Patriachy keeps women locked into child care

"I’m on the way home from a long trip that included three separate flights each way. In most of these flights, I saw this family seating pattern over and over: Parents in adjacent aisle seats, with the kids next to the woman. That left the man free to drink or sleep, while the woman handled all the child care.

This seemed to me like such a powerful illustration of the patriarchy in action. I guess when you have kids, only men get vacations."

So writes one woman seeing the patriachy bogeyman everywhere. These sorts of posts always make me smile as they are invariably written by young woman who have yet to have children themselvs. They are looking at family life, through naivety, a child's position, and seeing things from an very limited view point.

The thing is having children is a huge upheavel in your life. The life that you knew before, care free (taking long trips with three seperate flights each way for example) doesn't really exist anymore. It can do but it's going to be way more complicated and the majority of people opt not to bother with that and would rather fly to a resort, where everyting is on tap and people aren't going to get upset if the children cry. 

But there's more that happens, the mothering instinct is strong. I've seen it over and over again. It's inconceivable that as a man I would gladly die for my child. If he had to go to prison for life, in a foreign country, I would gladly take on his sentence so he was free. These are powerful instincts that arise in you.

The mothering instinct to love, to protect and to nurture is there too. Until you feel it, see it, it seems impossible to happen. That instinct is in children too. It's beyond frustrating, that as a father, you can take your child out, spoil them to within an inch of their lives, give them an amazing day. Yet when they come back, fall over, it's always mummy they reach for.

When my son was ill, with chicken pox, I told my wife I'd take these particular days off. She wasn't interested, she wanted to look after him and nurse him back to health.

And that's the problem with many of these young feminists, waxing lyrical about the evils of patriachy. They have extremely limited life experience, they haven't had families, relationships they are almost children themselves still.

Yet they see this evil force everywhere.

Only when they get the chance to experience motherhood, to feel those instincts, will they realise there was a reason why people chose those roles. I know the majority of mothers felt better, more sexucre, to be next to their children and this was not something forced onto them. 

All of this, is people who are not playing the game, attempting to write the rules based on their limited life experience and mostly getting it wrong.