Modern Fathers, Things Have Changed!

My Jblog buddy, LL, periodically promotes her daughter's baby-carrier on her blog.  The latest is a marketing appeal to fathers.  I get a real kick out of it, because when I was a young mother (and my husband a young father) not only were these sorts of baby-carriers rare, they were for the mothers.  "Real men" didn't strap babies onto their bodies in public.  They preferred an older child on their shoulders and then would knock the kid out when walking through a doorway...  "Horsing around" with kids was my father's specialty.  Diapering and cooking were my mother's.

Things have changed for sure.  Modern men even adopt babies/children or pay surrogates to carry their own biological ones.

When we had our oldest kids in Israel in the early 1970's we saw that Israeli men were much more involved with their kids of all ages than their American peers.  Fathers attended parent-teacher meetings along with or instead of their wives.  I don't remember my father ever going to one.

One thing I must say is that my husband, like his father before him, was better at getting babies and kids to fall asleep.  There's a hyper element to my personality which prevents sleep, while my husband could always doze off, which relaxes babies.