Equitable co-parenting is not supported by the world's design

I have been my child's main diaper-changer up to this point. It just feels just that, given that I'm biologically unable to nurse or carry a child to term, I help out where I can. This is not virtue signaling or an attempt to make a point.

What Aaron Hoyland wrote in a recent tweet sums up how I feel:

It sends a very clear message about whose responsibility you believe raising children is by placing baby change stations in the women's restroom (and possibly the family restroom if there is one) but not the men's restroom, and I detest it.

Equitable co-parenting is not supported by the world's design. Bathrooms are one illustration. If you want to avoid getting upset for a morning, don't go through to the tweet since the comments are dominated by people who try to make excuses for dads who don't change their kids or who try to claim that it's women's work like it's the 1940s again. It seems that a mother's sacred responsibility is to clean their infant alone.

Every men's restroom should have changing tables, in my opinion. Please give them to me; I'll use them. I'll spend money at your store in exchange.

Sadly, this chauvinistic approach to design doesn't just apply to bathrooms. They are all over. I refer to them as "mommy defaults."

Many of the parenting applications we use, most notably Huckleberry, which enables us to log activities like diaper changes and various feedings, don't support multiple parental user accounts, as I've come to learn. A password must be shared if both parents want to keep track of occurrences and have access to the record. Since our child had to visit the ER for dehydration on their first night home, we are not logging lightly, and it is essential that we both have access to this information.

Even our pricey and obviously high-tech smart bassinet, the Snoo, only supports one account. Again, we have to share credentials in order to track sleep and change settings. It's not particularly challenging to use a shared Password vault, but I anticipate that most parents will opt for a password that is simple to remember and therefore vulnerable to hacking.

The largest, most annoying aspect of this, and it starts with hospitals and pediatricians, is that every service provider wants to have a single parental contact number. You can find numerous posts complaining about this in parenting forums, and for good cause. Every time inequity occurs, it is exacerbated by the institutional service design's ingrained presumption that there is only one major caregiver in parenting. I genuinely want to do my fair share of scheduling appointments, handling paperwork, and otherwise providing for my child as the parent.

Startups can be removed from the boy, but not startups from the child, it seems. My answer was to create up a 24/7 virtual support line using a technology made for that purpose, treating our infant like a contact center. We may now provide a single number for texts and calls, but in reality, we both work as infant support staff. The first person to pick up answers the phone. It's not the most affordable option, but I was unable to locate an app or any alternative that would successfully make us both primary carers in someone's database. Our personal contact information is removed.

This technique has the advantage of allowing for more caretakers. As an adopted third parent, for instance, I have to wonder how my friend David Jay handles these design defaults. Families can take many different forms. Children are also cared for by a large population in a setting that resembles a hamlet. Making a baby call center enables you to temporarily or permanently include anyone in that circle. Obviously, I've been using corporate sales and support tools to make this happen, but could this actually be a startup?

Just think about the responses to Aaron's tweet to see that there are significant cultural obstacles to overcome. A lot of individuals have a lot to say on the relative importance of mothers and fathers, sometimes using rhetoric similar to "a woman's place is in the kitchen." They have to be defeated, and they will.

If you're creating a parenting app or service, I beg you to remember that dads are also caregivers. Please provide us full access to the services created to support our child and let us be. You'll receive our loyalty as payment. Dads are prepared.