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Healthy Co-Parenting and the Need For Pay Equity
Hi, my name is Joel, and I’m a co parent.
Growing up, I never heard the term “co parent.” I heard a lot of other things: absentee father, sperm donor, deadbeat dad, and my personal favorite: baby daddy. Baby daddy, for those not in the know, refers to an individual who helps to conceive a child, but does little else. A baby daddy is also someone who is not married by law to the mother of said child. A co parent was a term I assumed was only reserved for white families that star in televised primetime dramas. It wasn’t a term used to explain the role of a parent — either you had kids, or you didn’t. And no one was having explicit conversations at the dinner table about the role fathers played in the conversation. A shared responsibility in the household, a balanced and more open parenting approach, was not a topic of discussion in our social circles. A majority of the time, the fathers I knew of growing up were barely present or completely nonexistent. Coparent wasn’t a phrase used or heard of where I came from.
I come from the hood. That hood would be Creston Avenue and 188th in the Bronx. I was born in the American Reaganomics era, coined after Hollywood actor turned profiteering President Ronald Reagan, whose trickle down economic policies helped ring in a new industry of financial propensity: crack. I should know — my eldest brother…
