Why Dad Volunteers Are Praised and Mom Volunteers Are Invisible: A Teacher’s Observation
It happens every time we have a field trip or a classroom party. The sign-up sheet goes out, mostly mothers respond, and a couple of fathers take time off work to come along. When one of those dads walks through the door, carrying a box of juice cartons and looking slightly out of place among the classroom chairs, I catch myself doing it too. I say something like, “Oh, so great of you to make it today!” and he beams like a man who just won something.
It hit me last spring, in that very exact moment. I never, not once, have said to a mother, “Oh, so great of you to make it today.” Because mothers make it. The juice cartons are expected to be in their hands.
. That brief, automatic sentence—”great of you to be here”—contains the whole problem. It tells the dad he’s a hero for doing an ordinary parenting task. It tells the daughter or son watching that dad’s presence is an event, an act of generosity. Meanwhile, the grandmother who organized the entire craft table gets a polite “thank you” and a nod. The mom who brought snacks on top of her assigned duty doesn’t get a special greeting at all. She gets a stack of permission slips to review.
I think about this on the way home, and I notice the same pattern in how I talk to parents in general.
At parent-teacher conferences, when I meet with a mother and father, I ask them questions about how their child is doing at home. I ask “Does she read with you before bed?” and the mother immediately answers, rattling off the day’s routine. The dad nods along. I have done this for years without thinking. I have sat across from a perfectly capable father and phrased my questions to the mother exclusively, as if he were an observer or a guest in his own home.
What happens when we do this consistently, in classrooms and clinics and playrooms? The dad learns his knowledge doesn’t matter. The mom learns she is the only one accountable. The child notices who gets consulted on their education, health, and well-being. They notice who speaks and who nods.
Worse, I’ve seen it from the other side too. I’ve heard a father complain about how his wife schedules every meal and appointment, and when I asked why he doesn’t just take some of it on himself, her told me he tried once, but every time he volunteered at school or attended a doctor’s visit, people asked him “wait, you’re home with your daughter on a Tuesday?” with a level of surprise that was frankly insulting to everyone. So he stopped. Not because he didn’t care—because having to explain yourself in a school parking lot gets exhausting.
And that same mother gets criticized for being “overinvolved.” I’ve heard dads say it, and I’ve heard other moms say it. She’s hovering, she’s a helicopter, she should trust her husband more. But we created that hover. We built systems that place her at the center of every task, then we mock her for being at the center of every task.
Here’s a specific, small thing I changed in my classroom, and it cost me nothing. When the contact list goes out at the beginning of the year, I send out two separate emails—one to each parent, not one addressed to the mom with “and family” in the subject line. That does two things. It makes sure both people actually receive information, and it quietly tells both of them that their responses matter equally. You would be surprised how often a father responds to that email with a genuine question about his kid’s progress. He had questions all along. He just never got the invite.
I also started asking a different question at conferences. Instead of “What do you do with your child at home?” which somehow defaults to the mother, I ask “What does your child do at home that makes you proud?” and I make direct eye contact with whichever parent I haven’t heard from yet. It is a small physical shift, and it changes everything because it tells the child, and the other parent, that this adult’s observations count.
These aren’t complicated steps. They are the kind of adjustments you make when you realize your own automatic “great of you to be here” is doing damage.
In my own family life, the double standard lives in smaller moments. A father hugs his crying kid at the maternity ward, and the nurses comment on what a “soft dad” he is. When a mother hugs her crying kid at the grocery checkout, a stranger asks if the child needs anything. Same action, totally different temperature: he’s exceptional, she’s overreacting. I have been both of those people depending on the parenting bravado of the day. I have, as a dad, gratefully accepted praise for changing a diaper in a Target bathroom that my wife has changed in a hundred times without applause. I feel the absurdity of it even while I’m accepting it. The applause makes me less helpful, not more.
There’s a deeper layer here worth mentioning because it’s about the kids. When a girl sees her dad being treated like a reluctant participant who can occasionally step in, she learns that men are outside the core process of family life. When a boy sees it, he learns the same thing, and he might carry it forward into his own future parenting. Nobody is teaching either of them out loud. It’s happening in the small exclamations at the classroom door, in the email that goes only to mom, in the question at the doctor’s office that is handed to the mother by default.
We parents are not fully consistent, and we don’t need to be. The goal isn’t to make every interaction a courtroom. But I have started watching my own assumptions. If I notice that a mother is carrying every task in her family and a father is being touted for showing up to dinner on time, I try to widen the lens. I encourage the mother in question to let some tasks be handled differently. I talk to the dad directly. I make a deliberate point to praise what is ordinary, not what is exceptional.
I can’t claim that my little classroom shifts have solved this anywhere. Today, a mother was decorating cupcakes with our class while her husband stayed home with a sick toddler. I said, “Thanks for coming in today,” and she said, “Of course, is that all right?” and I realized she was waiting for a reason to apologize. Nobody had told her she wasn’t welcome. Nobody had to. The absence of a similar, casual invitation to her husband was enough.
The takeaway, if there is one, is less of a sermon and more of a habit. Catch yourself before you say “how nice that daddy picked up the child from school.” Ask the father how his week has been. Email the dad rather than assuming his wife is the point of contact. Say to a mother, “I can see you did a lot of work with him on this homework,” without implying she did it because someone had to.
I still catch myself months after making these changes. Just last week, I asked a room full of parents, “Who helps your child with reading at home?” and every single mother’s hand went up before the fathers even moved. And I noticed the fathers’ hands stayed down, not because they didn’t help, but because they were waiting for someone to give them permission to claim it. So I looked at one dad—a guy who I’d seen work with his daughter on spelling words in the hallway—and I said, “Eric, what do you do when she gets stuck on a word?” and he talked for five minutes about their routine.
A classroom functions on small signals. We send them constantly, to kids and to parents. The only honest way to address double standards is to start changing whose hand you ask for when you need help.
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