Image source: @BloggerFather via Twitter
Who does the nurse call when my son needs to come home early from school, sick? His mother, my wife. This, despite the fact that my boy tells her to call his dad, since I’m the one who picks him up from school and works from home. I’ve been his primary caregiver since he was three months old, but the school nurse operates under the outdated assumption that his mother is the one on point when it comes to caring for him.
Sadly, this one nurse is not alone.
On the heels of feeling disappointed by Similac’s “The Mother ‘Hood” campaign when it undercut its message of inclusiveness by leaving dads out of its tagline, I was made aware that retail Goliath Amazon also has no shame in publicly slighting the contributions that fathers make to caring for their kids. How? By calling its discount baby and toddler program “Amazon Moms.” And I heard this distressing new in the saddest of ways.
This past Saturday, Oren Miller, dad blogger and devoted father of two, died of cancer at the age of 42. In his too-short life, Oren touched a multitude of people through his words, in the example of love he showed his children and wife, and by starting an online community for fellow dad writers on Facebook. That group is now over 1,000 dad writers strong, and it is a beautiful place. You see men sharing about drinks and sports, but you also see heartfelt personal exchanges about being fathers and husbands, sons and friends, writers and just sensitive, thoughtful, emotional human beings. Every single one of these men is trying to be the best guy he can be, and that’s a powerful struggle to witness and, sometimes, participate in (I’m usually pretty shy about commenting). I can’t really go into the nitty-gritty, because the sanctity of the space comes from its privacy. But Oren was at the center of it, and his loss has been felt deeply by many.
In the aftermath of his death, an old essay he wrote in 2013 resurfaced. In it, Oren writes about how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos supported Washington State’s pro-marriage-equality campaign, and yet the company is not forward-thinking enough to recognize that fathers and grandparents play an integral role in the upbringing of American children. This seems especially surprising given that in other countries around the world, like the U.K., Amazon runs the same program under the name “Amazon Families.” Oren pointed to a petition that someone started asking Amazon to change “Amazon Mom” to “Amazon Families” in the U.S., which at the time had less than 100 signatures. He implored people to sign it.
Well, the dad blogger community, under the hashtag #AmazonFamiliesUS and #Dads4Oren, have re-taken-up and amplified Oren’s call. As of this writing, the petition has over 5,000 signatures, and has been covered by numerous media outlets, like CNN and the Today Show. Still, though dads have been tweeting and writing about it for three days now, Amazon has not responded.
Perhaps Amazon thinks this is a bit of ire being raised by a small group of dads. Maybe, like my son’s nurse, they believe that really moms are the people you need to be talking to when it comes to parenting. Or it could be that, like the misguided ad execs at Similac, they doubt dads buy things like formula or diapers or onesies. Amazon, you are mistaken. This is not just a bunch of whiny sad dads running their mouths. We are the face of change, the new American man, and we want Amazon and all companies that are in the parenting business to respect the fact that not all parents are mothers. DADS ARE PARENTS TOO.
We clothe, bottle feed, and change our babies. We play with them, and we worry too. We love our kids right from the very core of our being, just as much as any mother. We’re humans, dammit. And we want the role we play in the home to be respected, just as we want the roles our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters play in the workforce to be respected too.
As the #LeanInTogether and #HeForShe campaigns make clear, gender equality is not a women’s issue, it’s a human issue. When parenthood is equated to motherhood, it marginalizes the fathers, like me, who play a major role in their childrens’ upbringing. It denigrates those mothers, like my wife, who choose to be out working and have partners who play the primary caregiver role, because it implies that something must be off about their maternal instinct, or they must not love their children sufficiently. Making parenthood synonymous with motherhood discriminates against gay fathers, making them feel, in the words of Brent Almond on The Huffington Post, “invisible.”
If you agree, will you please sign the petition asking Amazon to change Amazon Moms to Amazon Family? And share about it if you will, under the hashtag #AmazonFamiliesUS. Dad bloggers need the help of other fathers, and we need the help of moms, too, in bringing attention to this issue.
When stereotypes about gender persist, we all suffer, women and men, mothers and fathers alike.