Dad Buys Cereal
Quiet Revolution or business as usual?
When my mother sees a man carrying a
grocery list, she takes it as proof that there's been a revolutionary
change in marriage. She's talking specifically about the guy Bjorning
the newest addition and ignoring the sugar-smacked pleas of his older
children. "I see dads in the store all the time with their kids," she
says. "And they're, you know, buying
the groceries. You never saw a father buying groceries when you
were growing up."
In late-seventies Nebraska, you might have seen a man in the grocery
store around Valentine's Day, buying a last-minute box of chocolates, or
maybe in the summer when he believed he had to pick out the proper cut
of steaks for the grill himself. But as a general rule? To buy frozen
peas and diapers? After working at the office or plant all week? Think
again.
"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and
a career," Gloria Steinem said in a radio interview twenty years ago. I
still don't hear many men asking. I suspect that has a lot more to do
with the way men are raised to gut things out and women are raised to
talk them through. When I talk privately with my male friends, they tell
me they don't know how to make it all work--how to spend enough time
with the kids, to devote enough time to their wives, and to give enough
time to their jobs. They feel inadequate, guilty, and tired.
They sound like mothers.
But even though the definition of a good dad has expanded to include
adjectives like "attentive" and "involved," the primary verb still seems
to be "to provide." Maybe that's why, despite the many, many recent
stories in the mainstream media about highly educated, high-powered
women "opting out" of their careers to stay home with the kids, there
have been none about men doing the same.
A year ago, the New York Times'
Lisa Belkin coined the term "opt-out revolution" in an article focused
on elite women leaving the workforce. Since then, opting out has been
spotlighted in articles in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Time to Fast Company and Business Insurance. In March, the Atlantic Monthly published a
particularly controversial article by Caitlin Flanagan called "How
Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement." In it, she rebukes today's working
mothers for riding to success on the backs of domestic servants and then
not having the decency to acknowledge both the nannies' primacy in their
kids' lives or to pay their Social Security taxes. Flanagan did not
similarly judge--or even mention--fathers, who presumably agreed to
having a nanny in the house and are contributing to their salaries.
Ignoring the responsibilities and desires of fathers seems to be the
norm in these articles. The writers and talk show hosts who've weighed
in on this discussion don't interview men, don't take into account their
points of view, don't ask them why they aren't feeling guilty about
hiring housekeepers and nannies, don't probe why everyone still looks to
the mother when asking how the children are to be raised. This
conversation is being held almost exclusively by women while paternal
keyboards and vocal chords largely remain silent.
Can it be that most women don't care what men think about how to
balance work and family responsibilities? Or is it that most men aren't
comfortable voicing their opinions on traditional women's issues? Or is
it something else entirely? What I do know is that no one's yet looked
at how husbands are reacting to their wives' opting out, and that for
every woman who is opting out, there's a stay-at-home dad going back to
work or, far more likely, a man who's about to become the
next-generation Ward Cleaver. Is that what he wanted? Is he secretly (or
not-so-secretly) happy that he's the one earning the paycheck? Or did he
want to be the one who stayed home with the kids?
The question now isn't why women are opting out, but why men are
keeping on. What makes Dad go?
* *
*
First, let's clear up a few things about
stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs (the usual, if unfortunate, abbreviation).
They're the poster kids for everyone who wants traditional gender roles
to relax. When in 1993 the Census Bureau reported that there were two
million American stay-at-home dads, it seemed that yes, in fact, we had
made mighty progress toward egalitarianism at home. Everyone seems to
know a stay-at-home dad these days. (In my own family, there's my
brother-in-law, who is forgoing a career for the time being to wrestle
with his kids on the floor and run science experiments in the kitchen.)
It's not unusual on a weekday to go to the park and find a handful of
dads playing with their kids, talking potty training and rashes with the
moms, or reading The Financial Times
while their spawn burn off some energy.
