Patriarchy Creates Bad Parents

June 15, 2026

So many people love weddings but not marriages. The party, the applause, the pictures… those are easy to want. Fun, even. However, the reality of marriage is the slow, unglamorous work of partnership and blending lives with another human.

I think the same thing happens with children, or rather the process of having children. People want babies or the idea of a (usually nuclear) family, but not children.

Babies are cute.

Families are validating.

Children… are labor.

This is where patriarchy warps the picture. Under patriarchal expectations, marriage is not just about love, it is about women securing legitimacy through their being chosen by a man. Motherhood is not just about children; it is about creating or maintaining a family with a man.

Children stop being people in their own right. They become symbols, proof, byproducts… receipts of what adults want to say about themselves, their lives, their abilities, or their relationships.

That is why so many women stay in relationships they should not, hoping the child will somehow make the man better. That is why single motherhood is treated as a shame to be avoided, rather than an arrangement where a woman can thrive on her own terms. That is why fathers can coast on bare minimum involvement while mothers are expected to contort themselves into exhaustion.

Patriarchy centers men so deeply in the process that the child gets lost in the shuffle, an accessory to the man-woman dynamic… rather than the reason parenting even exists in the first place.

And that’s just in conception. Beyond birthing children as byproducts, patriarchy even encourages competition between mothers and their children, particularly daughters. Instead of nurturing the next generation, it primes mothers to resent the next generation. As it relates to daughters, it primes mothers to measure themselves against them or even sabotage them. You can see it in everything from mothers who discourage their daughters’ confidence to women who frame their daughters as “attention seeking” or “being fast.”

It is ugly, but it is not an individual pathology. It is a consequence of a society that teaches women that their only value is in their beauty and youth (which may be impacted and considered lessened by the process of birthing and raising children as well as aging) and in their ability to take on as much labor as possible (usually tied to the maintenance and care of those children. This creates resentments and regrets. There has been an increase in public dialogue about women who regret having children for this very reason.

Fathers compete with their children, too, although in a different manner than mothers. Rather than beauty or validation, the contest is over the mother’s labor and attention. Men often resent the time and care a mother gives to her children because it means less energy left over for him and sometimes less desire for sex.

…Yet those same men will refuse to contribute meaningfully to the work of raising their children, dismissing it as “women’s work”, a patriarchal concept.

In fact, data from the American Time Use Survey shows that married mothers do morehousework and get less sleep than single mothers. Never-married mothers spend about thirty minutes less per day on housework and thirteen minutes more sleeping, while spending just as much time on childcare as married mothers.

Having a man in the home often increases a mother’s workload instead of reducing it. The result is that mothers are forced into an impossible bind: managing the full weight of child-rearing while also managing the fragile egos of men who want to be centered without doing the work. This also creates resentment, deeply unhappy marriages, and broken, dysfunctional families.

This framework also explains why LGBT+ families are so often treated as “immoral” or “unnatural.” Families that do not center men, especially those that exclude men altogether (like two lesbian mothers) or include members who openly reject masculinity (like trans women, fem boys, or effeminate men), disrupt the nuclear family fantasy that patriarchy insists is the only legitimate arrangement. This challenges the idea that a child’s “legitimacy” is tied to a married cis het man’s presence. Patriarchy responds by demonizing these families, painting them as dangerous, dysfunctional, or deficient- when in reality they are simply living proof that children can thrive without being tethered to patriarchal structures.

Growing up on the south side of Chicago in an intergenerational household comprised of a lot of single mothers, I would romanticize the smaller, nuclear families on TV, especially because they had dads. I do not do that anymore. I got a scholarship to be schooled alongside richer, whiter, more nuclear families. Almost immediately, I noticed a pattern in these families. The children hated their parents. The parents hated each other. That was not true of the single-mother-led families I had observed growing up (which isn’t to say that children and parents never got upset with each other).

Single mothers challenge this idea in a similar way. By raising children with a man who is outside of or who has abandoned the home, they expose the lie that a father’s presence is the only thing that makes a family legitimate and functional. Single mothers are punished heavily for this circumstance in ways that single fathers are not.

About 30 percent of single-mother households in the United States live below the poverty line, compared to less than 10 percent of married households. They are stigmatized, blamed for every possible social ill, and given less support, even while carrying the heavier load of child-rearing almost entirely on their own.

Single fathers, on the other hand, do not disrupt patriarchy’s story. They are celebrated as heroic for doing the bare minimum and often receive more help, more praise, and more acceptance. The outcomes for children of single fathers are often better, not because fathers parent better, but because single fathers are more likely to have higher incomes and because society actually supports them instead of treating their existence as a moral failure. If a man is a single father, it is assumed that their partner died or the woman failed. If a woman is a single mother, it is assumed that she, as a woman, failed. In either case, a woman is seen to have failed, and any man who steps up must be a saint.

When the way that children and parents are given or denied support is linked to cis het male legitimacy, and the children themselves are viewed as proof of a man’s presence, as rivals for his attention, or as burdens that pull mothers away from serving men, they stop being seen as whole human beings. They become props. That is why so many parents find themselves disappointed, resentful, or detached: they did not really want a child. They wanted a man, a marriage, a family unit that looked right to other people. The child is just… there.

But children are not just there... They are not leverage in a relationship, or trophies in a competition, or humans in need of legitimacy. They are people who deserve to be loved, desired, and equally socially supported for who they are and who they can become, not for what they symbolize.

If more people could separate children from patriarchy’s demands, if they could see them outside of the man who may or may not be there, parenting would look less like performance and more like care.

Until then, we will keep living in a world where weddings matter more than marriages, babies more than children, and patriarchy keeps winning at the expense of literally everybody. We deserve better. We ALL deserve better.

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Patriarchy Creates Bad Parents

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