Control for time spent with the child, and the effects of gender on things like missing cues and child harm will wash out. Whether you are male or female, the more time you spend with a baby, the more you are able to read cues and the better you become at caring for the child. What a shocker!

On a more speculative note, in my opinion the ways in which women tend to “damage” children is not something we can easily observe because of cultural constraints and the way gender is socially constructed (and btw, to posit the social construction of gender is not to deny its reality). In other words, men are more dangerous to children *by cultural definition*. That’s what these studies about male danger to children really show — that if you take traditional understandings of gender for granted, you can demonstrate that women are less dangerous to kids. But it’s a farce because in undertaking such a study, you can’t operationalize your outcome in a way that is not true by definition!

Oh and if you think Pruett seeks to “minimize and whitewash” male/female differences in parenting, then you seriously misunderstand his work. The main emphasis of his research is that males contribute in unique and important ways to child development. I actually think that, if anything, he even goes a little too far sometimes in generalizing about gender differences.

It’s really a problem I should work on, especially since it’s a fairly regular source of embarrassment for me.

But thanks for the public apology. I agree that you misinterpreted Ardis, but things like that happen all the time.

That said, since you’ve made clear just how strongly you feel about this sort of thing in blog comments, let me take this opportunity to publicly apologize for the fact that I interpreted the final paragraph of your comment #17 as mocking those who feel differently than you do about Proclamation language.

Mothers needn’t be so defensive about their role. That fathers play a greater role does not diminish the important role mothers play. It’s not a zero sum game, and we do no good to reduce each other’s influence to that of merely an iron hand or a skillet.

An example is when my father died, my mom was suddenly forced to learn at age 73 how to do dozens of things that she had not done all her life such as pump gas. None of the things individually were difficult to learn, but being hit with all of them at once, at a time when her brain was older and she was overwhelmed with grief was not good. Her learned helplessness was causing her great difficulty. In the same way, my father didn’t know how to do laundry. He had not the faintest clue. A male coworker once didn’t realize toilets have to be cleaned. I’m serious. His mom did it his whole life until he married, then his wife took over and not only had he never cleaned a toilet, he didn’t even know that job existed. I had a similar epiphany when I moved out of my mom’s house, not realizing that things like scrubbing and wiping down the washer and dryer were necessary because they’d been done for me all my life.

I think also that stay-at-home mothers sometimes don’t have the experience of delegating responsibility as they might have gotten if they worked full time outside the home. They might have learned that you have to give reasonable expectations, and maybe offer some help with methods, if needed, but basically get out of the way and let the person do the work in their own way. You have to trust the person to do things well. If you have no faith in them, they can feel that, and they’ll basically back off and let you take over.

So I agree with the article that mothers and dads should be expected to be involved with their kids but not necessarily in exactly the same way.

If you think the stats Rosalynde cites suggest you should leave your children or that all men are negligent, step away from the computer. Infanticide, outside of abortion, is quite rare. Rosalynde is not calling all fathers out as killers.