I love, absolutely love, carrying my little one in the baby carrier on my chest. My little guy is on the verge of growing out of it, so both my wife and I take advantage of “wearing” our son as much as possible. I find it both functional, and the perfect way to bond with him.
But here’s the strange thing: when I see other men wearing their kids, I feel a little embarrassed and offended, like “How can this guy go around wearing his kid like that? What kind of man is he?”
But then, oh yeah, I do that all the time, too.
Why the confusion?
A psychologist friend of ours says it’s a deep-seeded machismo that’s causing that feeling. Though I enjoy carrying my son, I still believe men should be more manly and not go around doing what a woman should be doing. Am I crazy for thinking this way?
Take comedian Whitney Cummings’ perspective:
“…We can’t think like you guys. We can’t be f__king sociopaths or else babies would just die all the time and our species would be extinct. Like if we felt like you guys, we would give birth to a baby, you know, take it home from the hospital if we even went to the hospital because I don’t need a doctor. Then we would like put it in the sink for a month. Just throw Doritos on it, every now and then spray it with Axe Body Spray, and when we were done with it, we would just like put it on Craig’s List, like, ah, I can get a few bucks for that.”
So not all men are sociopaths, and yes, we do have emotions, yet we do have biological differences from women. Where we cannot gestate and give birth to a baby, we can still help with almost everything after the big day. This is perhaps the manliest act of all. Me and all the other guys that wear our babies on their chests can keep on, keeping on. It will be our inner macho man that will have to grow up a bit, and quit thinking like a mad man.
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Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker.
