Have Families Become More Resilient?

I am spending today at Design 4 Resilience at the Berkeley Hub (watch the livestreaming here)—and so I’m thinking a lot about resilience. Specifically, family resilience.

My book The Daddy Shift is about how families have evolved so that both moms and dads have capacities for both breadwinning and caregiving. This is a radical departure in the history of the American family, where men traditionally specialized in providing and women specialized in care.

As a result, men had lots of economic and political power and women had relatively little; women developed powerful communication and emotional skills while men’s development in these areas was stunted. (Naturally, the full picture is more complicated than that…but you’ll just have to read the book if you want to understand more.) If a father died or abandoned his family, his wife and children would fall into poverty; if the mother disappeared, the children would quite often be separated from the father, to be cared for by female relatives or, in certain cases, an orphanage.

We’ve tended to view the rise of women’s public power through a profeminist lens—in other words, through the lens of fairness and equality for women. This is the lens I use in The Daddy Shift. However, in the course of my research I discovered that there is another lens through which we can view the recent evolution of the American family, that of resilience.

When reporters ask me why stay-at-home dads have emerged over the past two decades, I always reply that a) women went to work; and b) lifetime employment went away. The former trend reinforced the latter. Employers feel no loyalty to employees; in fact, disloyalty is rewarded—when companies lay off employees or managers fire people deemed nonperformers (e.g., a new mother putting in too much “facetime” at home and not enough at work), their value in the marketplace can rise. My grandfather had the same job for forty years, driving a crane at a quarry; over the past eighteen years of my working life, I have had more jobs than I can count, including two stints as a freelancer. We Americans now live in a culture of mobile, mercenary instability, and many of us are proud of it.

As a result of this growing mobility and instability, sole male breadwinners lost a tremendous amount of economic ground; today, for the first time in Western history, women as a group are more educated than men and women are on the verge of passing men in the workforce. Men lost the ability to reliably support families. And families, I discovered, have responded by diversifying. Men have developed emotional and interpersonal skills; women have gone to school and to work.

You can see this illustrated in Corbyn Hightower’s Shareable.net diary of her family’s efforts to survive the Great Recession. Corbyn and her husband started off as a dual-income family; her husband became a stay-at-home dad after their third child was born. Then Corbyn was laid off and her husband went back to work, albeit at a low-paying job.

This is a family facing a terrible economic crisis, but Corbyn’s diary simultaneously reveals a tremendous amount of stubborn resilience. Theirs is a family that embodies many of the characteristics of resilient systems, from redundancy to flexibility to transformability. You can also see this dynamic at work in the two-decade story of Anita and Brad, which Shareable.net published on Thursday. These resilient characteristics are not confined to Blue State families; as I document in The Daddy Shift, religious, conservative families are also adopting flexible gender roles.

So far, I’ve talked about family resilience in the context of the lone American families; mothers and fathers in isolation, modifying their nuclear family structure in order to cope with economic shock. But some families are also responding by trying to embed their nuclear unit in larger communities—extended family or urban tribes. In fact, Corbyn’s family moved from Texas to California to be close to the co-mother of her first child (Corbyn is bisexual)—in effect, the family now has three parents, which some research suggests is the ideal number of caregivers.

Like the growth of family egalitarianism and diversity, this is a phenomenon that crosses political boundaries—cultural conservatives have built church, family, and neighborhood networks to nurture their idea of the traditional family while Blue State progressives have engaged in secular versions of the same project.

In this regard, families, both Red and Blue, are trying to build their resilience to trying to rebuild much older family forms that are more networked, more modular, more redundant, more diversified, more shareable.

But the history behind these efforts is extremely problematic. The “traditional family” imagined by conservatives is oppressively patriarchal—it is other things as well, but in general the traditional family movement is focused on putting heterosexual men at the top of a familial, social, and economic pyramid.

More politically left-wing and communal efforts to reshape the family have been equally screwed up. As I write in The Daddy Shift:

Take the kibbutz movement. Early Jewish settlers in Palestine made children a communal responsibility. Babies slept outside the home, side by side in dormitories.

“This experiment failed the test of reality,” writes Israeli sleep researcher Avi Sadeh. In a study that compared a kibbutz that still kept this “children’s house” sleeping arrangement with other kibbutzim in which babies and young children slept in their parents’ homes, researchers found that “children who slept in their parents’ houses tended to have longer continuous periods of sleep than those in communal sleeping situations on the kibbutz.” They also found “that the kibbutz children’s sleep improved greatly after moving to family sleeping arrangement.” As a result of this dynamic, kibbutz children’s houses declined and have almost disappeared.

Despite such failures, explicitly utopian experiments persist today: in a 2006 New York magazine article, Annalee Newitz profiles a one-hundred-person commune on Staten Island....

“Our cars are a perfect example of socialism,” says a founder. “Nobody owns them, so we treat them like shit.” If children are defined as a collective responsibility, will they be treated like cars on a commune?

Movements to reshape the family along communal lines—which quite often sought to separate children from biological or adopted parents (largely on feminist grounds)—missed something important, something that decades of psychological research have established beyond a shadow of a doubt: children need to feel safe and protected by their caregivers, and that is what builds their resilience, their ability to overcome challenges and bounce back from disasters. Secure attachments to parents give kids a model for caring relationships that they can later apply in adulthood.

To many people, this will sound like common sense, but "common sense" is a construction, not a given. Many of us have reached a place where people (both academics and regular folks, using different languages), are acknowledging the importance of both the parent-child bond and of extended networks to fostering resilient families, along egalitarian lines. But as I write, this is a theory for most people, not a reality. Establishing psychological attachment and egalitarian relationships is hard, but achievable within individual lives; re-designing our environment so that men and women are more equal and families are more networked and nurtured is, to say the least, a much longer-term process.

