👶 My husband says childcare "is not his job" and I am exhausted arguing about it

We have two kids, five and two, and since the younger one was born, my husband has genuinely settled into a pattern where he considers most direct childcare, feeding, bathing, actually managing meltdowns, to be primarily my responsibility, occasionally helping when specifically asked but rarely stepping in on his own without being prompted first every single time. When I have brought this up directly, the response is usually some version of he works long hours and needs to actually rest when he gets home, which I understand to some extent, but I also work, currently part time from home specifically because full time alongside this exact imbalance felt genuinely impossible to sustain for both of us realistically. The imbalance is not really about total hours worked outside the house anymore, it is about who is actually mentally tracking everything the kids need at any given moment throughout each day. His own father was similarly hands off growing up, and I think he genuinely does not see an alternative model clearly enough to consciously choose something different himself, more that this specific pattern simply feels normal and expected to him rather than something actively decided upon. When I point this out directly, he does not disagree exactly, but nothing meaningfully changes afterward regardless of how the conversation actually goes each time. I have tried making specific, smaller requests rather than general complaints, asking him to specifically handle bath time every night for instance, and that particular one has actually stuck reasonably well for about two months now, which gives me a small amount of hope that specific, concrete asks work better than broader complaints about the overall pattern itself. Still, the mental load of tracking literally everything else remains almost entirely on me, and I am genuinely tired of having what feels like the exact same argument every few months without much real, lasting change resulting from any of it afterward. Has anyone actually managed to shift this kind of deeply ingrained pattern with a partner, and did specific requests work better for you too, or did it eventually require a bigger, more direct conversation to actually change anything meaningfully?

My own husband said almost that exact sentence once, word for word, and it took a full year of small, targeted asks before anything actually shifted. What worked for us in the end was less about arguing and more about just walking away mid meltdown a few times, letting him handle it alone without me stepping in to rescue the situation the way I always had before that point.