Blogger dads for truth in diapering: Editorial
Dads who devote their days to their kids have created a powerful online community that is rapidly getting attention from marketing companies.
Chris Routly is one of the stay-at-home dads who blogged about a Huggies commercial that made fathers look incapable of caring for their children. An online petition forced the ad off the air.
After mastering the art of the stay-at-home dad, father bloggers are now fighting against the archaic gender-insulting notions perpetuated in television commercials that men can’t handle a wet diaper, much less a week alone with the kids.
By airing their complaints online, dads who devote their days to their children have created a powerful voice that is rapidly getting attention from the marketing companies that create those antiquated ads. And that’s a good thing.
As Fatima Arkin writes in the Star, their blogging power has jolted companies like Huggies and Playskool into a new era of marketing that acknowledges fathers as capable parents and even better, valued shoppers.
Stay-at-home dads — those who let moms pursue careers or at least a work-life balance — have the commercial clout to demand a certain truth in advertising, even if it is self-serving.
They are also part of a societal change. After all, in 2011, 60,000 Canadian fathers stayed home with the kids, triple the number in the 1970s.
Thankfully, they didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of haplessness for, say, decades, before their voices were heard. Imagine the power of the women’s movement if blogs had existed in the 1960s.
So when Huggies aired a commercial that made dads look incapable, talking about “The toughest test imaginable: Dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days!” an online petition forced it off the air.
As blogger-dad Chris Routly said, “It wasn’t just an exclusion of dads or a single blubbering dad character. The wording was very much saying that dads are terrible at this stuff.” He was right to complain. Better yet, he’s now advising companies so they don’t get themselves into trouble again.
Smart companies are rewriting scripts that depict dads as bumbling fools, to avoid the ire of online dads. They’re engaged parents, not clowns. They can cope just fine.
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