Partnership Parenting

"Partnership Parenting is about the next iteration of paternal involvement. There are the exceptions, single parents, but let’s stick with the majority of families where there is a father, a mother, and biological or not they are trying to do this together. We call it co-parenting but we are not supporting each other very well. That’s what Partnership Parenting is about – getting practical about what this mean to a couple. How do you support it? How do you get it going? How do you keep it going during the difficult times? What does the research have to say? “The literature on fathering is actually much broader in its perspective than that on mothering” It was fun for Marsha and me to do this together as husband and wife. We love talking about the work. Her perspective is different from mine, it’s a really interesting and long-term conversation. We just recently had something interesting happen. The Chinese bought the rights to the book, although there’s not a paragraph in it targeted towards families in Asia. We asked the Chinese agent why they were interested. He said, ‘Our middle class families are under a lot of pressure to change very rapidly economically, and that means they’re also changing culturally. They’re a little lost about how to do this as partners and we think your book goes a long way to helping them.’ It was an example to us of how little we know about the potential usefulness of partnership parenting. I don’t agree. I don’t think these differences are rooted in chromosomes, I think they’re rooted in culture. There are many same sex couples that divide up tasks in the way that heterosexual couples do. You have good cops and bad cops. You have people who are playful and people who are serious. One parent wants to protect the child from frustration, while the other wants to help you learn from your failures. So a dimorphism tends to develop in couples when two people are trying to raise a child. We don’t have any really good science yet to tell us whether children who are raised in same sex marriages have any particular vulnerabilities, because most of them are not controlled studies. How can you control a study like that? It’s impossible. The work of Charlotte Patterson and others has said we don’t need to be especially worried about these children. They’re doing fine. So let’s pay attention to the children we know we have to worry about, the children of the poor or vulnerable single parent."