Jennifer Parlamis

So I'd like to begin with a story.

When my daughter was a baby, we lived in New York City, and I was there studying to get a PhD in social and organizational psychology, and I was researching conflict resolution and negotiation.

And like most New Yorkers, we would walk everywhere, and I would push her in a stroller with two hands, like a responsible parent, all over the city.

But I noticed that my husband, he pushed the stroller quite differently.

with one hand kind of off to the side, and kind of looking a little bit too cool, like he had better places to be.

And this really bothered me.

I started to get angry.

And I started to make all these causal attributions, what psychologists call these explanations for his behavior.

One, I thought maybe, oh, he's a hotshot Wall Street lawyer now.

He thinks he's too good to push a stroller.

Or I thought maybe he thinks women are the only ones who should push strollers.

Or maybe he didn't care about safety, and that was why he was doing it that way.

So as I was thinking about all these explanations for his behavior, I started to get angry.

And that anger started to build up, and I vented.

I expressed my anger forcefully to anybody who would listen, called my friends, called my sister.

But that venting didn't help release my anger.

I actually felt even angrier, until one day, I saw my dad pushing the stroller the exact same way.

He came into the city, and he was taking my daughter to the park, and he's walking like that.

And I know my dad doesn't care about looking cool.

Sorry, Dad.