We Need Men to Speak Up About Paid Leave and Child Care
Let’s start right here on Medium
In late April 2020, I stumbled across an article in The Nation entitled, “The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care.”
The story was both funny and infuriating, and it resonated deeply with me. At the time, my son’s preschool and my daughter’s elementary school were both closed indefinitely. My partner was taking advantage of a seven-week furlough to watch them while I worked from home.
I loved having a “house husband.” But we both knew the honeymoon would soon be over. Once he was called back to his hand therapy clinic, I had no idea what I was going to do.
I knew I’d likely end up doing what so many other parents were doing — juggling child care and Zoom school and full-time work, while slowly losing my mind because, as the author of The Nation article put it, “being a full-time teacher is incompatible with being any other kind of full-time employee, even if you are working from home.”
When I finished reading the article, I Googled the author, Elie Mystal, to learn more about her and was shocked to discover that “she,” in fact, was a man. As an advocate for working parents, I’d read quite a few articles about our broken child care system in my time, and never — I repeat…
