3 Dads Are Unable To Accomplish A Simple Parenting Task And A Woman Saves The Day Using One Hand
How many dads does it take?
Hodoimg / Shutterstock In many ways, having a baby is a trial-by-fire experience, where parents can mark off the moments they go through with each major milestone. There’s the first time you change a diaper in public, the first time your toddler walks, the first time they fall.
Each experience levels up a parent’s skill set, giving them a new badge of honor to claim.
Yet some parenting wins are harder to acquire than others, as a group of dads discovered.
3 dads were unable to accomplish a simple parenting task, so a woman saved the day using only one hand.
A viral TikTok post captured a dad on his own in the wild, trying to collapse a stroller and failing epically.
The dad stood by his car with the trunk open, attempting to fold his child’s stroller down to store it.
He jiggled the handle, then the seat, shaking the stroller every which way, to no avail. He flipped the stroller over, pulling and tugging on the joints and the wheels, yet he still couldn’t achieve his desired outcome.
The dad grew more frustrated as more time passed, and he still couldn’t get the stroller to collapse.
The seat itself came off as the confused dad kept trying to fold the stroller until another dad walked up and offered professional dad assistance.
The scene played out like some kind of set-up to a silly joke: How many dads does it take to get a stroller to fit into the trunk of a car?
The second dad was also completely incapable of folding the stroller.
Maks Tarkivskyi / Shutterstock
Misery loves company, so they say, and one more dad joined the group to try his hand at this everyday parenting task.
As the dads struggled, one woman came over to offer her institutional knowledge, collapsing the stroller one-handed with the mere push of a button.
Knowing how to use a stroller seems like it should be inherent parenting knowledge, yet truth be told, a stroller’s design is more complicated than it may seem.
During the 15 years that I worked as a nanny, I wrestled with my fair share of strollers, most often while holding a baby on my hip and a diaper bag on my shoulder.
Not being able to fold up a stroller is its own specific kind of panicky hellscape, as you wonder if every other adult on the playground knows something about physics and engineering that you don’t.
Yet there was one specific thing I did to help mitigate against that worse-case stroller scenario.
4Max / Shutterstock
Before the start of every nanny position, the parents and I spent a day walking through the logistics of each piece of baby equipment together.
I tried on all the different baby-wearing carriers, the Bjorns, the wraps, and the slings, putting them on and taking them off, with a parent’s help and then on my own.
We went over the bottle-making process. We talked through how to change diapers. Most importantly, I practiced opening and closing the stroller over and over until I was sure I could do it on my own.
The fact that three separate fathers didn’t know how to work a stroller is a clear sign as to which parent is held responsible for the majority of daily parenting tasks.
According to the Pew Research Center, households with two working parents still see an uneven division of parental labor within the home.
64% of working moms said that they do more than their partners when it comes to managing their children’s activities and schedules. 53% of dads agreed with that assessment, saying that the wives take on more parenting responsibilities than they do.
It was pure comic gold to watch three dads fight a stroller, only to lose to an incredibly confident woman who did what they couldn’t do in about two seconds flat.
Yet as all good humor aims to do, the dad versus stroller scenario highlighted a truth about families that’s less funny: Dads are still not held completely responsible for taking on the bulk of parenting duties, and just giving it a try isn't always enough to get the job done well.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.