I was talking to the husband yesterday and we had a little historical chat about parenting.
It seems there was a time when finding a baby changing station away from home was a major ordeal — and more or less impossible if a parent happened to be male. Even today, changing a badly soiled diaper can still require all of a dad’s resourcefulness since changing stations are still less common in men’s rooms than in ladies’ rooms. However, taking your infants and pre-schoolers to such public locales as hotels, amusement parks, and convention centers has gotten much easier over the last few decades because changing tables were once all but non-existent in men’s rooms.
Even today, as we all know, a parent of either gender might occasionally have to wait his or her turn behind another parent dealing with an unhappy, wet diapered babe in arms. A few decades back, however, a guy taking his diaper-wearing toddlers out for the day was a disaster waiting to happen. So says hubby and and so says any grandpa you’re likely to meet.
Say what you will about the 1970′s and the women’s movement, but the wider availability of changing areas never would have come along without it, since it directly led to men being asked to perform more duties around the house. Though fathers have never exactly gone away, they were once practically strangers in their own homes as child rearing was considered to be strictly “women’s work” and when divorces happened — and, starting in the 1960s, they happened a lot — fathers had few rights.
The 1979 movie, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” about a suddenly single father who has to fight for his rights, started a minor revolution in acknowledging that dads were just as much parents as moms. And, the good news for moms is that now dads no longer have an even half-way decent excuse to get out of a trip to ye olde baby changing station.