discussed when they let their husbands take care of the kids while they have a night or a week out for a business trip or just to have some fun.

An interesting thing to note is that women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.

> I would compare this to ask if men are judged the same way as fathers. For example, if a male CEO doesn't take the day off to nurse his sick infant

The example I would use is a father who looses his job. Is he considered as morally a less worthy person compared to a mother who lost her job?

Cultural we still have gender role leftovers from the perception that mothers are judged based on how they are able to raise children, fathers on how they are able to provide for their children and spouse. A man who can't provide is cultural viewed as an unfit father. A woman who can't raise her children a unfit mother.

In such culture it is of no surprise that the father can take a much more relax attitude to question such as nutrition.

> women on average were studied to have an additional 2 hours of work per day upon becoming new parents, while men on average have an additional 40 minutes.

And how many work hours at the office? Should anyone given our current culture be surprised if fathers spend more time in the office than mothers?

My post is about why a mother might have a significant amount of anxiety about being a mother and their mothering capacity.

This response is entirely out of scope. This isn't a competition on who works harder, and framing it like this completely ignored my point.

That misses the point. Gender roles is a cause for anxiety because the cost of failure is magnified and strike at the gender identity of the person.

Without understanding gender roles the different in anxiety in fathers and mothers is unexplained, but there is no reason to do so as gender roles is a fairly well documented and understood concept. Even in households that do not perceive the father as the provider and the mother as the caregiver the gender roles in society still imposes expectations that results in anxiety and stress that align identically to those gender roles.

I am not sure where you got the concept of a competition, as the key insight from identify the problems of gender roles is that both women and men suffer from it. A simple decision such as taking a day off to nurse a sick infant should have same outcome for both women and men, but with gender roles pushing the mother to prioritize the child over work and the father to prioritize work over the child the outcome becomes stereotypical.

"That misses the point. Gender roles is a cause for anxiety because the cost of failure is magnified and strike at the gender identity of the person."

Yes, that's... kind of what I was pointing at, because the original guy said he was baffled at the anxiety of his wife. That's literally all I'm saying. I'm so confused at your responses.

I often read about moms feeling bad because of other moms' perfectly curated instagram feeds. As someone who doesn't remember ever feeling instagram envy - and btw all photos of my adorable children that I post are adorable :) - I must admit I'm envious of people whose feelings of sadness and inadequacy are cased by things farther removed from day to day life. For me the most disheartening feelings are usually the result of interactions with people close to me, mother and mother in law particularly so. Nine years after becoming a parent I still am unable to not let it phase me when my mother says "oh, they never act in this [terrible] way when you're not around" or when my mother in law asks "oh, did you want to brush her hair before the family photo?" "did you want me to get some cute plates for her birthday party so she feels special?". I'm sure much it can be helped by me just growing thicker skin - but I do feel lonelier sometimes when I think, people worry about instagram, they don't often talk about family making them feel like they are not good enough, I guess it is me.

I haven't got a lot to add apart from saying that my experience parallels your own. We have an eight-month-old, our first, and my wife feels inadequate all the time because she can't ignore the carefully cultivated facades from 'influencer' parents. Rationally she knows that these standards are impossible and unnecessary, but we humans don't get to select our anxieties.

Also my daughter is super cute and smiley and we secretly suspect she really is unusually adorable, even though we rationally realize that it's mostly hormones. Mostly.

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