A few weeks ago, I was discussing the ideas of robot designer Rodney Brooks with the science-fiction novelist Paolo Bacigalupi: Brooks argues that resilient robotic systems are small, fast, networked, and numerous, individually dumb but collectively smart. I told Paolo that this is an interesting model for how humans are facing social change right now, each one of us groping across a strange landscape, each of us discovering a piece and communicating what we are learning through the Internet.

“Yes,” Paolo replied, “but you have to get the human robots to care about each other.”

Robots can be programmed to “care,” in the sense that you can create communication protocols for them. Humans learn to care, developing a theory of mind and a sense of empathy as they grow. Designer George Kembel, I just learned here at Design 4 Resilience, has argued that empathy, which he defines as the ability to perceive and meet latent needs, is an essential building block for resilience (see video at bottom).

But it seems to me that resilience thinkers rarely stress this critical idea. Can we design our society so that we are more likely to care about each other? I think so. But no master designer will be able to do it. This is a design that we collaboratively create as we go, through an accumulation of acts and decisions. You can start right now.

Originally published today on Shareable.net.

And the winner is...

Back in June, I invited Daddy Dialectic readers to help me think of a new title for my book. Many of the suggestions were good, or at least fun, but none of them ultimately made the short list.

This past week we (meaning, me and Beacon Press) finally settled on a new title: The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Fathers, Breadwinning Mothers, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the Twenty-First-Century Family.

What is the daddy shift? It's the gradual movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure breadwinning to one that encompasses capacities for both breadwinning and caregiving. You'll be able to read all about it on Father's Day 2009.

Help me find a new title!

I finished my book, formerly called "Twenty-First-Century Dad: How Stay-at-Home Fathers (and Breadwinning Moms) are Transforming the American Family." I turned it in to my editor at Beacon. He gave it to the other editors and business people at Beacon. They laughed at the title.

OK, maybe they didn't laugh. I wasn't there. But they do want to change it to something that is either more catchy or more specific, preferably both. I'm having a bit of trouble picking a new one, and so I turn to you, blog readers, for feedback and suggestions. Consider yourselves a kind of focus group.

The new subtitle will be something along these lines: "How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the Twenty-First-Century Family"--with certain words changed depending on what the title ultimately becomes.

As for the main title, here's what I've come up with so far (in order of my current preference). Imagine yourself browsing in the parenting section of a bookstore. Which one would you pick up?

Father Nurture

The Daddy Dialectic

Beyond Breadwinning

When Dads Stay Home

Full-Time Father

A Father’s Work (as in, "is never done...")

The Birth of Stay-at-Home Fatherhood

Dad Redefined

Half the Work

Dad’s Turn

At-Home Dad

Dads at Home

But if you like "Twenty-First-Century Dad" best, say so. I can take your comments to Beacon as evidence that someone out there likes that title.

You can learn more about the book here. I'd love to hear other suggestions. In fact, I'll give a free copy to whomever thinks of a winning title.

Incidentally, the Beacon business people are not the first to criticize the title. At the Mesa Writers' Refuge, I had the following conversation with a Very Famous Writer (VFW):

VFW: Twenty-First-Century Dad is a terrible title. I wouldn't read that.

Me: Do you have any suggestions?

(Thinks for a minute, chin resting on knuckles.)

VFW: I got it! You should call the book Mr. Mom!

(He's smiling broadly; he believes that he has just saved my book from obscurity.)

Me: Um, a lot of stay-at-home dads don't like the term Mr. Mom.

VFW: Fine. You can call it, Don't Call Me Mr. Mom! I would read that!

Are moms responsible?

Evolution of a Dad writes:

I've mentioned Jessica DeGroot from The Third Path Institute in these annals before and here I am doing so once again... We had been discussing some of the factors that help dads get more involved with their families. Here's #1 on her list:

"I think the number one reason men in professional jobs get more involved with family is because of the mother's attitude - for some reason she feels very strongly about having the dad involved."

Jessica's assessment seems to cut to the core of the issue. If moms really want dads to get more involved with the family then they have to be not only willing to give up some of the power in their 'separate sphere' of the home, but they must expect that involvement. If this expectation isn't there then the likelihood, especially given the current attitude of most companies, is that most dads will fall back into the traditional role of detached breadwinner.

This is a very controversial idea in many circles—so controversial, that I am taking the unusual step (for a blog entry!) of providing endnotes citing research in order to support the case I'm about to make. When some people hear that "the mother's attitude" plays a big role in determining father involvement, they think it means that we are “blaming the victim”—that is, blaming mothers for the disproportionate share of childrearing that they do.

But this assumes that most mothers see childcare primarily as a burden or see themselves as victims. In fact, they tend to see mothering as valuable and desirable and intrinsic to their identity,[i] though it goes without saying that childcare can indeed be a heavy weight to carry alone. Many studies have shown that relationship satisfaction falls catastrophically when the father doesn’t hold up his end,[ii] as well it should.

That said, a great deal of empirical research shows that the gender ideology of the mother matters quite a bit in shaping a father’s caregiving activities, and that ideology often stereotypes fathers as incompetent caregivers. By and large in our culture today, mothers are still the “gatekeepers”—that is, they control access to, and management of, children. They let men in and they can keep men out. This finding doesn’t apply to every couple, of course—it didn’t come up as a significant issue for any of the couples I interviewed for my book, and it doesn’t apply to my own family—but gatekeeping is extensively documented and replicated in the research literature.[iii]

Of course, gatekeeping behavior is not evenly distributed throughout womankind; it depends heavily on cultural values and beliefs about the bodies of mother and fathers. “If the mother believes that moms are more biologically suited for rearing children, gatekeeping goes up,” says Ross Parke, the University of California, Riverside, psychologist and pioneering parenthood researcher.