But while these men are a far cry from the Mr. Mom and Mrs. Doubtfire
novelties that Hollywood presented to us in the eighties and nineties,
there's a sad truth about SAHDs. It turns out that the much-cited figure
of two million at-home fathers was a bit misleading: 1.6 million of
those men were actually employed full- or part-time--not walking away
from careers to raise their children. They also weren't necessarily the
only care providers for their kids. To qualify as a SAHD for Census
purposes, it turns out, the father only needed to be the person who is
most often with the kids during the
mother's working hours.
Men who worked service jobs like maintenance, police, firefighting, and
security were twice as likely as men in any other occupation to be
taking care of preschoolers while their wives were at work. Census
researchers say this probably has something to do with the
nontraditional schedules of these jobs, in which men can work nights and
weekends when mothers are with the children.
You can imagine the scene in these homes. One parent walks in around
six p.m., dead tired from office pressure and rush-hour traffic, to find
a similarly exhausted partner who is simultaneously changing into a work
uniform and spouting off the verbal equivalent of a hand-off memo for
the household. What they've traded for never seeing each other is not
having to pay expensive daycare bills. This is a vital budget cut, given
that most families with dads at home are financially struggling. The
number of caregiving fathers peaked during the 1988-1991 economic
recession, when more men than usual were losing full-time jobs and
families were under pressure to make ends meet. Not surprisingly, the
number of primary-care fathers fell between 1991 and 1993, when the
economy reignited.
Last year, at the same time the Census Bureau clarified its 1993
estimate of two million SAHDs, it redefined what a stay-at-home parent
is. By its new definition--a married mom or dad out of the labor force
for all of the previous year primarily to care for family, with a spouse
who'd been working that whole time--there are currently 5.2 million
stay-at-home moms and a mere 105,000 stay-at-home dads. Only one-half of
one percent of all children under age fifteen who live in two-parent
families are being raised by fathers who quit their jobs to be
SAHDs--compared to more than twenty-five percent of similar children who
are being raised by stay-at-home moms. Or, to put it another way, if
you're a kid under fifteen in America today, living with your mom and
dad, you're fifty-six times more likely to have a stay-at-home mom and a
going-out-to-work dad than vice versa.
While the number of stay-at-home dads may grow eventually, many social
researchers believe it will never be the predominant family modus
vivendi. "It is unlikely this arrangement will ever be used by a major
proportion of American families, given societal, cultural, religious and
economic support for primary nurturing mothers as the norm," writes Kyle
Pruett, clinical professor of psychiatry and nursing at the Yale Child
Study Center and Medical School, in his book, Fatherneed: Why Father Care is as
Essential as Mother Care for Your Child (The Free Press, 2000).
So what gives? After women getting liberated, men getting the okay to
eat quiche and at least a generation getting Marlo Thomas's Free to Be. . . You and Me for
Christmas or birthdays, why aren't more men choosing to be at home,
raising their children?
When I ask my male friends this question, they all tell me the same
thing: No matter how many diapers they change or school plays they
attend, fathers are still judged first by their ability to "bring home
the bacon." (If I had a slab of the stuff for every time this exact
phrase was used, I could eat BLTs until my skin turned to pork rind.)
"Sometimes I wish I were a corporate titan who could command respect
from my wife's power-hungry friends," my friend Dan tells me. He's a
freelance photographer raising two young children. "I don't want to feel
like a person who ‘just couldn't get his act together in the corporate
world.' "
When Dan and his wife decided they wanted to have one parent at home,
three things made it easy for him to shift his focus from career to
children. He already worked out of the house, so he didn't face cubicle
withdrawal. His wife, a consultant with a major corporation, earned more
money than he did. Probably most importantly, he had a role model: his
dad was a minister who had picked up the kids from school, made
breakfast and packed the lunches. "He was able to hide behind the cloak
of a minister, so he was never labeled a stay-at-home dad," Dan says.
And right there, Dan reveals his mixed feelings about the SAHD title.
