'The stories we tell about dads are really f*cking old'

Talking to author, dad and activist Justin Cohen about parental divisions of labor, why having a kid won't save your relationship, and the wonder of discovering who your kid is.

When you’re working, where are your kids?

Azad is 18 months old now; when she was 3 months, we hired a full-time caregiver with another family in our neighborhood, which is a very New York thing to do, because day care costs $4,000 a month in the cheap places, and this is much cheaper than that. So their kid comes to our house every day. I’m sitting in my ‘office,’ and there’s air quotes because this is a guest room with a tiny table for my laptop, and both kids are in the immediate next room with our caregiver. It can get loud, but it’s still privacy, and I can do my work.

Is it enough, though? Does the care you have give you enough time to do your work, or do you end up having to squeeze it in around the edges?

I am also the house spouse, which is the term I use. In most relationships, one person tends to be more responsible for household duties, like cleaning and cooking and shopping, so I am that person. I end up doing a lot of those things during the time when our caregiver is here, though. So it’s a competition between work and house chores.

I’m a freelancer, I make my own hours. When I have more work than usual, it’s hard. Five o’clock comes around, and the person who takes care of our child goes home, and — it is a work in progress.

One thing I’ve really learned is that there’s no static arrangements when you’re parenting with someone else. I think we get caught in these ruts and patterns, like, I do 6 to 7:30 and that’s what I do. But we have to adjust. We just recently changed our division of labor for the mornings between when Azad wakes up, and when our caregiver gets here, because Sheila said, I can’t do that anymore. She was doing the early shift and it wasn’t working. So we’re figuring that out.

Yeah, and that only works if you have a relationship where you can actually talk openly and honestly about what you need, right? I think in so many households, that would be a fight, or resentment, or something else.

That’s why I find this idea of, ‘We’re going to have a child to save the relationship,’ to be such a fallacy. We know that in fact, so many relationships fall apart because of bad communication habits, and nothing will exacerbate that like a child.

The other thing I did not know before I had a child is that you actually have to have some premises about the amount of labor you’re planning to do, the division of that labor, and how that interacts with your other responsibilities. Our arrangement where I do the lion’s share of the housework, and we try to split child care — that’s the context we’re working in. There’s no way to superimpose a schedule on a relationship. You have to discuss the context you’re in.

Right, and as you’re saying that, I’m reflecting on the fact that I think that conversation just never happens in a lot of households. And what takes the place of that conversation are ideas about who’s going to do what that are probably informed by gender roles. Like, I’m the dad, so I guess I’m going to do ‘dad stuff,’ or whatever. To really be thoughtful about it instead of falling back on whatever your preconceived notions are — it’s hard and it’s work. It’s both of those things.

I think a lot about models and narratives — what stories do we tell about what dads are responsible for? And the stories we tell are really fucking old, and we all know that at some level, they’re no good. We know that as the gendered expectations of the workforce and earning have changed, the roles of men and women and the way we think about gender are different. And yet we don’t have a lot of new stories.

Name something that’s challenging about parenting for you at this time in your life.

Azad all of a sudden has a longer attention span and that has coincided with me relenting on a long-standing aversion to having a television in the household. And this combination is causing a lot of strife and anxiety for me. On the one hand, it is cool to see her attach more time and energy to paths — like, she’s playing with Magnatiles, or she will take out six different musical instruments and do stuff with all of them in a way that is incredibly creative and weird. But now that there’s a television in the household, she also has an attention span for that. So figuring out what the boundaries are. When it’s 7 p.m., and she’s been active for several hours of the day and I’m exhausted, it is easy to turn on Cocomelon and let her zone out. And I get really anxious about that as a parent, so that is very hard for me right now. It is an easy shortcut.

I’ve heard a lot of other parents say that it feels hard to figure out boundaries around screen time, because the expectations we grew up with might be very different from what feels appropriate today. Did you grow up watching TV?

I did grow up watching TV, and Sheila did as well. We were kids who came home and sat in front of the TV for hours. I don’t judge myself; I think I’m OK. I don’t think I was permanently damaged by that. But I also know that the variety and extremity and availability of crazy content is much different now. If Tiktok had existed when I was a kid, I’d be in jail.

Besides TV, what’s one thing you’re doing differently as a parent, compared to the household you grew up in?

Religion comes up a lot in our household. My parents are both atheists, very anti-religion, and my father’s parents were observant Jews. We ended up having a pretty intensive experience with Hebrew school and the Jewish faith when I was 9 or 10 years old. Sheila’s from Iran; her parents are both atheists as well, but they’re from a Muslim culture. We are trying to do things early with Azad to introduce her to the fact that she’s from a blended religion background. She will have her own opinions — I don’t want her to feel like she has to believe what I believe — but I feel like she gets to experience the traditions of her families.

What’s something you swore you would never do as a parent that you have absolutely done?

I get bored a lot. I promised myself I would follow her interests and energy where it goes, and I’m bored a lot. I think the excitement wore off, and I felt really guilty about that. Some of it’s not fun. And that’s one thing where I’ve had to let myself off the hook.

That’s really interesting to me, because here again, I don’t think your parents or my parents would have even considered the idea that their infant child should captivate their attention.

Yeah, I think there was less of an expectation that the child was the center of the intellectual center of the home. I think we have a more realistic balance on that. We have turned over a lot of the physical real estate of our home for toys while maintaining a lot of our own hobbies at the same time. We get invited to dinner parties with younger friends who have no kids. We’ll bring Azad and let her hang out and then we’ll put her to bed, which might be a little bit weird, but we think it is a way to have it both ways. Not all of our friends have kids.

Tell me something wonderful about your kid:

Azad looks into your soul. We will go to a restaurant and sit down and she will make intense eye contact with other people, to the point where people will come up to us and be like, I think she just looked into my soul. There’s something about her eyes that penetrates into people in a way that transcends anything about the aesthetics of her eyes.

She also knows when she needs to recharge. If she’s with somebody who’s hyper energetic, she can be in the middle of playing, and she will walk over to her stroller and ask to be put there and be quiet. Which is funny to us, as two people who don’t necessarily need that.

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Thanks to Justin for speaking with me — you can find out more about Justin on his website. If you want to chat about your experience as a parent, educator or both, please be in touch! And look for the audio edition of my interview with Justin in a future newsletter. Don’t forget to mark your calendar for my Instagram Live chat with Jen Lumanlan on Jan. 22 at 8 p.m. EST! I hope to see you there (virtually).