Insight about the relationship between gender stereotyping and gatekeeping behavior feeds into a tremendous amount of research about the social impact of how gender is framed.

For example, one University of British Columbia study in 2006 found that telling women that their gender will affect their individual math achievement causes their test scores to go down. “The findings suggest that people tend to accept genetic explanations as if they’re more powerful or irrevocable, which can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies,” says investigator Steven Heine, echoing Parke.

This phenomenon—which psychologist Claude Steele and colleagues call “stereotype threat”—has been widely duplicated in other lab experiments, and has been found to affect racial minorities as well.

“Lift this stereotype threat, and group differences in performance disappear,” says University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton.[iv] “Whether one is an older person learning how to operate a computer, a woman learning a new scientific procedure, or a father learning to feed a baby, negative stereotypes can hurt performance in ways that seem to confirm these very stereotypes.”

Mendoza-Denton’s own research has shown that “notions about innate ability don’t just hinder the performance of negatively stereotyped groups—it’s worse than that. They actually boost the performance of positively stereotyped groups.”

So while belief that abilities are determined by biological identity can increase anxiety among negatively stereotyped groups, Mendoza-Denton argues “it reduces anxiety among positively stereotyped groups by reassuring them that their group membership guarantees high ability. So stereotypic views of fixed ability not only perpetuate achievement gaps—they exacerbate them.”

In his 2003 book The Essential Difference, psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a very convincing case that empathizing defines what he chooses to call “the female brain” and systemizing defines “the male brain.” But Baron-Cohen cautions against misapplying his argument: He is not talking about all men and all women, “just about the average female, compared to the average male.”

However, research by Mendoza-Denton and others reveals that Baron-Cohen’s argument faces a real problem: His samples are spoiled by deeply held stereotypes, positive and negative, that affect performance—not only stereotypes, but differences in power between groups that are related to differences in education, income, and wealth. Does that mean there are no differences between men and women? No. But we are a long, long, long way from having an accurate picture of the roots of those differences.

Neither Mendoza-Denton nor I know of a study that specifically tests for stereotype threat against stay-at-home dads, but, based on interviews with the dads themselves, there can be little question that affects men’s caregiving behavior.

“Fathers face the stereotype of being cavemen when it comes to children,” says Mendoza-Denton. “The problem for dads is that given negative stereotypes, whichever strategy they choose is likely to be more easily labeled as wrong precisely because it is dad is doing it, and those who disagree with the strategy may feel more justified expressing disapproval because of dad’s gender.”

We are accustomed—much too accustomed—to thinking of women as the victims, but when it comes to taking care of children, it is men who are entering a female domain and confronting stereotypes that can hinder them in sneaky ways. There is obviously something to be gained from positively stereotyping women as great caregivers—but in the twenty-first century, is there anything to be gained by stereotyping fathers as incompetent caregivers?

The good news is that this is changing in a big way--the culture of parenthood is shifting so that more and more mothers are validating male caregiving and welcoming them into the club. Peggy O'Mara, editor of Mothering magazine, has a quietly courageous editorial (well worth a read) in the current issue that acknowledges this shift and how it is affecting the magazine's editorial direction:

There is a new generation of fathers who are not second-class parents to their wives. They are fully present and know what to do. Just like mothers, they have to figure things out for themselves and learn from their mistakes, but more of them than ever are willing to show up and get involved.

In my generation there were only a few such daddies, and in my mother's, even fewer. When my husband and I led workshops at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in the early 1980s, the fathers would sometimes look as if they'd been dragged to the event by their wives. By the '90s, they were attending on their own accord, and in this new century, daddies have found their voices.

This is not to say that, all along, fathers have not been loving and supportive. Of course they have—but their role was usually more narrowly defined than it is now. Fathers of this new generation want to be more actively involved in the life of the home and the care of their children. Many are primary caretakers, and proud of that role.

I began to understand what I'd been missing... when I spoke with another young father, Paul Newman, at the recent Natural Products Expo West. He told me a story about a mothers' group that his wife belongs to. One night, she couldn't attend, and suggested that he go in her stead. He was the only dad at the meeting, and he told the mothers how hard it was for him to go to work every day and leave his children, and how much he missed them. We both got teary-eyed as we spoke, and wondered that so much of a father's experience is unarticulated in our culture.

As I listened to Paul's story, it occurred to me that this was an intimate conversation. While women have a habit and history of gathering to talk about their experiences, these kinds of conversations are not their exclusive domain. And even though its name suggests otherwise, Mothering really is an intimate conversation among mothers and fathers. (Our readers' surveys indicate that fathers read the magazine as much as mothers do.) This intimate conversation is defined not by gender, but by commonality of experience and depth of inquiry.

I told Paul that I was coming to realize how much we unintentionally glorify the image of "woman alone" in the magazine. I personally am inspired by the image of the Madonna, and have pictures and statues of her all over the Mothering office. Now, however, it occurred to me that nearly all of those pictures and statues depict a woman alone with her baby. Aside from a sculpture of mother, father, and baby on my desk, most of the other artwork in the office begs the question: "Where's Joseph?" No wonder we think we're superwomen.

So where does that leave us? In transition. Changes in motherhood (e.g., women going to work) triggered changes in fatherhood (e.g., more caregiving) which are now triggering more changes in motherhood. Mothering magazine is retooling editorially to show fathers as integral to parenting--they are adding blogs, including one I'll be writing for them called "Fathering," as well as new departments, articles, and images that include dads. This reflects a wider change in our culture, one that I welcome. The day is coming when mothers and fathers can co-parent on an equal basis, and no parent has to ask the other one for permission to hold a child.

