New word creation: matronizing

Recently I've had quite a few meetings with activists and key decision makers in the child care space - all of these meetings were very inspiring as they confirmed our belief that more needs to be done for and with fathers (when it comes to helping new parents). Unfortunately, at the moment there is still quite a focus on "the mum" and the material written for fathers is often "matronizing" - there you go! Let me explain ...

In one of the meetings a FEMALE participant summed it up in one sentence - "a lot of the traditional parenting material for fathers is written by women and describes how women want men to be (around children)". I found her description quite accurate based on our to date experience of working in the parenting space. So I guess I thought "matronizing" was a good way to describe the content and language used by some of the information material around.

This is obviously assuming that "patronizing" is linked to "patriarch" or "paternal" somehow (maybe somebody with a PhD in etymology could help me out?) and then making the connection between paternal / patronizing and maternal / matronizing ... You get the idea. Maybe the word matronizing actually exists or it has already been defined (properly) ... haven't checked but I thought it was a nice creative moment today.

Either way I think it could also be quite useful in everyday conversations ... like "that sounds really matronizing" ... or "don't matronize me".

So there you go - if you are stuck for a word to described the above scenario - use matronizing :-)

-Stefan