With the inexorable disintegration of the traditional Indian joint family, especially in urban India, and rapid multiplication of nuclear households in which both parents go to work, male parents are increasingly beginning — American style — to share parenting duties and household chores – Mini P. & Cynthia John Mother’s Day (May 12) is a big ticket annual event around the world and increasingly in urban metro India. Malls, restaurants and online websites offer large discounts and newspapers feature special stories highlighting the mother-child bond. However, similar enthusiasm is conspicuously lacking for Father’s Day (June 16). In popular folklore, literature, public imagination and reality, mothers are perceived to be primary care-givers who play the lead role of nurturing children through early childhood, adolescence into adulthood. On the other hand, in the popular imagination — especially in India — the male parent is a stern patriarch, protector and provider who doesn’t get his hands dirty with nappy-changing, school drops, laundry, cooking and other “women’s work”. But in the new me-too, equal pay for equal work and women’s emancipation age, stereotypical gender roles are changing, even if gradually. With the inexorable disintegration of the traditional Indian joint family, especially in urban India and rapid multiplication of nuclear households in which both parents go to work, male parents are increasingly beginning — American style — to share parenting duties and household chores. In the interest of fair play and gender equity, a small but growing minority of men are changing the parenting narrative and evolving into hands-on work-sharing fathers. This new tribe of hands-on fathers known as ‘penguin dads’ — after the male emperor penguin who protects and cares for the family eggs for two months after the mother leaves post-delivery to feed in the ocean (see box p.12) — are deeply involved and invested in child-rearing and work-sharing in nuclear households. A 2018 survey by e-retail giant Flipkart, which interviewed a sample group of 1,700 male parents in 17 cities countrywide, found that a rising number of men are upending stereotypes by becoming heavily involved in child rearing duties — “a revolutionary change sweeping Indian society”. The survey reports that 50 percent of the respondents wouldn’t mind being stay-at-home dads and 85 percent said they participated in their child’s daily routine activities including helping with school homework and other child care duties. Moreover, 58 percent of fathers interviewed have become more health conscious role models with 27 percent quitting cigarettes and 22 percent foreswearing alcohol after birth of their children. Pune-based Abhijit Roy, father of Aarohi (8) and Jay (2), and a freelance visual effects artist and animator, represents the new tribe of penguin dads. In 2010, he quit his full-time job to bond with daughter Aarohi. “There’s no shortage of research studies which indicate that the best parent-child bonds are established in the first three years. And I didn’t think it was fair this bond should be the exclusive preserve of mother and child. Therefore, I also quit my job to become…