---

[i] “Doing family work is a way to validate a mothering identity externally as it is the primary source of self-esteem and satisfaction for many women,” but that “does not automatically mean that they are inhibiting more collaborative arrangements of family work.” Sarah M. Allen and Alan J. Hawkins, “Mothers’ Beliefs and Behaviors That Inhibit Greater Father Involvement in Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61, (1999): 204. For many insightful personal observations about mothering as a source of identity and self-worth, see Daphne de Marneffe, Maternal Desire (New York, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2004), passim.

[ii] For an overview of this research, see Scott Coltrane, “What About Fathers?” American Prospect, March 2007, 20-22.

[iii] See the following studies for examples: Sarah M. Allen and Alan J. Hawkins, “Mothers’ Beliefs and Behaviors That Inhibit Greater Father Involvement in Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61 (1999): 199-212; Naomi Gerstel and Sally K. Gallagher, “Male Caregiving,” Gender and Society, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 2001): 197-217. For observations and insights into the relationship between stay-at-home fatherhood and maternal gatekeeping, see Andrea Doucet, Do Men Mother? (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 229-232. Like me, Doucet also finds that mothers in reverse-traditional families did not appear to exhibit gatekeeping behaviors, although she found that quality of housework remains “a sensitive issue.”

[iv] The statements from Parke and Mendoza-Denton are taken from interviews with me.

Joey's Story: Somebody There

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the past year, I have periodically posted sketches of the families based on interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Joey and Angela Fernandez, who live in San Francisco's Mission district. Their last name has been changed.

Joey Fernandez was raised in San Francisco’s Mission district by Mexican-born parents. There’s little in his upbringing—which sounds tough, at least to my ears—that suggests Joey might have one day become a caregiving father. He was beaten, sometimes with belts or cords, for disobedience, and his father was the indisputable head of house.

But he says that most of his friends did not have fathers at all—they were dead, deported, jailed, or just out of the picture—and Joey loved, idolized, and feared his dad. “I had somebody there,” he says, “who was going to be there for me, that we could look up to, where the buck stopped." But when Joey was 16, his father was killed in a car crash. Today, Joey remembers him as "a great father."

Joey—who was once my neighbor in the Mission, and is still my friend—grew up to be a strong, handsome, and good-hearted man. He tends a bar while his wife Angela works as a waitress and dance teacher.

After their first child, Julius, was born, Joey wanted more than anything to be a part of his son’s life—and, unlike his father, he recognized that his wife’s work was important to her. Her dance teaching, especially, gave her a creative and social outlet, not to mention income.

And so instead of seeking full-time work, as most fathers do, Joey cut back on his hours so that Angela could keep her two jobs and they could share child care. This arrangement persisted after their second child was born, with each continuing to work complimentary shifts.

Their story illustrates a great deal of research into Latino families. When University of California, Riverside, sociologists Ross Parke and Scott Coltrane conducted a five-year longitudinal study of how Latino and Anglo families in Riverside cope with economic stress, they found that Latino families are often willing to accept much higher levels of material deprivation in exchange for time with children.

Parke, Coltrane, and their colleague Thomas Schofield discovered that the decision is based more on an anti-materialistic ideology of family togetherness (which academics call familialism) than it was on an ideology of male supremacy. In fact, contrary to stereotype, their study found that today's generation of Mexican-American fathers tend to be significantly more involved with children (though not necessarily housework) than their Anglo-American counterparts.

“I do the housework but he also helps,” one Mexican–American mother told Texas Tech University researcher Yvonne Caldrera in another study. “I go to work at 6 in the evening and from there on he's in charge of the house. He feeds the children dinner and he leaves the kitchen clean for me.”

Joey does leave much of the housework to his wife, but he is a highly involved, caregiving father. “Before he was born, the plan was that we would do as much of the parenting ourselves,” says Angela. “We didn’t even look into child care. Unless you’re making tons of money at work, it’s not worth it.” They both make it clear that staying home with their kids was not an economic decision. “The most important thing was that we wanted to be the ones to raise our kids,” says Joey.

But for Joey, parenting is not a vehicle for emotional growth. “We gain something, but parenting’s not really for our personal gain. It’s for them.” And yet Angela notes that since he started caring for his kids, Joey has become a more patient and thoughtful guy. “Now that he has to think about what children need, he’s much better about time management and being prepared,” she says. “He thinks about other people.”

One Utopia

In my ideal world, mothers, rich and poor, will be able to take at least the first year of their child's life off of work. Affluent mothers will have their professional jobs held for them. Lower income mothers will receive state support.

At the end of the first year, it will be dad's turn. The transition will be marked with a rite of passage. There will be a party at the office; that night, the dad's buddies will throw him a celebration that very much resembles a bachelor's party. Beer and liquor will flow, joints will be smoked, and ribald jokes will be told.

The next morning, Dad will wake up to a new life. His partner will go back to work and he will be alone with the baby. His life will be hard at first; no utopia can ease the passage to full-time parenthood. He'll struggle with juggling a hundred tasks and losing time for himself. He'll start out as an incompetent slob, like most new parents, but he will learn.

In this utopia, he won't be lonely. The playgrounds will have at least as many dads as moms. Their will be playgroups, support groups, and places for him to go if he really needs help. Relatives will provide what support they can, and no one will give him a hard time: In fact, the stage of his caregiving will be validated and valorized.

In this egalitarian utopia, parents might still sort themselves according to gender. Some moms will prefer to hang with moms, some dads will want male company, but there will also be mixed-gender groups of parents who aren't that hung up on sexual differences--groups that will almost certainly include many gay and lesbian parents. There will be flirting: sex and sexual difference will not disappear, only inequality based on differences. People will just have to deal with it.

