There are loads of stereotypical behaviours in hetro-parents. E.g.: Dad is there less, but when he spends time with the kids alone, everything goes. You’ll order take-out and watch crazy ageinappropriate movies till way past your bedtime.
Mum runs the show. She wakes you up, puts out clothes when your younger. She cooks, makes appointments, organizes your hobbies and playdates.
And whenerver you ask if you can get something a little more expensive, or if you can go see your ffiend it’s “ask your mother”.
Are there comparable common dynamics in lesbian or gay parents, or are they percieved less, because both parents are of the same gender which automaticly dissolves these gender-roles from the beginning.
Elder millennial here, in my early 40s now. My parents were like this. Dad was antisocial and didn’t know how to be a dad (his own dad died when he was 2 years old), so he was there, but hardly interacted with us kids unless we approached him.
Mom was the bread-winner, but also did most of the parenting/cooking/cleaning. Probably a big part of why their marriage didn’t last.
Granted, my parents also waited really late in life to get married and have kids, so my mother was an early boomer and my dad was actually from the Silent Generation.
Also a millennial. My parents were largely like this. My dad was just around less because he was commuting to and from manhattan. He was up at 5am every day. My mom did random jobs here and there but my dad made the bulk of our household income.
You mean he just happened to have a long commute and it didn’t have anything to do with the only social expectation of fathers was to earn money?
Yeah, for the most part. He definitely was present and engaged with us despite having a good deal of the boomer parent tropes like “ask your mom” or running off to the basement to scream at a sporting event and drink beer away from the family. Like, I remember he went to all the parent teacher conferences, not just my mom, or he would take off to go on some of the field trips.
Elder millennial here too. Neither my parents nor my grandparents were like that.
It was actually a pretty common stereotype in my childhood. The mother was the “housewife,” while the father was the “bread-winner.” Anything different was poked fun of in pop culture.
Then sometime in my teen years, people started talking more seriously about different family types, and pop culture slowly shifted toward being more accepting of “unique” family situations. It took a long time for it to be commonly accepted, at least here in the US.
Of course, there were always outliers to pop culture. It’s not like other family types didn’t exist. It’s just that media always pushed their straight Christian family roles on us through movies, music, news, etc.
My mother’s family has always had strong women, which is why I hold women in such high respect in my life. My mother only begrudgingly took on housewife roles because my dad didn’t step up, but she was also the bread-winner in my family.
And her mother (my grandmother) was also a tough-as-nails woman who built her own business from the ground up and was the matriarch of her whole large family.
On my dad’s side, his mother lost two husbands in their 50s and decided that was enough of that, so she raised a half dozen kids herself as a single mother.
It’s just my parents that slipped into the stereotype during my childhood. But that was all I knew growing up, thanks to pop culture and my home life, so I had a lot to learn about the world when I turned 18 and left home.
Also elder millennial and my parents and my mother’s parents were ¯\(ツ)/¯