Despite dads' clubs and a boom in fatherhood books, being seen strictly
as a stay-at-home dad is isolating. SAHDs are still outnumbered at
Gymboree, moms aren't always warm (at least one moms' club made news
when it asked a father to leave), and other men don't always understand
the choice.
"Stay-at-home dads????" e-mailed my long-time friend David, an
entrepreneur and father of two. "I think few men respect it and most men
want respect of other men first."
* *
*
In June 2003, the New York Times ran an article about
the fourteen women in the one-hundred-member U.S. Senate who were
pressuring Majority Leader Bill Frist to stop scheduling votes at dinner
time. This plea, the article said, had "won them the quiet support of
some men who would also like to have dinner with their children."
Why quiet? I wondered. Did someone tape their mouths shut? We were
supposed to believe that these public figures with strong opinions on
education, abortion, and war were too timid to say, "Hey, Bill, I
haven't been home for dinner in two weeks. Let's vote on it in the
morning"? But, as my friend says, men care what other men think--perhaps
nowhere more so than in the Senate, which isn't known as "the last
plantation" for nothing.
In this deeply traditional institution, success comes to those who are
ruthlessly and relentlessly ambitious. But even when you look to the
other geographical and institutional extreme, you'll find the same deal.
Consider Bill Gates, in Seattle, taking off only a couple days of work
when his daughter Jennifer Katharine was born in 1996. Or Houston Oiler
football player David Williams, who skipped a game in 1993 to be with
his wife during the birth of their first baby. He was fined a week's
salary. Coach Bob Young, who wanted Williams suspended as well as fined,
compared Williams's action to that of a World War II pilot refusing to
fly while his wife was in labor. The player's unapproved absence could
have hurt the business, Young claimed.
Every man I talked to while writing this article mentioned the fear men
have of being perceived as weak, ineffectual, or deficient if they take
a company up on family-friendly benefits such as job-sharing, flextime,
or telecommuting. One friend, an international attorney and dad to two
boys, says there's a feeling that if a man takes paternity leave, for
example, the other men back at the office are sniping, "Did he lose an
arm or something?" (Apparently, the only excuse for missing work would
be the reading of the last rites over your body.)
In Fatherneed, psychiatrist
Kyle Pruett tells the story of a Maryland state trooper who won a
four-year fight against his department, which had denied him the unpaid
parental leave required by the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
This was the first discrimination case brought to trial under the new
law. Although the jury awarded him $375,000, only two male colleagues
called to congratulate him. Men are "not doing nearly enough" to press
for workplace change or to support each other, Pruett says.
At root, many fathers feel as though they're in disguise while they're
at work, says John Evans, a Massachusetts psychotherapist specializing
in work-life balance for men and the author of Marathon Dad (Avon Books, 1998).
These men feel that the company is always on the verge of discovering
what "double-dealers" they are--Benedict Arnolds with loyalties to
family as well as workplace. Men fear that taking advantage of
family-friendly policies is a clear signal to an employer that they're
turncoats, and the price to pay could be their seniority or a lucrative
promotion.
"The guys in my groups are afraid to take family leave," says Hogan
Hilling, founder of Proud Dads, an open-discussion workshop for fathers,
and author of The Man Who Would Be Dad
(Capital Books, 2002). "They use vacation time. They say if they use
family leave, ‘My employer will look at me differently.' "
In time, enough hard data on how family-friendly policies affect
companies may be able to counter pressures like these. FMLA is letting
us see, for the first time on a national level, how providing at least
one benefit affects both companies and workers. FMLA provides up to
twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave and continued health care
benefits for eligible employees who need to take care of a newborn,
newly adopted child, or newly placed foster child; a seriously ill
child, spouse or parent; or one's own seriously ill health. This
includes maternity-related disability and prenatal care.