At the same time, Mom will also get the support she needs as new breadwinner. She'll be welcomed back to the office with a reverse rite of passage, and there will be procedures in place to help her get up to speed. Just as her partner is struggling with his new role, she will probably struggle with feelings of guilt and separation. Her need for flexibility will be informally understood by colleagues and formally supported by a combination of workplace and government policy. Violations will occur, but in this utopia, the state will be on the side of parents, not employers.

This will be equally true for men: policies will be gender neutral and defined by an understanding that both parents will serve as caregivers at some point, and the working parent ought to make time for children and provide support to partners who are currently caregiving. Of course, many couples will prefer to split paid work and childcare fifty-fifty from the beginning. Others will prefer more traditional and reverse-traditional arrangements where one parent specializes, especially when they have more than one child. Choice and negotiation will define a world where the division of labor is not gendered.

No utopia can guarantee a happy partnership. Some relationships will decline and dissolve. But in this world, fathers will rarely abandon their children, because they will have developed a deep attachment during the year or two in which they served as primary caregivers. Mothers will not be condemned to poverty by divorce. In a context of gender equality, the post-divorce couple will be able to build new, cooperative relationship as co-parents. New families will form, and be understood as a kind of extended family.

Girls will be raised to one day serve as breadwinners as well as caregivers. Boys will be psychologically and practically prepared to one day take care of children. Even so, individual preferences and proclivities will emerge. As these girls and boys grow up and start dating and contemplate parenthood, the division of labor will be negotiated, not imposed.

What do you think? Would you want to live in this world?

Alone Together

Is marriage dying, or is it just evolving?

Four Pennsylvania State University sociologists used two national surveys, one conducted in 1980 and the other in 2000, to quantitatively track how the experience of marriage has changed over a 20-year period. In both surveys, 2,000 randomly selected couples were asked an identical set of questions about their happiness, household division of labor, social lives, gender roles and attitudes, values, and more.

The results, just published in Alone Together: How Marriage in America is Changing, are fascinating. This is an academic book with lots of graphs and numbers, but it's well worth a read for anyone who really wants to understand the meaning and status of marriage these days--and, actually, as academic books go, it's fairly readable.

On the negative side, couples are spending less time together eating meals, visiting friends, and working around the home. Plus, today’s husbands and wives were far more likely to report that their jobs interfered with family life. This confirms the impression, voiced by many social critics and researchers and bloggers, that today’s families are more harried and isolated than those in the past.

Meanwhile, however, marital problems and conflict steeply declined—-reports of domestic violence for both sexes tumbled from around 21 percent in 1980 to 12 percent in 2000, which is consistent with crime data during the same period. (The authors attribute this good news to public education campaigns against domestic violence, as well as increased likelihood that abusers will be arrested and punished.) Overall, husbands and wives in 2000 reported less anger, hurt feelings, jealousy, and domineering behavior in their marriages than did their counterparts in 1980.

But surprisingly, none of these improvements seemed to increase the happiness of the couples. According to the surveys, both husbands and wives are just as happy with their marriages today as they were in 1980.

I asked lead author Paul R. Amato why this should be the case. "We know that people's expectations for marriage have been increasing for many years," he told me. "So the fact that there is less violence and fewer relationship problems is what people expect. If there had not been a decline in violence or other relationship problems, then marital happiness probably would have declined rather than stayed the same."

Twenty-first-century married couples are “older, better educated, and more diverse than at any previous time in U.S. history,” write the authors. Because so many women are working, egalitarian attitudes and a fair division of labor are critical to today’s happiest marriages. “The most successful marriages,” they conclude, “combine gender equality, two incomes, shared social ties, and a strong commitment to marital permanence.”

But what about families that don’t fit that mold?

"We can speak only in averages," Amato said. "Many couples who don't fit the above description still have successful marriages. One of the implications of the 'deinstitutionalizaiton of marriage,' which we discuss in the book, is that couples are free to design their own relationships in a way that wasn't possible in the past, when social norms, laws, and religion had more influence on marriage."

Conservatives argue that marriage is dying, threatened by a nefarious combination of feminism, gay rights, and secular humanism. But I think research like this confirms that it's traditional gender attitudes, not marriages, that are dying.

To me, that's something to celebrate.

[This is based on a shorter piece I wrote for Greater Good magazine.]

The 21st Century Family

The Fall 2007 issue of Greater Good magazine is out, featuring essays by historian Stephanie Coontz on the rise of the new family, sociologists Ross Parke and Scott Coltrane on lessons from Latino families, psychotherapist Ruth Bettelheim on binuclear families, sociologist Constance Ahrons on tips for a better divorce, writer Amie K. Miller on recent research into the well-being of children in same-sex families, and me, writing about how today's diverse families overcome social isolation.

And a reminder for Bay Area residents: On Wednesday, October 17, we're holding an event to celebrate our new issue, featuring Stephanie Coontz, psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan, and psychotherapist Joshua Coleman. I'll be moderating. The panel will start at 3 pm at the Lipman Room on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, located off of Bancroft Way at Barrow Lane and Eshleman Road, on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus. Click here for a map, parking information, and directions to the Lipman Room.

The Way We Were vs. The Way We Are

This photo depicts the J. Bates home in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 1800s. Note the size of the family and the size of the porch they share. Families of this period were large, both because extended family stayed together and because children were still an economic necessity: more of them meant more hands to work in farms and shopfloors. Fathers and sons often worked side by side, and so did mothers and daughters. The economic and domestic were not separate spheres; though in the process of being eclipsed by large-scale enterprise, at this time the home economy was still America's fundamental economic unit.

