"Men only "borrow" their children;"

The Manipulated Man.

The Mama lion at the gate. Maternal chauvinism is a dad's greatest obstacle to parental parity;

"Generally, men are as involved with their kids as their wives will let them be," says Armin Brott,

Ms. founding editor Suzanne Braun-Levine, author of the new book "Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First," says that the problem of female "gatekeeping" was an unexpected direction in which her work took her.

"I kept running up against the fact that the process of men becoming equal partners at home was harder than people expect it to be," she says. "I kept trying to figure out why. There are a lot of answers in the workplace and the culture, but I didn't expect to find so many answers in the family."
These observations are confirmed by some true confessions of maternal chauvinists -- women who admit to feeling secretly thrilled when Dad shows his incompetence and slightly disappointed when he copes well in Mom's absence.

A few years ago, Redbook ran an article called "My Husband Is Too Good a Father" by Beth Levine. Levine's husband, a home-based freelance writer like her, was an active, nurturing father to their young son, which was exactly what she had always wanted. What she had not expected was to feel hurt every time the boy cried for Daddy, not Mommy.

"I'm ashamed, but I hate that I am not the center of my child's universe," she wrote. "When I am honest with myself, what I really want is for Bill to be an eager but charmingly inept father, a soldier to my general."

Some mothers wisely keep such feelings to themselves. At worst, they may occasionally sulk when the child displays too marked a preference for Dad. But in some instances, maternal jealousy can turn ugly and wreak havoc on parents' and children's lives.

In the 1999 book "Divorced Dads," University of Arizona psychologist Sanford Braver describes the case of a woman who felt so upset and threatened by her husband's apparently closer bond with their young son (due both to the father's more flexible schedule and to his desire to be a "New Dad") that she filed for divorce and successfully fought for sole custody. Her husband, who was devastated by these events, felt that "she wanted a court of law to certify that she was indeed the better parent." The result was that instead of being in the care of his father while the mother worked, the boy was now left in day care.

Esther Villar,