So far, more than three-quarters of all FMLA-covered companies have
reported to the Labor Department that granting the leave has had no
noticeable effect on business. More impressively, ninety-six percent of
these companies say that taking leave has had no noticeable effect on
career advancement. Despite this, most men still prefer to cobble
together precious sick days and vacation time rather than to take the
federally mandated time off. Less than half (forty-five percent) of all
men eligible for FMLA actually took it for any reason (not just to care
for a new member of the family) according to a 2001 Labor Department
survey of all eligible workers.
Fear of career repercussions is one thing, but by far the most common
reason for not taking the leave was not being able to afford it. In the
federal survey, seventy-eight percent of all workers who decided against
taking FMLA said they did so because they couldn't spare the income.
According to one recent Labor Department report, "Many leave-takers
report having difficulty making ends meet during their leave, some
cutting short their leave due to financial constraints."
This leads to the very basic reason why fathers are more likely than
mothers to be working: The families need or want the larger salaries the
men draw. At the peak of his earning potential, a man brings home a
median of $205 more a week, or $10,660 more a year, than a woman at the
top of her game. Of the 263 occupations tracked in 2003 by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, there are only three in which a woman's median weekly
earning is the same or more than a man's. (They are: hand-packers ($5
more a week); healthcare support technicians ($2 more a week); and
general office clerks (same weekly income).)
Even when they're doing the exact same job, women earn on average less
than their male counterparts. Some experts believe that's because
mothers "willingly" accept lower incomes in exchange for perks like
flexible schedules and shorter workdays to fulfill their parenting
obligations. But it's also possible, says a 2003 report on women's
earnings published by the federal General Accounting Office, that
"underlying discrimination exists in the presumption that women have
primary responsibility for home and family, and as a result, women are forced to make decisions to
accommodate these responsibilities" [emphasis added].
Men, because of their enormous earning potential, are much less likely
to be drawn to part-time work or shared jobs. This type of employment is
still "centered around jobs that aren't necessarily very high in the
company hierarchy," says Jennifer Schramm, manager of workplace trends
and forecasting for the Society of Human Resource Management, based in
Alexandria, Virginia. She doesn't foresee men's becoming interested in
these jobs, either. "We can't expect men to take up some of these
options if they don't see the women who do progressing in their careers
the way they'd want to."
Until men and women are paid equally, true co-parenting can't happen,
says Ann Crittenden, author of the much-lauded book The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most
Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Metropolitan
Books, 2001) and of the forthcoming If
You've Raised Kids, You Can Do Anything. "It's very hard for the
lower earner to say, ‘You have to do half the work,' " she says.
As long as men keep up the pace at work and don't give higher priority
to hands-on parenting tasks--whether it's because they're trapped by
cultural stereotypes, trying to support a family, or just being
self-centered--women by default will remain the chief handling officers
at home. Last year, fired up by Crittenden's book, the National
Association of Mothers' Centers (NAMC) launched a movement called
Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights to promote the economic value of
motherhood. The organization is unapologetically targeted to women, not
parents.
"We're not saying that fathers' issues are not important," says NAMC
Executive Director Linda Lisi Juergens. "There has been tremendous
change, but the numbers are not that significantly different. Even when
both parents are working, the mother is still overwhelmingly taking care
of the caretaking details, even if she's not doing the caretaking
herself."
And for this, we have our uteruses to thank, says the Times's "Opt-Out Revolution" author
Lisa Belkin. Because women give birth to children and men do not, she
tells Brain, Child, "society
gives women a different relationship with children than it gives to men.
There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the scientist who can figure out if
this is the result of history or biology or psychology or sociology, but
whatever its roots, it is, at this moment in history, a fact. So the
conversation about working and caring for children is most often
addressed at the audience who, at this moment in history, is most
entwined in it."
* *
*
No one's really pushing to merely swap
stay-at-home mothers for stay-at-home fathers. But why not a more
reasonable sharing of all responsibilities and tasks, whether it's
working or caring for children?
