I mean, most people aren’t. We have a general cultural illiteracy about early childhood development. It’s incredibly rare to find, for example, jurisdictions where public schools offer courses in childcare the same way they might offer Spanish or Art. You’re just supposed to “pick it up” (usually by being a young woman in a family with babies and getting tasked with childcare, which is happening less and less these days).
(And when schools say they’re teaching “what it’s like to be a parent” they’re usually not teaching useful parenting skills, just trying to scare kids into not having sex.)
But for what routes there are, most boys are totally excluded–many girls begin babysitting strangers’ children to earn an extra income as young as ten, a practice which boys have typically been considered too dangerous to participate in. When public schools do teach classes about childcare, they’re generally aimed at teen moms, not all students in general. A lot of parent education and bonding programs are specifically aimed at “moms” and act like cats with boots on when dads show up.
This is something I care about a lot because I care about preventing child abuse, and the no 1 way to do that is to educate parents about basic child care, like “It’s not good to just prop a baby up with a bottle all the time” or “Yes they WILL scream for no fucking reason for the first three months, learn to live with it” or “3-to-5-year-olds don’t lie to your face because they’re bad kids, they’re just learning how reality works”.
These are the kind of things a lot of parents simply don’t know, because nobody tells them and trying to look for good parenting advice on your own today is like walking with pizza into a room that’s on fire. But men, especially, are put at a disadvantage when it comes to learning them.
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