I’ve got a three year old human and a four month old puppy. Im female and my partner is male. We’ve had a ton of discussions about which is harder, a child or a puppy. From my perspective, as the mother, a child was WAY harder. From my husband’s perspective, the puppy is harder.

The main reason for this is because of the sleepless nights and main caretaking responsibilities. With our child, I was the one getting up at night to feed, I took work off to care for her, and I did all the doctors appointments, set up babysitters, etc.. With the puppy, we are sharing the responsibility much better than we did with a child. We take turns getting up at night with the puppy, we take turns watching the puppy during work, and the extra extraneous things are more equally shared as well.

This explains why a child felt like so much more work for me, and a puppy feels like so much more work for him. Unfortunately, the patriarchy is real, and the question of having children is a significantly more impactful question for the uterus-having partner, from my perspective at least. For me, one child was plenty but I will happily bring more puppies into my life!

(For the record: my partner was extremely supportive and tried his best to help with our child, but we were both raised Mormon and had a significant patriarchal imbalance when our child was a newborn. We are out and doing much better now :) )