Balancing fatherhood and career

Balancing Fatherhood And Career

You can hardly flip through a magazine without stumbling upon a story about a mother balancing career and family. And it only takes a spin or two of the channel selector to catch another TV report on the crisis in child care caused by increasing numbers of women in the work force. Where are the daddies in these stories? Do they just mail in their chromosomes between business meetings? Aren't there any fathers rushing from the changing table to the conference room with diaper wipes streaming from their pockets?

We are out here! We may be a demographic molehill, but a growing number of fathers are doing more than "pitching in." We are putting parenting ahead of work and sharing the burdens and joys of child care and housework.

It is not news that fathering has changed over the past generation or two, that today's father is more involved in child care than his father was. Over 80 percent of fathers are now present in the delivery room when their children are born, and the days of dads never changing diapers are mostly behind us. Now we know that real men can be caring dads.

But although the involved and nurturing father is becoming more visible and acceptable, he is still generally regarded as a helper in the world of child care and housekeeping. He pitches in. He helps when he wants to. Fathers are volunteer providers; mothers are the staff. The household with two "staff parents" is still rare, especially when it requires father to cut back on work.

TV commercials show fathers in business suits ducking out of conferences to attend their children's school plays, but we do not see them ducking out of work for the plain-old-vanilla caretaking of their children--the "quantity time" stuff. Support for father involvement in quantity time is growing in the work world with the speed of a glacier. Whereas employers may not allow a mother to work part-time, they do understand her reason for wanting to. However, a man who wants to work part-time in order to care for his children is looked on with suspicion, or at best, amusement.

Hollywood films, considered by some to be a harbinger of popular culture trends, also present the notion that it's OK to be a dad as long as it's temporary. Movies such as Three Men and a Baby and Mr. Mom depict men who have child-care duties thrust upon them. These fathers learn to cope with and even thrive on parenting, but in the end they are "rescued" by mom taking over the primary caretaker role so dad can fade into the background. The implication: Dad is OK as a pinch hitter, but he just doesn't have the stamina or desire for the long haul. His role is to be out earning money.

Sharing Child Care

My wife Laurie and I decided to share child care before we were married, before our son Sean was even the proverbial twinkle in my eye. From the beginning, we strove for a relationship based on equality, and we divvied up the household chores with only occasional squabbles. But parenting is more than a chore; it's a lifestyle. Cognizant that our partnership could become unbalanced once a baby came squealing into the world, we deliberated carefully about how we'd manage the juggling act ahead.

Neither of us wanted to stop working, nor did we want to miss out on this exciting period of newborn growth by being the full-time bringer-home-of-bacon--or, in our case, textured vegetable protein sausages. As our childbirth educator said, "Your job will be there later, your friends will be there later, your hobbies will be there later, but your baby will never be a baby again." Besides, when was the last time you heard a man on his deathbed say, "I wish I had spent more time at work"?

In the months before our son was born, we both went to our employers and negotiated a reduction in working hours. We were able to juggle our time so one of us could always be the primary caregiver. Our employers were supportive, allowing us the flexibility to work at home and not balking at our patchwork schedules.

So after the birth, I worked long hours two days a week while Laurie stayed home with Sean. On Tuesdays, I was home on the range. On Wednesdays and Fridays, we each worked a half day and spent the other half with Sean.

Fortunately, many variables came together for us. Because we both worked close to home--our commute time plus some overlap amounted to less than half an hour--we were able to manage half days. Laurie was also able to come home to breastfeed until Sean stopped nursing at 15 months. And because I was already doing some of my writing and design work at home before Sean was born, it was fairly simple to formalize five hours of at-home work into my schedule. In addition, we both took the baby to work on occasion, mostly to pick up messages or drop things off. Only in the first few months, when Sean's chief activity was sleeping, were we able to accomplish any real work with him in tow.

We managed this arrangement for 17 months and then suffered a temporary setback. A restructuring at my workplace and a promotion I never asked for sent me across the bay to San Francisco...full-time. Despite an impassioned speech about why I should maintain a flexible schedule, I found myself being a commuter dad, away from home 11 hours a day, five days a week. Laurie worked out shared-babysitting arrangements with two other mothers and called on her own mother to babysit once a week. Some weeks it worked, some weeks it didn't.

