When Glee alum Darren Criss won his first Tony Award last night, he did the thing most celebrities do in their proudest moments: He honored his partner, Mia Swier, whom he married in 2019.
But Criss did something else as well: He talked about his wife’s role, not just as a support system in his life, but as the “real hero” of his professional win — and in doing so, he highlighted the role that default parents everywhere play in their partners’ success.
“The real hero for this remarkable journey is my wife, Mia, who took a massive swing on allowing me to do this and to allow this crazy upheaval in our life to make this logistically possible. And for bearing the brunt of raising two tiny friends under three,” Criss said in his acceptance speech.
Shouting out a partner is, of course, an awards show acceptance speech mainstay. But what isn’t common at all is a true acknowledgement of how it all works. And that’s why it feels almost revolutionary when a star pulls back the curtain to reveal what happens at home to enable their onscreen (or, in this case, onstage) work. We’ve seen a few examples of this: Melanie Lynskey famously thanked her nanny when accepting her Critics Choice award, for example.
This acknowledgement is rare, yet so important: Because without someone holding it down at home and handling the pickups and the dropoffs and the doctor’s visits and the sick days and the transitions and the bedtimes, nothing else is possible. How do you step into the spotlight, either literally or figuratively, as a parent without knowing your children are in someone’s capable care?
Whether you work as the star of a Broadway show like Criss or in a 9-to-5 capacity, once you become a parent, nothing really works without care work. In many cases, this work comes from paid help, but often it comes from the unpaid contributions of a partner, or some combination of both. In every case, this care work is the scaffolding upon which every other type of work is built. And when we look at it that way, we begin to realize: Default parents aren’t just able to focus on the logistics of running a family because of their partners’ success — they’re driving and enabling that success as well.
In his acceptance speech, Criss articulated it perfectly. “Mia, you are the very pedestal that upholds the shiny, spinny bit in our lives,” he said, while spinning the top of his award.
He’s right: If professional success is the shiny piece at the top of the award, the piece that is visible and eye-catching and glitzy, that care work Swier (along with so many other default parents) takes on is the base. It’s the part that people don’t often notice or praise, but it is essential. And without it, professional success can’t rise up to find the light.
Criss doesn’t explicitly say that his wife is a stay-at-home parent at the moment, but his comments do indicate that she’s currently the default parent in their home.
As we’re finally starting to discuss in a mainstream way, being a default parent can be a relentless, thankless job characterized by never-ending work that goes largely unnoticed or even dismissed entirely. It’s about being a human safety net for everyone’s needs, often at the expense of your own. And it doesn’t come with a salary or a title or even real visibility from the outside world.
Default parents are often — but not always — moms, often stay-at-home moms or mothers who have intentionally let go of or paused career opportunities that compromise their ability to fully step into that default parent role.
The messaging that so many parents in this position receive only adds to that devaluation of their work. On TikTok, for example, conversations about “provider men” are everywhere. People will ask stay-at-home parents what their partners do to “allow them to stay home,” for example. They’ll also accuse stay-at-home parents of “spending their husbands’ money” or “leeching off of their partners.”
Culturally, we have no problem telling people who have partners with bigger and shinier careers that they are “dependent” on their partner’s success. What we rarely include in the conversation, though, is the way care work, which is often shouldered by default parents, enables so much of that success.
But Criss puts that context back in the conversation. He acknowledges that signing on to perform eight shows a week wouldn’t have been possible without his wife’s buy-in — and without serious logistical strong-arming on her part. Because that’s what partnership is: It’s making decisions together with an understanding of how each member will have to shift their priorities to complete the picture. It’s about realizing that each of these roles has equal value.
Criss sees that without those sacrifices and all that labor, none of the accolades would be possible. And he sheds light on the interconnectedness of it all: The way that home life and the work life, and the care work and the paid work all must come together in order for it all to work. Because of that, Swier’s heroism — and the heroism of default parents everywhere who feel seen by his comments — doesn’t have to go unsung.
