Where is Daddy?
Volume 2, Issue 20
“The Boo Boo Song” - a popular ditty in the CoComelon corpus, which has rapidly established hegemonic control over global kid content - has over 1.3 billion views on YouTube. Throughout the song’s four interminable minutes, the CoCo Mom character fixes a series of “boo boos,” backed by the simple melodies and repetitive lyrics that characterize content in the CoCoverse. The CoCo parent company, Moonbug, obsesses over kids’ attention habits, micro-editing content to keep their addicts *ahem* viewers engaged, and according to the New York Times, Moonbug market research finds that toddlers are “fascinated by minor injuries.”
That’s not the main reason I hate “The Boo Boo Song,” though … the real problem is this dude, the CoCo Dad:
Yeah. That guy.1 The khaki-clad, side-part stand-in for *waves hands* whatever it is that Dads are supposed to do and be, which, if you trust Big Brother Moonbug, is a giant doofus. Because at the end of “The Boo Boo Song,” after Mom has addressed all of the eyeball-generating, revenue-enhancing cuts and scrapes endured by the CoCo kids, Dad hits his own hand with a hammer (2:52).
Whoopsie!
With this single editorial decision, the CoCo overlords bless us with a perfect metaphor for traditional household gender roles: Mom does all of the actual work, while Dad haphazardly fumbles through life, making everything harder for Mom in the process.
No joke, I started writing Spinning Plates because of this shitty song.
CoCo Dad illustrates a broader chasm in our culture that demands careful attention: we don’t have strong cultural and mental models for men engaging in childcare.
“Being a dad was invented like three years ago,” David Drake deadpans in the clip above, reminding us that 1983’s highest grossing film was about an unusual man, Mr. Mom, played by Michael Keaton, who takes care of his kids while his wife goes to work. In the intervening forty years, women’s overall participation in the workforce has changed dramatically, while Keaton, unrecognized for his prodigious comedic work in the early ‘80s, is finally getting the critical recognition he deserves.
Meanwhile, back in 2023, men IRL are doing only slightly more work at home than they were in the distant 1980s. That fact can be obscured by celebratory, instagram-friendly talking points like, “Millennial men are doing 3X the childcare their dads did!” but we, as a sex, were starting from almost zero.
3 x 0 = still pretty much 0, bruh
And to be clear, no shade to our own Dads. Times and cultural expectations change. That said, some segments of society, particularly those on the political right, openly pine for a time when women were subservient house serfs, and creating an adequate alternative to that retrograde response is important work. Many men profess to crave a more equal relationship, even if they’re not exactly sure how the division of labor ought to shake out in practice.
That’s why I write: for all the parents, whatever their genders, who are sure that hardened old household roles are obsolete, but aren’t sure yet how to replace them.
You, my friends, are not alone.
The conversation you are having - with your spouse, partner, family, and child care community - is the one all of us are having: how the fuck do we divide and conquer work and home life, when the old template is broken, but a new one doesn’t exist.
I don’t have answers to these questions, but I’m learning a lot by raising them, and those are the lessons I’m trying to share here. Some of them are simple, tongue-in-cheek “Dad Hacks” that are easy to understand and deploy. Most of my findings, though, are more complex, involving the emotional, technical, and transactional costs of negotiating these dynamics with a spouse or romantic partner. Making a chart to track everyone’s responsibilities in the house is one thing; addressing gendered pay disparities and work-life balance expectations, while confronting calcified perspectives on what constitutes contemporary masculinity, are much more complicated.
The idea behind Spinning Plates is to embrace that complexity … but instead of being paralyzed by it, work through it, messily, publicly, and hopefully in a way that’s helpful to other parents.
All of which is to say, if you’re struggling with your role as a new Dad, you’re not alone in contemplating the contradictions of modern DadHood.2 There are a whole bunch of us out here. We’re rolling our eyes at the aforementioned plaid jackass, even if we don’t know exactly what replaces him.
But, spoiler alert: it’s you.
Because it has to be.
Helpful to intone these last few words in heavy John Wick Voice.