The changes in my work schedule provoked changes in Sean. He began clinging more to his mother. And on the one evening a week that I soloed, he would wander through the house baaing "Mama" like a lost sheep and stay awake until she returned around 10:00 pm.

After four months of full-time work--and a lot of grumbling--I found a flexible, 80-percent-time job as a publications coordinator. As the personnel manager put it, this company supports the principle that a person can be professional and still work part-time. Although our situation is tighter and less flexible than it was originally, we have recovered our sense of balance. My relationship with Sean has improved dramatically.

We've been lucky, yes, but the determining factor for our success has been asking for and looking for suitable work arrangements. Requests for flexible scheduling are unlikely to be considered unless there is a demand for it. Although part-time professional work, job sharing, and working-at-home situations are still scarce, they have nevertheless entered the vocabulary. According to proponents of alternative work arrangements, such as San Francisco-based New Ways to Work (see For More Information), the most successful route to a flexible situation is to create it yourself, and our experiences attest to that. For now, this is more easily accomplished by workers who have already established the trust and respect of their employers.

Our new arrangement is working well for the entire family. Sean is a good-natured, energetic, outgoing, secure child, who laughs more than he cries. When we are all at home, he sometimes wants his mama, and not me; but when Lauries is away, Sean and I have a great time together. This phenomenon is borne out by the work of psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, who finds that in "soloing," fathers fare best, because mothers are not around to invite comparisons.(1)

Sean's not the only one who is thriving. Laurie loves the balance of playing with the baby and taking him for walks in the mornings and then working on licensing contracts in the afternoons. And when people at work ask where the baby is, she feels good saying, "He's with his father." I also enjoy balancing the intellectual demands of work with the emotional demands of parenting. The slower pace of being with Sean gives me a fresh perspective on the worried, hurried pace of the working environment. And our quantity time together frees us from having to have an agenda: we hang out, take aimless walks, play on the swings, eat ice cream, or sit on the corner and watch cars and trucks go by--one of Sean's favorite activities.

Although Laurie and I continue to strive toward equality in our parenting, we realize that it has never been truly equal--partly because Laurie logs more hours with Sean, but mostly because of the strong biological attachment between mother and child. Among couples who are committed to true equality in child care, mothers tend to nurse for just a few months or not at all.(2) For us, the importance of breastfeeding took precedence over any ideological commitment. In the early months, when Sean nursed a lot, our division of duties was weighted toward me doing most of the household stuff and Laurie doing most of the baby stuff. As Sean grew older and began to nurse less, we adjusted our division of labor. We seem to be mirroring what Kyle Pruett, MD, calls the Jack Sprat theory of parenting: our contributions are not similar, but rather complementary.(3)

One way we keep current is by having "business meetings" on Friday evenings after Sean has gone to bed. This gives us a built-in opportunity to check in on how we are doing with our responsibilities as well as to synchronize calendars, schedule child care, balance the checking accounts, and so on.

The Trade-Offs

It is not all milk and honey, of course. Quantity time with Sean translates into a shortage of quantity time for his parents--for romance, for play, for sleep, and for keeping our living room from looking like the "before" picture in a miracle cleaner ad. We've also made sacrifices--but with our eyes wide open. We're renting a house instead of buying one. Career advancement is on idle. And although I know in my heart that nurturing a strong family is more important than having a deed on a house or a fat paycheck and an important title, it's tough to ignore all the people cruising by me on the fast track.

The careerism of the eighties and its squeezed-down timetable buzz at me like a mosquito in my ear. Not to have achieved a certain rung of success by the age of 35 is perceived as a failure. But what's the hurry? Here we are living longer than any preceding generation, and yet our collective energies are tied up in having it all now. I certainly hope to have it all, but in my lifetime, not in a week.

Actually, the career pressure has been of less concern than the lack of peers making similar choices. One of the questioning voices in my head has nagged, "If it's so right, how come more fathers aren't doing it?" I have often felt isolated as a father, a daddy lost in mommyland, especially on weekdays, when I find myself in a gym or on a playground filled with babies and their mothers.

