Maternal Gatekeeping is described by Jancee Dunn, author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, as follows: “If [my husband] Tom was struggling to bathe our daughter Sylvie when she was a newborn, I’d grab her and say, ‘Let me do it.’ If he tried to change her diaper, I’d direct him over his shoulder. This behavior, in which mothers limit or control the fathers’ interactions with their kids, is called maternal gatekeeping—and I did it all the time. It puts off a hesitant new dad (and who isn’t hesitant, at first?) and makes him less likely to lend a hand.” Science backs her up. Maternal gatekeeping hurts moms: “One study found that gatekeeping women in dual-earner couples did five more hours of family work per week, and had less equal divisions of labor than women classified as collaborators,” reports CNN. And it may even hurt our kids. A different study published in The Journal of Family Psychology “revealed associations between maternal gatekeeping and fathers’ parenting quality. In particular, fathers who experienced greater [discouragement] at 3-months postpartum showed greater relative declines in parenting quality at 9-months postpartum.”
So why do we do it? One theory is that motherhood can feel so scary, we exert control over whatever we possibly can, to mitigate our own anxiety—including about how much syrup goes on our kids’ pancakes (and, for the record, he poured too much). Experts also suggest the pressure to be perfect mothers (and friends, daughters, professionals, wives, etc.) plays a role. “Gatekeeping really seems to depend on how much a woman internalizes societal standards about being a good mom," Ohio State University psychology professor and gatekeeping researcher Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan tells CNN. "The more you care about being viewed as a good mom, the less likely you are to give up control over that domain." Here, real women fess up to the ways they’ve stood guard.
