Fathers are changing the nature of families. I don’t give fathers any particular credit for this. I just maintain that it is true. Fathers are stepping up, and as they do their partners are stepping aside and letting them in.
I have watched these changes in my own life and in my own evolution as a father, and in families around me. The change isn’t universal. It is a work in progress.
I am a lucky man because I have had a couple of cracks at fatherhood. I am the father of three adult children, all of whom are busy getting themselves launched in the world, and a five-year-old daughter, who recently received her pre-school diploma. I have been in the parenting game so long I consider myself a wily veteran. I may not be as fast as I used to be, but from time to time I find myself at the right place at the right time.
My understanding of fatherhood and parenting, which emerged from a process of learning from my many mistakes, is far different than it was when I was a young father in my twenties. The simple conclusion I have reached today is that fathers and mothers are equally able to parent children in every way. Men are able to share in nurturing children and caring for a household on every level. None of the real work of parenting is gender specific, despite the ongoing myth making in the media and popular culture about gender roles in families.
There is a fascinating discussion underway about fatherhood at the New York Times blog called Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting. Motherlode is the online home of author Lisa Belkin, a contributing editor to the wonderful New York TImes magazine, where she has explored the subject of shared parenting in the past. In the run-up to Father’s Day, Belkin is interviewing author Jeremy Adam Smith, who has recently published a book called The Daddy Shift: How Stay at Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family. He also runs a blog called Daddy Dialectic, which began as a journal of his experience as a stay-at-home dad but is now a group blog about fatherhood and parenting.
The current discussion at Motherlode is about the changing roles of men and women in families, and among other things the difficulty men have in seeing a positive role for themselves in families. Jeremy Adam Smith told Belkin: “For decades, fathers have been told they’re worthless, or violent, or absent. Now guys are providing positive examples, to reflect what’s best in fatherhood back to men and boys. Perhaps as the process goes on, we will see more dads fight for public policies that will help them to be the fathers they want to be.
“You know, you can also see this change happening in mommy media. I write for Mothering magazine, and they have made a deliberate decision to start including fathers in their pages, in pictures and articles. Not because they’re shifting the focus away from moms — it’s still very much a magazine about the special issues moms face — but because they want to depict parenting as a cooperative activity, a partnership.”
In my recent book Bittersweet: Confessions of a Twice-Married Man, I wrote about the struggles of fathers and mothers of my generation to develop roles for themselves in family life. This co-operative activity, these partnerships, force us to leave behind the parenting role models of our youth and imagine new roles for ourselves in families. Parenting and the maintaining of household partnerships is a creative activity. Our ideas of what a loving and peaceful household should be are clouded and confused by the pervasive images of the 1950s nuclear family — the male breadwinner–female homemaker partnership of most of the families of our youth — even though this kind of household organization has been widely rejected by women and men and, in fact, is unsustainable for most families in the modern economy.
Women want to work, and need to work in most households, and yet they often feel guilty when they don’t stay home with the kids. Many men still tend to put their careers first, leaving household management and domestic chores to their wives, even though they claim to understand that marriage must be an equal partnership. I did all of this as a young father, even though I considered myself to be an involved parent, and I was – I just hadn’t taken it far enough.
When men step up and families change, they take responsibility for the project in its entirety. And families change when women demand this of their partners and let them in as equals. There is a level of gate-keeping that comes with the mother guilt. I don’t blame mothers for this, but we should acknowledge that it is there. Women and men don’t do certain things better by nature, but they often do things differently. In the end, however, the biggest change has to come from men. The other day, my wife told me: “I’m so glad you aren’t completely useless.” I took it as a compliment, because I am confident in my usefulness. Her reference was more to the men she sees in some households who are indeed completely useless.
The transformation in families, as Jeremy Adam Smith notes, is not only in households with stay-at-home Dads. This is the most visible and perhaps radical change, even though the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are women. I respect the stay-at-home parents, both women and men who make this choice. We have chosen not to do this with our five-year-old daughter. My wife wants to work and so do I. And our daughter has spent three years at a preschool where she has grown and learned and made wonderful friendships that I suspect and hope she will maintain in some cases all her life. I think it is important for parents to understand that whatever the roles we play in families, that from the moment we make the decision to be parents together, it is a shared parenting project from that moment forward. It should continue to be a shared parenting project no matter what happens to the marriage itself. (The degrading of fatherhood in the family law courts is another story altogether.) Parenting is a constant negotiation and renegotiation to determine what roles we will play as we move forward.
In Bittersweet, I wrote that the heart of the challenge is finding ways to adapt to change. In his book, The Age of Unreason, business management guru Charles Handy explores how technological change is transforming the working world. Handy makes a case for a new way of thinking about the way we work. He suggests to reinvent work we need a new word, and he suggests the word portfolio to describe the different kinds of work that we do that fit together to form a whole. For example, I spend part of my life teaching, part of my life writing, part of it organizing and running my department, and reading, and working at home. He argues that the same kind of portfolio thinking should be applied to modern marriages.
“Everyone will live a portfolio life for part of their lives,” Handy writes. “Most people will match that with a portfolio marriage. A portfolio marriage is not a recipe for polygamy, a different partner for each day or night, nor is it an invitation to serial monogamy, a sequence of husbands or wives. Rather it is a way of adjusting a marriage to the differing demands of a changing portfolio in life.” Marriages need to be constantly renegotiated. We need to be flexible, Handy writes, or we’ll break. “Too often, serial monogamy or a change in partner is the way many people match their need for a marriage with their need for change.”
In our household, I am about to begin a six-month sabbatical leave from teaching. My wife started a new job this winter. Yesterday, I baked bread in the evening while she worked on her online master’s degree course. She read our daughter her nightly story book; I rubbed her little back. Where is all this going? We’ll figure it out. Because in six months it won’t look like it does this morning, and wherever we land we need to be there together.
