When fathers take responsibility for their children, it is not a favour to mothers. It is what being a parent means
“I have a very important storytelling show. I really want to go, but it’s on a weekday. How do we manage the kids?” I asked my husband.
“I’ll take a work-from-home day. You go, learn and enjoy,” he replied, without missing a beat.
We are a nuclear family with twin boys, so childcare is our shared responsibility. Sometimes one of us does more because the other has a demanding day; sometimes one takes over completely. There is no question of one ‘helping’ the other. We are both parents.
Yet what feels ordinary inside our home is still treated as unusual outside it. A father who feeds his child, changes a nappy, takes a child to school, attends a parent-teacher meeting or stays home when a child is ill is often praised for “helping” his wife. A father taking his children out alone may even be described as “babysitting”. The language reveals an assumption that children are primarily the mother’s responsibility and the father is merely lending a hand.
We rarely use the same language for mothers. Nobody says a mother is ‘helping’ her husband by making breakfast for the children or staying awake with a sick child at three in the morning. It is understood that she is parenting. Why should the standard be different for fathers?
The Father Who ‘Helps’
For generations, the Indian family has been shaped by a persistent division of labour. The father earns. The mother manages the home and children. Even when women work outside the home, much of the domestic and emotional labour continues to fall disproportionately on them.
The arrangement has changed, but expectations have been slower to change. A father can spend ten hours at work and be considered a responsible provider. A mother can spend ten hours at work and still be expected to know whether the children have finished their homework, whether the school has sent a circular, whether the uniforms are ready and whether there is enough food at home.
This is not simply about chores. It is about the mental load of parenthood: remembering, anticipating, organising and worrying about the countless details that keep children’s lives moving.
The Government of India’s Time Use Survey 2019 exposed the scale of this imbalance. Women aged 15 and above spent substantially more time than men on unpaid domestic services and caregiving. The International Labour Organization has similarly documented the disproportionate burden of unpaid care carried by women globally.
These numbers expose what family conversations often conceal. What is described as a mother’s “natural instinct” is frequently unpaid labour. What is described as a father’s “involvement” is often simply the same labour being noticed for the first time.
Children Need Parents, Not Helpers
The distinction matters to children as much as it matters to mothers. A child does not need a father who occasionally steps in when the mother is tired. A child needs a father who knows what time school begins, who their friends are, what they are afraid of, which book they are reading and why they suddenly refuse to eat something they loved last week.
Parenting is not only about visible tasks. It is also about familiarity. It is knowing the difference between a child’s ordinary silence and the silence that means something is wrong. It is knowing which teacher they like, which subject frightens them and what happened in the playground that they are reluctant to discuss.
It is being present often enough for those details to become part of your own knowledge. That is why “helping” is the wrong word. Helping suggests that the responsibility belongs to somebody else. A father does not help the mother raise his children. He raises his children.
What Children Learn
There is another reason this matters. Children learn their ideas about men and women largely by watching the adults around them.
A boy who grows up seeing his father cook, clean, pack school bags, attend meetings and comfort a crying child does not grow up believing these are inherently female responsibilities. A girl who sees both parents make room for each other’s work receives a different message about partnership.
This does not mean every household must divide every task exactly down the middle. Equality in a family is not an accounting exercise. There will be weeks when one parent does more and periods when work, illness or circumstances make the balance uneven. What matters is that responsibility is shared rather than assigned by gender.
That is particularly important in India, where women continue to bear the consequences of unequal caregiving responsibilities at work. The question is not simply whether fathers are willing to change nappies. It is whether families and workplaces are prepared to accept that a man’s career, too, may sometimes have to accommodate the needs of his children.
A father taking leave for a school event should not have to explain why the mother cannot go. A father working from home to look after a sick child should not be treated as though he has made an extraordinary sacrifice. A father taking his child to the doctor should not be asked whether he is “managing alone”. Such reactions may appear harmless, but they reinforce the division we claim to be moving beyond.
The Invisible Bargain
In our home, my husband did not have to be taught how to parent. He learned by being involved. He changed nappies because the babies needed changing. He attends parent-teacher meetings because they concern his children. He gets them ready for school because someone has to do it. When I have something important to attend, he does not see childcare as a favour he is doing for me. He sees it as his responsibility.
That is the change we need. Women should not have to become managers of their husbands’ parenting. A mother should not have to prepare a list of instructions before leaving her children with their father or explain where the clothes are, what the children eat and what time they sleep. The father should know, not because the mother trained him, but because he is there.
Let ‘Ordinary’ Become Ordinary
There is nothing revolutionary about a father looking after his own children. The fact that it still attracts praise tells us how far we have to go. The next time we see a father taking his child to school, feeding a toddler in a restaurant or staying home because his child is unwell, perhaps we should resist calling him “helpful”. He is not helping anyone. He is parenting.
That is what we should want to make ordinary: fathers who are not celebrated for occasionally stepping into their children’s lives, but expected to be fully present in them.
When my husband told me to go to the storytelling show, he was not doing something noble or permitting me to enjoy an evening. He was simply making a decision that any parent should be able to make. One parent has somewhere important to be; the other stays with the children. Sometimes it is me. Sometimes it is him.