As a consequence, marriage was primarily a business decision--as it had been throughout the world for thousands of years. For the lower, middle, and upper classes, people had little choice about whom to marry. Once married, they could divorce only in special or extreme circumstances. Fathers were the undisputed heads and masters of households, by both law and custom. Marital rape and wife-beating were, in most cases, perfectly legal.

Another thing to note about the J. Bates family: it is monoracial and was almost certainly monocultural. Though interracial marriage was more common than we might suppose--see Randall Kennedy's 2003 Interracial Intimacies--it was still widely condemned and illegal in many states. Nineteenth century families had more in common with previous generations than they might have with families today, but society was changing. The family as an economic unit declined; as a consequence, love rose in importance. Young people began to feel that when love dissolved, so should the marriage. Between 1880 and 1890 the divorce rate soared 70 percent.


Throughout the first half of the 20th century, people left farms and small towns for cities. Extended families fragmented and the nuclear family emerged as the dominant family form. Children became more of an economic liability than an asset; as a result, sentimental attachment to them intensified. As the century wore on, child labor was abolished and universal schooling was made mandatory. Government programs like the GI Bill educated millions of American men and increased their social mobility.

By the middle of the century, postwar prosperity made the male breadwinner and female homemaker family possible. Most men worked in offices and factories far from home; they did not take care of children. The vast majority of mothers did not work and raised kids far from from extended family. Thus mothers were isolated and many children grew up without fathers, grandparents, aunts, or uncles as stable, regular presences. By the late 1950s, middle-class women--and their children--started to rebel against isolated, retricted lives. "It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male breadwinner marriage," writes family historian Stephanie Coontz. "It took less than 25 years to dismantle it."


At the beginning of the 21st century, families are egalitarian, diverse, isolated, and voluntary. Where once there was no choice at all, today we have too many choices. Take a look at this 2004 photo of Brian Brantner and Matt Fuller holding their 2-month-old adopted daughter, Audrey, in San Francisco. Their family could not have co-existed with the J. Bates family in 19th century Minnesota. The gay family is, in fact, something totally new under the sun, blossoming side by side with stepfamilies, female breadwinner/male homemaker families, multiracial families, and so on. Today, only 7 percent of families fit the 1950s mold of breadwinning father and homemaking mother.

At the same time, the American economy is far less stable and social mobility has declined dramatically; class barriers are much more rigid than they are anywhere else in the developed world. This means that family is more important than ever in determining a child's chances in life. Poor children are falling behind richer counterparts, a process that starts before they even enter school. Educated parents are investing large amounts of time and money in their small number of offspring; both husbands and wives are spending more time with kids and at work, and less time with each other or in the community, which puts tremendous strain on love-based marriages.

Surveying decades of research, the sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen writes, "What is now becoming clear is that the seeds of inequality are sown prior to school age on a host of crucial attributes such as health, cognitive and noncognitive abilities, motivation to learn, and, more generally, school preparedness." As marriages become more egalitarian, society becomes less so. We should celebrate the gains made in women's economic empowerment and male participation in domestic labor. At the same time, we should do what we can to resist rising inequality and social under-development.



Most of the photos above illustrate an article by Stephanie Coontz that will appear in the September issue of Greater Good magazine, which will focus on the relationship between the diversification of family types and the well-being of parents and children. I'm happy to provide a free copy to any blogger who promises to write about the issue. Send me an email at jeremyadamsmith (at) mac.com.

Axel’s Story: Alone and together

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Axel and Lex, who live in San Francisco's Noe Valley. Some names have been changed. (The photo above was taken by Jackie Adams.)

“We’d only been together for two months before Marjorie got pregnant,” says Axel, 37. Until that point, Axel had been working as an actor, with no regular income—but with a child on the way, Axel overhauled his life. “I stopped going out and partying,” he says. “I quit sports. I stopped acting. I got a job again and got an income again.”

At first, says Axel, “it seemed very grand and romantic, having a baby.” But the couple started bickering even before Lex was born, and after the birth they found themselves thrown together in the most intimate, uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. “The first 48 hours after Lex was born was like living on a remote island,” he says. “In hindsight, it would have been better to first build a community as a couple and as parents. I wasn’t comfortable in the relationship. I was happy in Lex’s birth, but I wasn’t comfortable being a dad, I had no idea with what I was doing.”

Their fights grew in frequency and intensity, keeping pace with the couple’s rising anxiety and sleep deprivation. “It was all emotional issues, in my opinion based on the fact that we didn’t get on well together and the situation was largely forced on us…forced on us by ourselves, of course.”

Even before Lex was born, Axel and Marjorie had joined a parenting group, seeking to build a new community as parents. But, while the meetings were enjoyable and provided the basis for individual friendships, the group did not translate into a durable, village-like community. “It seemed like everyone [in the group] was silently hoping for a community, because they hoped for emotional support as well as practical help,” says Axel. “The first year we certainly didn’t get that. Since all the couples were under the same pressure, they didn’t want to hear about it, because they didn’t want to hear anything that would remind them of how fragile their own situation is. I don’t blame them for it. They had no time or emotional energy to give us.”

Over the course of Lex’s first year, the rift between Axel and Marjorie developed into a serious crisis and then one day, just after Lex’s first birthday, Axel left Marjorie. He slept on the couches of his few remaining single, childfree friends, while Lex stayed with his mother. “I felt horrible,” Axel says. “Everything had just fallen apart. But I knew that I couldn’t stay. The only thing that would have been worse was staying.”

During this period, Axel was truly isolated. His friends, even those with children, didn’t understand what he was going through. His entire family lived in Germany. Worse, he immediately lost the small, fragile community he and Marjorie had constructed. “All of a sudden, it looked to me like all these parenting groups we’d joined ceased to exist at all,” he says. Both Marjorie and Axel still received support from individuals, but the group as a whole was not able to shift its "structure and energy" to accomodate the break-up.

