When Austin Estes took his sick baby son to urgent care, he struggled to change his diapers in an examination room without a smaller table. "Oh, if only mom is here," the nurse said. Estes, an education policy consultant in Washington, D.C., wondered why she thought his wife would be better at handling impossible diapers.
Justin Rauzon, director of program in Los Angeles, told me he listed himself as the primary contact for the air intake paperwork in the Pediatrician’s Office. But office staff often ignore this information. "They usually contact my wife, who either try to handle things (sometimes without a full context), tinker with me, or tell them to call me," he told me in an email. "It's exactly the kind of inefficient experience I called first."
Shannon Carpenter wrote a book (for Atlantic) About a full-time father, one day calling her daughter’s high school to let them know she was sick. The school immediately contacted his wife to confirm that she was really sick. A few years ago, he picked up his son from day care and another child asked why his father always picked him up. The teacher said, "He has a father, Momi." ("damn it?The carpenter thought. )
School, pediatrician, random passers-man many think moms know what’s going on in their family, and dads don’t. They believe that if the child has problems, the first step is to contact the mother rather than where she is or what she may be doing. Yevgeniya Nusinovich, a mom of four, told me that earlier this year a doctor's office called her three times while working in Taiwan, leaving her messages in the middle of the night without ever trying to contact her husband. When Alexis Miller was on an international flight with her husband and 11-month-old daughter, they booked two seats together and the row came back. Her husband and the baby started to make a fuss. The flight attendant walked past Miller's husband, approached Miller, and told her to help the baby calm down. "She's with her father and she'll settle in a minute," Miller told her.
I am familiar with this phenomenon myself: I once called to confirm my son’s appointment for physical therapy, told the office to call my husband, and gave them his phone number. I'm hanging. They called me right away.
This is not only in our minds. Research supports the idea that people tend to assume that mothers are the default parents, even if they explicitly require that they do not. A few years ago, Kristy Buzard, an economist at Syracuse University, and her colleagues believed to be fictional parents and emailed more than 80,000 school principals, saying they were looking for a school’s kids and asked to call. The researchers found that the principal was 40% more likely to call back the phone as a mother than pretending to be a father. Even when the emails come from the father, the father says he is more usable than his wife, the principal calls his mother 12% of the time.
Buzard believes that part of the reason is “this basic belief that moms are more available and will be more responsive.” This suspicion is because of the fact that it is emphasized in areas with more Republican votes, religions and rural peoples, and that she and her co-authors use as agents of traditional gender norms, even more likely to be called. "We have stereotypes about mothers being caregivers," said Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania. Many school administrators and doctors' office workers may not have gone through the unintended process they like," she said. Well, which of these two should I call? Let me consider the probability that they are caregivers.“People will come to conclusions, not even realize it,” she told me.
Another explanation is that many children-related institutions rely on clumsy and outdated software. “The data system isn’t smart enough to prioritize who is called,” Jen Shu, a pediatrician in Atlanta, told me. "I never know which one I should call because our system isn't smart enough to say 'Today, call this parent with this number.'" She said the software sometimes only has only one email in the file and can only list its cells as the parent with the primary number. If the mom takes the newborn to make an appointment, fills out the intake paperwork, and then goes back to work while the husband is staying before the parent-child marriage, there is not always a reliable way to notify the office that should now contact the father. If the mother tells the receptionist, that person may not be the one who updates the patient’s charts. If she herself makes changes online, the patient portal may not provide new information to the doctor's records. “In this era,” Shu said, “it should be easier.”
Of course, in many families, mothers are the primary contact. (Dustin Strickland, assistant principal at North Murray High School in Georgia, told me that, according to his records, most families list moms first.) However, when they don’t want to be the default parent, considering mothers as the default parent can add annoying to their already troubled life. Unnecessary phone calls from school or doctor’s office can interrupt their attention at work, and passing the phone to dad is not always easy. In another survey conducted by Buzard and her co-author, mothers said that outsourcing work to their partners was 30% more likely than fathers, “It’s destructive for their partners, and they still have to participate in the task even after seeking help from their partners, which is a surprising sentence, and it’s a surprising sentence. Some mothers are so tired of being the pressure of being an email in flu shots and mental day outfits that extend backwards or stop working entirely. Buzard and her co-authors found that child-related disruptions have caused many women to decide to engage in lower jobs, providing greater flexibility, or becoming a full-time parent.
For dads, being seen as a backup parent will feel frustrated. Rauzon tracks his son’s asthma treatment program, and when the doctor’s office calls his wife instead of him, managing his medications and treatments becomes more difficult. Similarly, when Estes and his wife use daily services when their son is ill, even when Estes works from home, “this adds an unnecessary step,” he tells me. “I think sometimes people think dad is there to decorate.”
These days, many dads want to step up their efforts and the family is doing better. If only others would catch up and let them.