The problem is the other side to this coin, which is that because males are presumed to be incompetent, their interactions with children are restricted ahead of time. Children aren't allowed to be alone with an adult male because the presumption is that he'll allow them to solo pilot a homemade single-passenger rocket ship with no safety equipment, if not literally rape and murder them.
And then, for example, little girls can't learn about tech because qualified adult women to teach them are scarce and they're not allowed to be unsupervised around adult men.
This may change with the rise of ubiquitous surveillance. In fact if I'm alone with a teenage girl to whom I'm unrelated for more than a few minutes, I'll be much more comfortable if there is a recording. This may also change as deepfakes become more common...
Joe Random was never actually going to hurt your kids.
It's like school shootings. You hear about them because they're outrageous, not because you're ever likely to experience one.
And if someone is willing to lie about what happened when you were alone together, what stops them lying about the fact that you were alone together to begin with?
It is objectively a bad thing if men are perceived as incompetent parents, because they are men, let alone from any other stereotypes.
The very same prejudice hurts men in different contexts - when good and cool things they do with children are attributed to their wifes, when they want more time with children, when they don't get chance to learn how to deal with young relatives because everyone keeps them away. When they are shamed for wanting to work with young children or presumed incompetent.
All this to say that I am much more interested in the direct topic of this article - which is the fear I and my wife operate under of our getting in trouble for not raising our kids "right" - rather than have the discussion get derailed into a gender rabbit hole.
In USA, a lot of things that annoy white people are worse for people who aren't white. E.g. dealing with police, CPS, the courts, etc.
Strongly disagree.
> The glee at which our current culture laughs at the perceived incompetence of men with regards to parenting has taught us all to expect fathers to be completely boneheaded at all times.
Exactly. I, as a father, can get away with all kinds of things because according to society I don't know any better, whereas my wife, as a mother, is expected to be perfect all the time and when she does something that doesn't measure up to someone's unvoiced, unwarranted expectations she's harshly judged for it. This is true not just for mothers but for all women in the US, all the time, basically from birth, doubly so if they're POC.