“The first five weeks were horrible, but then it got better,” says Axel. Though they were initially enraged at each other, Axel and Marjorie gradually calmed down, “got back in touch with reality,” and ironed out a fifty-fifty custody agreement for Lex, with no lawyers involved.

Now Axel faced a new challenge: learning to be a single, joint-custody dad. “You know, Marjorie had this mama’s group, but there I was, trying to do all this by myself, and I thought, this is insane, so I actually tried to find a father’s group. And it was almost impossible to find. I finally found some people. They were all half-time single fathers, but most of their troubles were surrounding their divorces. I didn’t really feel at home there either. There’s hundreds of mothers’ groups, but almost no groups for dads.”

Axel gave up trying to find a group to join, accepted his isolation, and, for the first time, was able to focus totally on trying to be a good father. Ironically, this acceptance is what allowed him to find a new community. As Lex got bigger, he started playing with other kids and Axel found that it was easier for him to interact with the parents with a clear identity as a single dad. It wasn’t enough for Axel and Lex to do things that seemed best for Lex; Axel had to genuinely enjoy their activities and the company of the parents who were there. Their community grew when father and son found people they could both play with. “I feel much more comfortable being a parent and I’m finding a community that works for me and for Lex,” he says.

Ultimately, he feels, the separation from Marjorie was good for the whole family. “Having this structure and having the relationship with Lex separated from my relationship with Marjorie, it made it easier for me to see myself as a father,” he says. “It made it clear to me and also to Marjorie, that I’m Lex’s dad and I’m going to do all these things that are a part of being Lex’s dad, and it has nothing to do with the relationship, which wasn’t working out. For Lex, it’s better than what he was in before, when we were fighting all the time. It’s really changed my relationship with him and allowed me to focus on being a dad. I can be with him 100 percent.”

* * *

A post-script: “Through most of history,” writes family historian Stephanie Coontz, “marriage was only one of many places where people cultivated long-term commitments. Neighbors, family and friends have been equally important sources of emotional and practical support. Today, we expect much more intimacy and support from our partners than in the past, but much less from everyone else. This puts a huge strain on the institution of marriage. When a couple's relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But we often overload marriage by asking our partner to satisfy more needs than any one individual can possibly meet, and if our marriage falters, we have few emotional support systems to fall back on.”

Jackie and Jessica's Story: The missing piece of the puzzle

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on stay-at-home fathers and non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Jackie and Jessica, who live in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

Jackie and Jessica met ten years ago. “I think we were destined to be parents,” says Jackie. “We would stay home, we would watch movies, then we moved in together. It was always about creating this home. We always talked about having a kid.”

Of course, a lesbian couple cannot simply stop using birth control in order to get pregnant.

“We decided to put the word out that we were looking for a donor,” says Jackie. “When we met Dave, we knew immediately that this was going to work. He didn’t want to have any fathering responsibilities, but he just thought it would be a great idea and he wanted to help us.”

After work, Dave would drop by the couple’s apartment, where he found a discrete glass of wine, a tube of lube, a stack of porn videos, and a small jar waiting for him in the living room. It didn’t take long for Jackie to get pregnant.

After a 28-hour labor, Eli (“the only name we could agree on”) was born.

“I don’t think I slept for literally a month after he was born,” recalls Jackie. “I was pretty messed up for that first month of his life. Jessica needed to work, she only got two weeks off, and she slept in the living room so she could actually sleep and function at work. I remember just being with him 24-7 and I don’t remember sleeping, and he would just sit there awake or I would be awake while he was sleeping, and I remember actually hitting my head against the wall at one point, because I just couldn’t control it at all. I couldn’t go away from it, I knew needed to be there, and it was so much, so crazy. It was such an intense beginning, that it just kind of broke me. There is just something that you have to succumb to, in order to maintain your sanity.”

Meanwhile, Jessica’s life and self-image were being turned inside-out. Though she had read dozens of books on birth, nothing prepared her for the brute reality of the labor—or the demands her new role as breadwinning, non-biological parent placed on her. “I remember during the labor just feeling really useless,” she says. “After we got home, we had this situation where she was in bed with him and I was on the couch. I was just like, ‘Are you OK, can I get you anything?’ That surprised me. Because I think culturally we’re trained to assume that that’s what the father does. In the movies, the mother does stuff and the father runs around looking silly and saying, ‘Are you OK?’”

“I did feel silly,” says Jessica, “but I definitely didn’t feel like a father, because I’d grown up learning to be a mother. Growing up and in our relationship, it was always my intention to have a baby. I think anyone who gives birth has this very instinctual knowledge of what that baby needs, but I didn’t know how to make myself a part of the nourishing of this little person. We had both grown up believing that this is the mother’s role, and she was doing the mother’s role, but I wasn’t going to do the father’s role. To call myself the father felt like that was a further step away from being the parent, from being the mother.”

“When I’m not at work or not here at home, then I feel very guilty,” continues Jessica. “I don’t have a lot of time to myself. I feel like I have a job that I’ve had for eight years and I guess that makes a career, but I could just as easily have a different job. I grew up with a father who said, you don’t take a job unless there are benefits and health care. He taught me first you get the things you need, then you get the things you want.”

Both moms say that parenthood has invested their lives with a meaning that they’d never had before. “Before I was a parent,” says Jackie, “I’d be running these errands and doing grocery shopping, and it just felt so meaningless to me. I feel like with Eli there’s more meaning now, with the cooking and dish-washing. Everything is so structured. When am I going to have that moment when I scream, ‘I just can’t do this anymore!”? I’m waiting for myself to go crazy and just let everything go, and then I’ll have one of those houses that everyone is really scared to come to, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now I just live moment to moment.”

