Stories are everywhere these days about how oblivious many men are to how much work goes into parenting and keeping up a home, but every now and then another comes along that takes it to a whole new level. Take for instance a dad who recently posted about how easy it is to take a kid on vacation when the evidence that this is untrue was literally on the beach chair beside him.

A dad bragged about how easy it is to vacation with a toddler.

Tikoker and dad Darius Cortez went wildly viral a few weeks ago for what at first blush seems like a simple vacation video. Under the perfect blue skies of the Caribbean, Cortez sipped a cocktail while celebrating being able to go on vacation despite having a toddler.

“Whoever said you can’t travel with a toddler is lying,” Cortez said with a giant smile. “Our baby is 1 year old and she’s in the Dominican Republic!” The message: You really can live a full life even if you’re currently engulfed in the storm of raising a toddler.

What seems to have escaped Cortez’s notice is that the entire reason he is able to enjoy a Caribbean vacation while parenting a toddler was sitting right beside him, doing the parenting in question.

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While he enjoyed a drink and posted a TikTok, his wife was rocking their daughter to sleep.

This TikTok is so oblivious it’s hard not to wonder if it’s rage-bait purposely made to go viral (in which case it succeeded in its goal). Regardless, the visuals could not be more absurd. As Cortez toasts the camera about the ease of vacationing due to his 1-year-old simply sleeping through the day, he pans over to his wife, the one rocking the child to sleep in the first place.

At no point does Cortez seem to put two and two together, but the women who watched it definitely did. “Why is she asleep? Who put her to sleep? Who is keeping her asleep?????” one woman wrote in a comment on a repost of the video.

A torrent of similarly exasperated comments followed. “It’s never a vacation for moms, ever,” one mom wrote. “He’s on vacation, she’s not,” another added. Others were even more pointed. As one woman put it, “fathers can still be absent even if they’re in the same room.”

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Of course, we know little about this family just from this one TikTok, and in follow-up videos, Cortez showed he and his wife enjoying the beach together, interacting with their little girl. Still, the video struck a very obvious nerve about the enormous load of often unnoticed work that goes into parenting and managing a family’s life, nearly all of which falls on women’s shoulders.

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Studies have shown that even in the most equal marriages, women do much more parenting and household work.

In 2023, Pew Research looked into whether the rise of dual-income families and more egalitarian marriages impacted the division of labor inside the home. What they found will likely be of no surprise to most women.

Even in marriages where basically everything was equal, from the partners’ incomes to their approach to the division of labor, Pew found that women did roughly one-third more childcare work than men. And when it came to housework, women did double.

To put a finer point on it, another Pew study found that while men on average work more hours at their job outside the home than their female partners, they also have substantially more leisure time each week. The difference was even more pronounced among couples with children.

Even worse, men often CREATE more work for their wives, too. A 2008 University of Michigan study found that husbands create an average of seven hours of extra housework for their wives per week. Or, as a friend of mine, a working mom of two, once put it to me while sobbing in a rage, “I don’t have two kids, I have three, and one of them is 50 (expletive) years old.” He thinks parenting is “easy” too, by the way.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.