As it stands, most fathers just aren't that involved in the day-to-day
details of their children's lives. Roughly eighty percent of mothers are
responsible for choosing their child's doctor, taking the child to
doctor's appointments, and arranging child care, according to a study
released last fall by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Because of
this, mothers are much more likely to be the ones agitating for
workplace change and leading the campaigns for paid family leave and
Social Security credits for stay-at-home parents.
But with the increase of mothers either leaving work to raise children
full-time or scaling back on their jobs, it's men who will have the most
influence over how the workplace operates. If women opt out of the
workplace, will the chance for change go home with them?
There is some encouraging evidence men are realizing their stake in
making the workplace more flexible. Balancing professional and personal
responsibilities, always ranked very high in importance for women, is
starting to take higher priority for men, according to the Society of
Human Resource Management's annual benefits survey. Men, especially
those who are thirty-five years old and younger, are beginning to value
it as much as women do, says SHRM's Jennifer Schramm. A December 2003
job satisfaction survey echoed this trend, with paid time off rated as
the second most-important benefit, just behind health care benefits;
SHRM had expected retirement benefits to place second.
This isn't to say that the under-thirty-fives are solely concerned
about quality time with the kids, however. This is a group that's
fiercely protective of personal time in general, Schramm says. They've
grown up with e-mail, the Internet, PDAs, cell phones, and now webcams
and wi-fi, so they're well aware how much work can be done outside an
office. They also are likely to have grown up with both parents working
demanding jobs that had to be balanced with family responsibilities, and
they don't seem too interested in replicating that juggling act.
Of course, this study wasn't about fatherhood, per se. Perhaps those
surveyed were mostly unmarried, childless lads who want their free time
for gaming on the Internet, home brewing, and biking. Once they settle
down, perhaps they'll have to give in to the same roles as today's
parents. But it's also possible that this generation is a transitional
one, just as our mothers' generation was for women who wanted out the
right to get of the house and earn their own cash.
* *
*
My friend David, the one who noted that few
men respect stay-at-home dads, used to be the CEO of an e-commerce
company that he founded. Back then, he felt constant guilt about
neglecting his family to focus on building the business, which took off
like a rocket. He's since left to start a second company, this time in a
partnership that works with multiple businesses on a part-time basis.
One benefit of this arrangement is a more flexible and slightly less
demanding work schedule, giving him more hours with his wife and
children. But, he says, "I often find myself in a malaise about what I'm
doing with my life from a career standpoint."
Sound familiar?
In many ways, forward-thinking men are where women were thirty or forty
years ago. "Imagine how hard it was for a woman to break out of her
gender role prior to the sixties," says David. "It's a bit easier for
women now because society in the U.S. has mostly accepted women in roles
other than parent/spouse/homemaker. But men are still back in the
fifties, where the acceptance [for roles other than breadwinner] is just
barely starting to exist."
So what's it going to take to even things out?
A bit of everything: legislation acknowledging the economic value of
stay-at-home parents, paid leaves of absence, pay equity, equal
promotion opportunities, the elimination of cultural stereotypes. You
know, your basic seismic ground shift.
But revolution begins at home, says Proud Dad's Hogan Hilling. Hilling
was one of several men I talked with who suggested that women are
ambivalent about, if not flat-out resistant to, sharing the caregiving
responsibilities. "Guys want to get more involved, but moms are by
nature overprotective. It discourages involvement," he says. This is the
hottest topic in his workshops right now, he adds.
Something more than overprotection may be going on here. Mothers may be
having a hard time ceding their authority on the home front. As
psychologist John Evans points out, if parents become equals at home but
men continue to rule the office roost, women won't have any place at all
to exercise power. As much as women say they want co-parenting, many are
frustrated by-- and perhaps afraid of--the possibility of not having a
place where they can be the boss. We've all seen scenes like this: A
father is fumbling with a crying baby, and the mother swoops in to pry
the child out of his arms. The scene may be different--a mother
questioning what the husband has packed in the diaper bag or served the
kids for lunch--but the bottom line is that the woman is asserting her
identity as the keeper of knowledge when it comes to the kids.
