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Comic perfectly nails how moms and dads are treated differently in public
By Laura DonovanJuly 18 2024, Updated 7:51 p.m. ET
A popular comic by parenting site Babble highlights some of the different ways moms are treated in public compared to dads, with many parents commenting that they can relate to the image all too well.
The comic shows the ways moms and dads may be received in five different scenarios. In the first, a man shown at the grocery store with his kids is labeled a "good dad," whereas a woman at the store with her kids is told by an onlooker that she has her "hands full" and offered no help.
In the second slide, a man brings his daughter to the doctor's office and receives praise for painting his daughter's nails, whereas a mother is chided for letting her daughter wear nail polish because it contains chemicals.
It's been shared more than 42,000 times, and several people have chimed in to say that moms face a double standard:
One person commented that it's "annoying" to see men praised for taking care of their kids, something that should be a given anyway:
Writer Ellen Kate confronted the issue of praising dads for fulfilling basic parenting tasks, and conversely demanding more of moms, in an August 2014 piece for Everyday Feminism. Kate wrote that it's silly to cheer on dads for going to the playground with their kids, as seen in the above comic, and to say that dads are "babysitting" their own kids when they are actually just watching their kids.
"As a society, we continue to have overall lower expectations for fathers than for mothers," Kate wrote. "The result is that mothers continue to be viewed more critically than fathers, who are often given credit for simply showing up. Speak up when you notice people commenting on how awesome it is that a dad is at a playground on a Sunday morning and not sleeping in! Call people out when they talk about a dad 'babysitting' his own kid. Neither of those things are anything out of the norm. They are just part of parenting."