Men Are Just as Good as Women in Parenting

Parenting is a challenging but a highly crucial task. Good parents produce happy and healthy children while bad parenting will produce problematic children. Many people believe that women make better parents than men and that is why they have a greater role in raising children in most societies. Others claim that men are just as good as women at parenting. According to Kurianjoseph (2013), women have proven to be a better parent than men because women tend to be more understanding and patience than men. Besides that, women also possess good qualities in communication and intelligence. As an example, studies from UK have shown that there is a greater dominance by female candidates who tend to outperform the male candidates in aptitude and communication test. As a result, women have proven to be an excellent communicator and smarter than men when it comes to taking care of children. Therefore, through proper communication and understanding, mothers play a greater role influencing their children. Since young, women have obtained more familial conditions than men. Females tend to enjoy learning about nurturing. They tend to play with dolls, feed them and even pretend that they are their mothers and sing them a lullaby. Girls show sympathy with the essential role of their mothers and often consider those activities including housework as feminine duties. Compared to the males, they are much different. Boys prefer playing football or toy guns and sometimes behave like a particular vigorous hero in movies (Kitosdad, 2010).
Koreagunba (2010) stated that it is in the women's nature that counts as an advantage in being better parents. Women are gentler and more tolerant than men, thanks to the close and sacred relationship with their children from the very first day of pregnancy. Hence, children may have the tendency to listen and confide their personal problems to their mothers. Contrarily, there is always an unbridgeable gap between the father and children because fathers are strict and serious men, which also makes children reluctant to open their hearts. Therefore, women are considered not only better mothers but also close friends or even outstanding psychologist by their kids.
Moreover, the belief that the women's sole responsibility is to raise their children has been deeply rooted in society for many years. Men are sole financial providers and have to work very hard to support the family, thus projects deprive them of invaluable time to spend with children. Their significant contribution to the family is undeniable, but in educating and taking care of kids, their wives seem to outweigh them. Not only do women have to work from morning till midnight to meet deadlines, but they also spend time caring for their children physically and emotionally.
However, according to Sykes (2008), men are just as great in taking care of children like women. When men do have time to spend with their children, men are actually just as capable at rearing their offspring as women. Although women do not like to acknowledge it, in some areas of parenting fathers do even better than mothers. For example, when Sykes’ wife, Sasha went away on a well-deserved break with her girlfriends to Barcelona, she left Sykes in sole charge of their two children (both under the age of two). After she came back, she was surprised to come home only to find their son, Benjamin, asleep and her five-month-old daughter, who had been sleeping irregularly, going to bed at 7pm on the dot, taking one quick bottle of milk at 10pm then sleeping through the night.
Also, Sykes’ friend, Paul, for example, took advantage of his wife going away to make a few changes to the routine of their nine-month-old son. He started to feed him solids and got his son to bed at the same time every day. It only took several days of crying right before bedtime and then his son would just go to sleep quickly. Unfortunately, once his wife came back, all his hard work became nothing because she started to breastfeed their son. Paul believes that his wife's emotional attachment to their child got in the way of her being able to stick to a regular routine. For him to put the child on a routine, by contrast, was a practical and not an emotional task.

One reason that fathers have such influential role upon their children is because they tend to challenge their children to try new experiences which would help them become more independent. Challenged children whose fathers expect them to handle responsibilities, such as carrying their own bags, crossing the street carefully or taking the school bus turn out to be children who mature quicker compared to others. Accomplishing such tasks at a young age is important and the father’s involvement is so crucial that fathers these days have a larger influence on their children’s self-esteem than mothers (Parke, 1996).

By encouraging children to take on challenges, fathers help their children not only in learning new skills, but also to take responsibility for their own actions. Fathers with strong commitments to their family provide a model of responsible behaviour for their children. These children have an internal sense of control, which means that they are more likely to believe that their successes and failures are due to their own efforts rather than due to external factors. As a result, children like these tend to take more responsibility for their actions instead of their mistakes.

Aside from that, when fathers play with their toddlers, they are not just entertaining them, but also providing a sense of security yet a challenging arena for toddlers to learn how to interact with others. Fathers also create obstacles for their children and demand respect for limits and boundaries. At the same time, they challenge their children and encourage them to explore their own strength and their ability to do new things. As an example, toddlers who tend to work out for themselves on how to achieve goals, such as retrieving a ball that is just out of reach in their father’s hand are good practices for them. In fact, when fathers are good at playing with their children, these children have a higher chance of scoring well during tests, especially through thinking and problem-solving skills.

In conclusion, I advocate the idea that women do make better parents than men. Women not only have natural skills, such as calmness, great communication with children, but also better in understanding their children. Not forgetting, women are the ones who have carried their children in their womb for 9 months before officially giving birth to them and nurturing them with kindness later on. These gives women the greater role in parenting compared to men.

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