Getting Mom to be more hands-off at home is such a hot button for dads
that author Austin Murphy focuses more on that conflict than on actual
parenting in his recently released book, How Tough Could It Be?: The Trials and
Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-At-Home Dad (Henry Holt &
Co., 2004). Murphy chose to stay home with his kids for six months so
his wife could restart the career she abandoned when their first child
was born.
What kind of thanks did he get? Well, there was no card for him on Mother's Day, he notes. He
took this as a slight, he writes, his wife's way of telling him that he
hasn't earned it. "It was her way of saying . . . you may have deceived
some of our friends and people in the community, but when it's just us,
we both know that I'm still the sheriff in this house, still the
authority figure who remembers sunscreen and doesn't leave the kids
unattended in hotel rooms. To make some sort of fuss out of you on
Mother's Day would be to reward you for a level of competence you
haven't achieved."
(Of course, not all at-home dads lock horns with their spouses over the
right way to load the dishwasher. Peter Baylies, for one, the founder of
athomedad.com and editor of the At
Home Dad newsletter, says the book reads more like a "venting
tool" against Murphy's wife than a record of what it's like for a dad to
be the primary caregiver.)
To head off this kind of resentment, Hilling strongly recommends that
mothers let fathers learn to handle child care tasks on their own. "Not
color coordinating a child's wardrobe or putting a diaper on backwards
will not harm or kill a child," he says. "Moms need to recognize that
they also learned from their mistakes; it's just that there was nobody
there to point them out."
Some organizations traditionally run by women, such as the PTA and
Girls Scouts, are trying to be more receptive to fathers and are
actively pursuing their involvement. The New York State PTA has created
"Focus on Fathers," with the goal of having men comprise a quarter of
each PTA membership.
Still, Hilling argues that his local association in California isn't
father-friendly enough. For several years he tried to get the group to
recognize both a mother and a father with its annual Volunteer of the
Year awards. Initially, PTA board members told him they couldn't afford
to buy two plaques, then they complained that men didn't spend enough
time at the school to be recognized for their efforts. "I tried to
explain that dads are working, that just to come here may jeopardize a
dad's job," Hilling says. In 2001, the board handed out two awards,
including one to a stay-at-home dad, but since then has reverted to
giving a single award, always to a mother.
* *
*
Of course, except for that one mother, a
lot of parents' efforts go unrecognized. In fact, that lack of
recognition might be one of the defining characteristics of what used to
be called "women's work," the thankless tasks of nurturing children,
cleaning the house, and generally keeping the domestic machinery
well-oiled. Despite the lack of SAHDs, though, many things already have
changed, particularly in the smaller, subtle domestic details--like
who's shopping for the groceries.
When the first generation of women doctors earned their medical
degrees--taking on traditional "men's work"--they did so with pomp and
circumstance, in a black-robed graduation ceremony. Women CEOs are now
written about in the business sections of daily newspapers, and women
directors talk about their films in the national media. Women soldiers
are greeted home alongside their male counterparts. The women's
revolution happened in public.
If most men really do want to co-parent, and if this is indeed a
transitional generation, the revolution will likely not happen in
public. If and when co-parenting becomes widespread, it will probably
happen privately, like domestic work itself--behind the curtains,
household by household, with little fanfare but no less importance.
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About the author:
STACEY EVERS
is a contributing editor to Brain,
Child. She has been a journalist for twelve years. Her work has
appeared in the Washington Post,
the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and
the now-defunct Baltimore Evening Sun.
She lives in the Washington, D.C., suburbs with her husband Peter and
daughter Zoe.
For Peter and me, it
was easy to figure out how we'd divide the money-making and
child-rearing duties. He's maintained from the beginning that he doesn't
have the patience to stay at home and raise kids, and I've never had the
patience to sit in a cubicle and go to really awful staff meetings.
Still, we're both surprised sometimes at how traditional our arrangement
has turned out to be, even though it's what best suits our personalities.
art by Oliver Weiss
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