L'Arnaque des nouveaux pères – La maison des Maternelles

I have a five-year-old daughter and the daily life of our daughters is these exchanges that we can have on the management of the house, how we manage our daughter, who is going to do what, these are essential questions. And me, while making this comic, I asked myself a lot about my own involvement, on whether I do enough at home and if I do enough, how it goes in our relationships. My girlfriend told me a lot, yes, we share the tasks and that's good, but on the other hand, you should stop talking about it all the time. You don't have to receive thanks because you spread the laundry. In fact, it's normal. L'Arnaque des Nouveaux Pères is a comic about the heterosexual couple in 2024. Do fathers finally take on parental tasks, domestic tasks? On social networks, we have the impression that they do. They sometimes put themselves forward on this. We talk a lot about it in the press magazine, on TV, about their commitment, which would be new. The fact that they change the diapers, that they will look for the children when they leave school. But when we listen to the testimonies of mothers today, when we listen, when we look at the statistics in the matter, we see that it remains largely unequal, that women, mothers, take care of most of these issues. And even more so, that they manage a large part of the mental burden that drives them crazy every day a little more. Doing the laundry, doing the kitchen on days that are not holidays, doing homework and brushing the children's teeth. And the fathers, they do the most gratifying tasks, which create a bond with the child. They are the ones who go a little more often than before to pick up the children from school. They are the ones who go to the park to play with the child. There is really a significant inequality in the management of the tasks, nice or not nice. In this book, we cite a number of statistics. We see, for example, that the website Doctolib has stated that in 2023, 83% of medical appointments with the pediatrician are taken by mothers. This is really the sign that the mental burden is concretely in the hands of mothers. We also see that, for example, it is she who most often wakes up at night when the child is crying. It happens a little more often that the father simulates the fact of continuing to sleep. We see it in the statistics. It is the fathers themselves who recognize it in the surveys in which they are interviewed. By working on this comic strip, we discovered that work was also a fairly central subject of the involvement of fathers in their homes. It is that, simple statistics, when a man becomes a father, in fact, his partial time goes from 4 to 6%. As for the mother, it doubles, it goes from twenty to forty percent. So the mother really stops working often, for example, on Wednesday afternoons, to be able to take care of the child. Whereas with the father, it doesn't change much. Why? Because on both sides, the father and the mother, work requires them things. On the mother's side, they are asked to work well, but they are also asked to be a little available for their family, while having schedules that are largely incompatible. On the father's side, however, they are still asked to be fully invested in their work. Companies have not yet adapted much to this number of fathers who would like to invest in their families and have meetings that do not start at 7 p.m. And it creates a real structural problem that prevents the fathers who would like it to be fully, 100% in their families. It's a bit like the famous sentence, you took your afternoon off when you leave at 6 p.m. We have the impression that fathers continue to be quite subject to this judgment in companies, because companies are not yet completely used to the fact that fathers leave work to pick up their children at school. And even more so when there are diseases, children who are sick and the school calls to ask someone to come urgently. Statistically, it is always the mothers who break their day, who interrupt themselves to come home, and much less the fathers, because there is this weight of the inertia of the world of work that makes that either the fathers do not feel authorized, either they feel that there are remarks, either they do not do it, but in any case it does not move fast enough yet. As our investigation progressed, we realized how strategic the subject of paternity leave was. We see that in France it is now 28 days, but it does not really allow equality, because the fathers continue to behave in support of the mother. They are there at the same time as the mother at the birth of the child, and they do not learn to be alone with the child, to see the extent of the tasks that it can lead to. There is no real change in the matter. We went to Sweden, where there is a much longer parental leave, and there is a key period where the father is alone with the child for several weeks, even for several months. And the studies in this matter are really very clear. They say that a parental leave, paternity, where the parent is alone with the child, is the best way for him to develop an affective relationship with the child. It is also the best way for him to learn how to manage his child. The question we fundamentally ask ourselves in this comic is the half-empty glass or the half-full glass. We have the impression with Stéphane Jourdain that the glass is half-empty, that the fathers today have not advanced fast enough, or at least not as fast as the mothers who are more demanding than before and who are right to be, because the world has changed, there has been a half-empty glass. And we ask fathers today to be as engaged in action as they are on their social networks, in the way they tell themselves how they are fathers. We try to think of all the ways for things to change. For things to change, it is obvious that fathers have to question themselves. We are still in the process, but we are working on it. There must also be structural changes. We saw in the comic that the paternity leave, the fact that it is brief, that there is not really a moment when the father is alone with the child, it means that the heterosexual couple will not move much from this point of view. And then there are also questions related to the world of work, relative to the perceptions, to the education of future fathers, who do not necessarily always have the tools, the transmission to master parental knowledge. There may be something that can be done from this point of view. For example, in the comic, we will meet a paternity coach. It made us laugh a lot at first to see him and imagine seeing lessons for young fathers, but in fact it was very interesting to see how, not only did he teach future fathers to change layers, to feed a baby or to react to these different sounds or ways of expressing themselves, but also how he told the father that it is important to get involved, that a father should not be a second parent, an assistant in the home, but someone who has all the skills possible and who is able to manage his child alone, without the assistance of a mother. In this comic, we also tackled a question that bothered us a little bit, but which was asked to us by many women. When we talked about the subject of the comic, when we wrote the investigation, many women told us, okay, fathers may not do enough, but also mothers never give up, they want to control everything. We were a little embarrassed with this question, because we did not feel very comfortable with the idea of ​​giving lessons to mothers on what they should do or not do. But we went to see the feminist researchers' writings, we went to see what the research on the subject said, and at the end of the day, we realize that there may be a subject on the fact that women end up being in a situation of domination in a whole bunch of sectors, except that of the home, where they would reign a little in majesty, because they would have been left this space to themselves. And so there are a whole bunch of feminist researchers, for example Tissot Lecoq, who wrote the book Libérée, which explains that they must also leave room in the kingdom and make sure that the fathers feel competent in the matter. But so that the fathers can have space, so that women, mothers, let go of the East, the fathers must also be at the level, they must avoid these behaviors that we have documented in the comic, which can be behaviors of avoidance, a bit of sabotage, where we make sure that the household chores always remain in the hands of the mothers, because we prefer not to do them. There is always an advantage for the fathers to enjoy patriarchy and the fact that we do not have to worry about a whole lot of things, whether it is organization or mental burden, there may be a movement to be made, and we still think that it is largely the main movement that is necessary in the matter.