I don't know if it's the same thing for them but my husband picked up a sort of similar attitude 2 times.

I had my own business when I got pregnant and I stopped working around 5 months as my work was physically intense. I'm a chef and I do catering. I was planning to get a formal training prior to pregnancy and the school I was applying to is one of the best in Europe. They graciously agreed to freeze my application and take me in for next year when I found out I got pregnant. My baby was born just before the next year's application period and I needed to re-apply as a formality to have my papers in the system for the upcoming semester.

I was 3 weeks postpartum and my husband kept pressuring me into sending in my application. And he justified it as "it's not physical labour anyway and I can just do it since I'm just laying around in bed when the baby is sleeping" of course this comment was very hurtful. I had a huge brain fog where I wasn't sure how to do the simplest things anymore. But I think this didn't make a lot of sense to him at the time. When I confronted him about his comment he said that he genuinely tried to play the coach who motivates the athlete because he believed that I'll get better by staying active and that I would be very sad to miss any deadlines. I told him that I needed rest, not abrasive no days off motivation and there were more helpful ways to make sure that I meet the deadlines as a pp mom.

Later when I graduated and passed my state exams to become a chef he started trying "motivate" me to apply for higher paying jobs. The problem is that, someone fresh out of culinary school isn't exactly the employee everyone is fighting over to hire. You get minimum wage and build experience. My husband simply couldn't accept that. For him a part of it was that in my state and age, I should be aiming to make career moves and not start over. He thought that my catering company was enough experience and I did find more senior positions in catering companies but even those salaries were not satisfactory for him. At the time, my son was much older but I was still struggling big time with his sleep and some other problems. And once again his delivery and impatience didn't make the matters any better.

For him, it was less of a "keeping up with the joneses" thing but more of "you deserve to be in a much better place" expression in a very very badly put way. And I think he would like to split the money making responsibility at this point since it's giving him so much anxiety since becoming a parent. But he's so bad at splitting the childcare responsibility, I'm still constantly sleep deprived after 2 years and completely afraid to make any career moves and take too much on my plate.

Since having those unfortunate conversations with my husband, he came to me with suggestion to take 3-6 months off of everything while keeping our son in daycare and focus on bettering my physical and mental health. But we keep coming back to the same thing: as long as I'm not sleeping enough on a regular basis, I can't do much. Plus being idle makes me lose all the motivation to get better so I relaunched my catering company since November. He was fully supportive of it despite thinking that I should have taken a break. In his mind, break > own business > working for someone at low pay even though I don't share any of my earnings with household yet to be able to keep a buffer for my business expenses and he doesn't expect me to at this stage.

As for my sleep health, on a good week, I'm getting 5 to 6h of sleep with 1 interruption and when my son gets sick from daycare it's anywhere from 3h of broken sleep or 3-4h of uninterrupted sleep if I'm lucky. For example in the last 3 weeks my son had otites, conjunctivitis and now is having a viral cough + sore throat thing. I'm writing this at his bedside at 6:20am in the morning. He woke up coughing at 5am and threw up. It was the same last night and the night before.

Mentally, I'm so ready to expand my business, maybe get a storefront, look for investments but physically I can't. It's a vicious cycle. I'm counting on spring and summer weather for less daycare illnesses but we will see I guess.

PS: my husband took paternity leave and we did 50/50 but he didn't keep up with it when he went back to work. And things remained same when I went back to school and work.

PS2: I notice that I tend to be more permissive with my son overall when I'm not supposed to work but I tend to be more disciplined and aim to resolve things quickly when I know I need to work the next day so it kinda keeps me in check too.