Occasionally, when I'm tired and the dishes are piled high, or when Sean is hanging onto my pants as I scoop cottage cheese into a bowl for him, I think: "I'm doing what, a generation ago, my wife would have done without complaint. What if I had been born in an earlier era and Laurie were a more traditional wife and mother? Instead of changing Sean's diaper and feeding him and holding him when he's upset, I'd just bop in for some `I'm gonna get you's,' roll around on the floor, and then head down to the bowling alley with the guys..."

And be a full-time provider. And have less in common with my wife. And have to improve my bowling.

The "Mr. Mom" portrait of men as fathers--bathrobed, humiliated househusbands sulking behind their vacuum cleaners while mom cuts multimillion dollar deals in her dress-for-success costume--is way off the mark. Men should feel good about taking care of children. The problem is that the work is devalued. Any mother knows that; it comes with the territory. But men are not used to walking these roads.(4)

When Sean was younger, one of my recurrent concerns was receiving the recognition I felt I deserved. I was waiting for the Congressional Medal of Honor to arrive in the mail, or my picture to appear on the cover of Time magazine, all for doing half as much as Laurie, for doing part-time for a year what millions of mothers do full-time for 20 years. What I did not realize at the time was that every engaged parent deserves recognition and that, as a man, I needed to unlearn the reward mentality of work.

Ehrensaft notes that men have been getting attention recently for their parenting. "We know full well that with all the recognition given to babies on men's laps and the visibility of fathers and children on Sunday strolls, the percentage of men and women who genuinely share the tasks of parenting is quite small. But the fact that such a practice is increasingly lauded rather than condemned is a large victory, one that will make it decidedly easier to receive social support for this new family style."(5)

She also notes that much of the renewed interest in flextime, on-site child care, and parental leave is due more to men's increased role in child care than to additional women in the work force. "Women have been in the work force for a long time. It is only recently that the influx of career men into involved fathering has occurred. As the attention has zoomed in on men involved with their children and as men have made more noises concerning its effects on their work and family lives, so American industry and government have given increased attention to the needs of working `parents.' As in many other spheres, only when the more powerful male gender is affected is a social problem given public recognition."(6)

Both my need for recognition and my feelings of isolation have faded as Sean has grown older. So, too, have the voices in my head that challenge our decision to share child care. Sean, in his wonderful, preverbal way, tells me to listen to that deep-down-inside feeling that wants to be a daddy first and a guy with a job second. An ambassador of delight, he points his little fingers at strangers, at cars and sunflowers and dogs, babbling and giggling and infecting me with his joie de vivre.

When I was a child, no boy ever said he wanted to grow up to be a father. Hopefully, that is changing. Perhaps when Sean and other boys of his generation start thinking about what they want to be, some will decide to be fathers. And perhaps, if and when they do become fathers and ask their employers for a reduced schedule in order to care for their children, they will be met with a knowing smile. Perhaps some of them will be the employers with the knowing smile.

By then, we will be further along into what Betty Friedan calls the "second stage of feminism"--when men assume a larger role in child care, when men's desires for self-fulfillment beyond their jobs meet women's struggles for alife outside the home, and when these two forces combine to achieve an equitable balance between the sexes and between work and home responsibilities.(7) By then, society will hopefully have learned to support these new roles. We will know we have made it when Gentlemen's Quarterly starts featuring models with diaper pins as tie clasps.

Notes (1.)Diane Ehrensaft, Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharing the Care of Their Children (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 75. (2.)Ibid., p. 45. (3.)Kyle Pruett, MD, The Nurturing Father: Journey toward the Complete Man (New York: Warner Books, 1987). (4.)James A. Levine, writing over 12 years ago in Who Will Raise the Children? New Options for Fathers (and Mothers) (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1976), describes the doubt, skepticism, and rejection that a man can encounter when he takes on some of what has been traditionally viewed as female responsibility: "A non-traditional family structure presents by its very existence a questioning of the norm, and evokes strong feelings." (Italics mine.) (5.)See Note 1, p. 252. (6.)See Note 1, p. 260. (7.)Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit Books, 1981).

COPYRIGHT 1989 Mothering Magazine
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