Why did my husband change when we had a child?

So many men become abusive when their partners give birth. Why is this?

A reader asks…

Things seemed fine, even good, when it was just me and my husband. But once my son was born everything changed. He was not just unhelpful but cruel at times. Why the 180 once a child is introduced to the relationship?

My answer

For many of us, having a child is the first time in our lives that constant work became absolutely mandatory. You can’t ignore a hungry baby, or prioritize your sleep or your hobbies when a child needs you. You can literally go to jail for doing these things.

So someone has to step up when the baby comes, and it’s almost always mothers.

In my experience supporting women over the years, it’s not that the man changes when a child arrives. It’s that a child requires an increase in effort and emotional intelligence, and he refuses to scale up. Because he refuses to learn new skills, he becomes more and more dysregulated, unpleasant, and abusive.

Consider this example (and please don’t come at me about the precise hourly amounts; I’m only giving an example): Let’s say your house requires an hour of maintenance (cleaning, pets, cooking, etc.) a day before you have kids. If he does 10 or 20 minutes of that work, you’re going to feel like things are pretty equal, because patriarchy tells you doing “slightly” more (really double) what he’s doing is ok.

If you have a kid, your daily household maintenance is going to increase. Let’s say it’s now three hours of household labor, plus the many hours of parenting. If he continues doing 20 minutes a day, things are going to be catastrophically unequal.

But maybe he’ll double or triple his labor. He’ll feel like he’s really stepped up, because he’s doing so much more. But he’s really doing 30 or 40 minutes to your, say, 150 minutes. And that’s going to occur in a context where you’re recovering from birth and he’s not—and in which you’re probably going to end up doing all or most of the direct parenting labor, too.

He won’t spend much time thinking about how much more you’re doing, because men aren’t socialized to notice women or our needs, or to consider that they might owe a woman any particular duty of care. The cruelty comes from his sense of entitlement. You’ll be giving him less attention, and your new life will demand more of him. He’ll blame you, and take it out on you, rather than giving you the love and adoration you deserve for making a new life.

This is how things spiral in relationships that seem fairly equal. But there are other factors, too:

• Increased demands for emotional labor. Parenting requires exhausting, near-constant emotional labor. Men are taught that this labor is trivial and unimportant. So they avoid it, and demean it. You may have seen early signs of this refusal to engage in emotional labor in his unwillingness to learn your needs, to resolve conflict, to be a supportive friend, or to learn to better manage his own emotions.

• The challenge of learning new skills. Parenting is a skill. It requires tremendous patience and intellect. In patriarchy, this labor is optional for men. Women are left to fill in all the gaps, and told that no matter what they do, it’s wrong.

• Laziness. Patriarchy allows men to be lazy. Indeed, minimizing men’s work, stress, and inconvenience is the central mission of patriarchy. Having children is a lot of work, and men who have not done significant internal work don’t really care if foisting that labor onto a woman ultimately destroys her psyche.

• Lack of commitment. From birth, men are socialized to view women as useful objects, and to see marriage as a gift men give to women. Their commitment to their partners as independent human beings tends to be low. If a woman can’t service a man exactly as he desires, patriarchy tells him it’s fine not to care about her. You may have seen this early on in fear of commitment, mixed messages, or a general lack of warmth and love. Often, though, the full scope of the low commitment doesn’t become apparent until a baby arrives.

• Feelings about women, birth, and bodies. When you were dating, he probably said or did inappropriate things about women’s bodies—commenting on women’s weight, being grossed out by periods, etc. Those might have seemed small at the time. When your body makes a human, though, it depends on support to stay healthy. If he finds the process gross or sees you only as a sexual object, that is going to become apparent in neglect of your physical needs, and perhaps a volley of emotional abuse.

• Becoming a caretaker. Most men have never been expected to provide sustained care for another person, and in fact believe that they are entitled to limitless care. When faced with the reality that they must care not only for a baby but for the woman who made the baby, many of them wither into resentment. If you reflect on it, you’ll probably realize that you have experienced other moments at which your partner has been reluctant to provide care for you or others.

So he’s not really doing a 180 at all; he’s just doing more of the same while your world has completely changed. Because a core rule of patriarchy is that men should not have to change to accommodate women (or children).

Patriarchy has conditioned women, too: to keep giving men chances, to ignore red flags, and to treat obvious problems as trivial. Perhaps most importantly, it socializes us to believe that we are allowed neither to want nor ask for things. For this reason, most of us are reluctant to discuss the nitty gritty of parenting, pregnancy, postpartum, and life together until we’re already stuck with a man who has never given a single thought to any of these topics.

Your husband—most husbands—didn’t really change. He remained his old self while you evolved into a parent.

A few quick administrative notes

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