Pierre's Story
I am from Alsace, which is on the border of Germany and France. For a while, I lived in New Zealand, where I met my wife. Now, we both live in Umeå, a town in Northern Sweden.
My wife is a very organised person. We try to develop a routine and set the rules of our house together. This arrangement works perfectly because we both know what is expected of us, which makes it easy to stick to the plan.
We are both researchers — my wife is post-doctoral and I am a Ph.D. student. There is a difference in our job contracts: mine can be frozen during parental leave, while hers cannot. So, following the birth of our child, in the interest of practicality (and our financial stability), I chose to stay at home and look after our infant while she continued to fulfill her contractual obligations.
I have been taking care of our baby since she was four months old. This does not leave me much time to do other household chores, apart from cooking and doing dishes, so when my wife comes back, we split the remaining work. I am really enjoying this phase of my life. I feed my baby girl, play with her, and put her to sleep when she is tired. I have been going to open preschools a lot here, and they are wonderful because they allow you to socialise with other parents and play with your child at the same time, which helps keep us parents sane.
Despite the fact that I have been very happy taking care of our child at home, however, I now understand why some women do not want to do it. Being a stay-at-home parent is challenging, and it’s not the right fit for everyone. Having this experience has helped me to recognize that it is more effective to assign the responsibility of childcare based on an individual’s personality rather than their gender. Anyone, regardless of gender, can become a good child caregiver as long as they have conviction and passion from within. Though many people still embrace traditional gender roles within the household, and assume that it is the man’s place to work while the woman stays home to care for their offspring, our society changes rapidly — and so should our views on raising children. There is a lingering stigma around being a stay-at-home parent — especially a stay-at-home father — which is based on outdated ideas and value judgments about gender roles and the relative “importance” of the work traditionally assigned around them. That stigma needs to stop, because raising our children is definitely not trivial work.
For more about Pierre, follow him on Facebook.
Artist Notes
“Pierre is shown doing chores in the kitchen, with his baby girl in a sling on his back. He reminds us of the famous proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ and I have tried to symbolically represent the reality of stay at home parenting where one doesn’t even get a minute of free time while having a child in the house because they can be a handful. So, he has to carry her in the sling and do some quick work in the kitchen, in addition to playing, learning and growing with her all the time.”
Published Mar 1, 2020
Updated Aug 23, 2023