Though he now lives in Hawaii, the donor, Dave, is close to the family. “We had a hard time with that in the beginning,” reports Jackie. “I was very, very possessive, and I didn’t want Jessica to lose that feeling of being a parent, because people are so focused on that question of who’s the father. But Dave is just such a love, there’s such an honesty to him, that it makes me want to open up more and allow this extended family to work out. Today, he’s more than an uncle, he’s closer than that.”

Jackie and Jessica have also found a wide circle of parents, straight and queer, who share their values and accept them as part of the community. “The companionships that we have developed over the past year or so have felt genuine and that has meant the world to me,” says Jackie. “Respect plays the main role in my day-to-day existence. When I see other parents respecting other parenting styles that are unlike their own, I take note and appreciate their ability to be open and accepting. I find myself instantly drawn to them and I, who used to be an extremely shy person, am sparking up a conversation and making a new friend. Parenthood has definitely turned me into an open person. Something I thought I would never be.”

Jessica agrees. “We are finding that because Jackie took Eli to the playground so often, and we go to the farmers’ market together, we have started to find a legitimate community of people we like. [Now] hanging out with Eli and other kids and their parents is essentially my only social interaction with adults. Outside of work, play dates are my social life...and it’s pretty nice.”

“When Eli was born,” says Jackie, “we felt like he was the missing piece of the puzzle, for some reason. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to being just Jackie.”

Interview with Family Historian Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz is a professor of history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on the history of the American family.

Coontz has authored numerous books and articles, including, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and The Way We Really Are. In 2005 Viking-Penguin published, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage—a tremendously important book that's just been released in paperback.

Marriage, A History argues that marriage has evolved from the economic and political alliance of two or more family groups, to an individual love-match, which over the past thirty years has catalyzed the creation of new family forms like gay and lesbian families and helped dissolve the division of labor between husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. The result, says Coontz, is not the end of the family as we know it, but instead its revitalization as a more just and equitable institution.

I sat down to talk to Coontz at the tenth anniversary conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization she helped to found.

In your books, you’ve demonstrated how the family is constantly evolving. But have you identified any traits shared by all families that successfully cultivate the health and well being of their members?

In the broadest sense, there are some universals. For example, helping members to go outside the family – I think there’s been an incest taboo for a good reason, for thousands of years. We even find a primitive version of it in chimpanzees. It’s important to create individuals who not only can build successful relations within the group, but that are not so physically or emotionally incestuous. The good family teaches its members to reach out and form bonds with others.

So the family is a facilitator of human diversity.

Or rather, of social connection. The healthiest families are those families that don’t try to be everything and do everything. But I do think that what makes a family work really depends on social circumstances.

Let’s take the question of marriage. I think that in the 1950s you could build a successful marriage and rear kids who were going to do pretty well on the basis of a union of two gender stereotypes. And it wasn’t really necessary to have the depth of intimacy and friendship that is required now. That could lead to all sorts of abuses, and did. But on the whole, it could produce pretty decent people in the context of that time.

Today, that doesn’t work. When you have two people coming together at an older age, they are both economically and emotionally independent in very important ways. Men don’t require women to do their housekeeping services, women don’t require men to support them. In that circumstance, the level of friendship has to be much deeper and the level of intimacy needs to be much deeper. You can’t raise your kids with the same degree of authoritativeness—or especially, with the same level of authoritarianism—that they could, many years ago.

And each of these changes, I think, creates new problems. We solve old problems but create new ones. A good example is parenting. We have solved so many old problems in parenting. There is so much less child abuse, both emotional and physical, than there used to be in the past. There is a real interest in developing the child’s individuality—not necessarily individualism.

But, some parents go too far in the opposite direction and forget the need to establish generational boundaries and not be their kid’s best friend. So over and over again, what families need changes with the social and historical context and we create new challenges in the process of solving old problems.

As new family forms are emerging—and I mean the whole range, including reverse traditional families, gay and lesbian families, stepfamilies, and so on—how might that evolution contribute to the well-being of family members and society as a whole? How does the evolution hurt well-being?

Well, it’s another one of those trade-offs. Families have always been diverse, but that diversity was swept under the rug, and they were made to be ashamed of it. They were not helped, nobody analyzed their potential strengths and helped address their absolutely clear weaknesses. So as we’ve brought this diversity into visibility and increasingly legitimized that diversity, we’ve opened the way for all sorts of positive things. For example, preventing people from being forced to stay in a heterosexual marriage when, in fact, their impulses go the other way, or forcing people to stay in an unfair or unsatisfying marriage, which has been a huge relief for many people, I mean, literally a life saver. In every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the next five years saw twenty-percent declines in the suicide rates of wives.

But again, it certainly opened up more opportunities for people to make more bad choices, more opportunities for failure. It’s opened new opportunities to misjudge how much work it takes to build a new family form in an environment where the economy, the work practices, the school schedules, and the emotional expectations favor—privilege—one family form. So you have some people being overly optimistic about how easy it is to carve out a new life – they might say, “Oh, I can be a single mom, no problem,” and they’re not prepared for the difficulties they’ll encounter.

So I think that it does have some negative effects, but I would emphasize that these changes are not going back underground. They’ve had tremendous positive effects by rescuing people from very difficult situations and they pose us the challenge of helping people make more informed choices.

In Marriage, A History, you show love and intimacy have become more important to marriages. How has that evolution contributed to the rise in male caregiving?

This is one of the real, unambiguous good news stories that we’re finding. When the women’s movement first encouraged women to make these demands on their husbands, to spend more time at home, it caused a lot of conflict in families. And I think the conservatives are quite right to say that women’s liberation destabilized marriage.

But as men made adjustments—and they really have—the result has been tremendous good news, that, first of all, these adjustments have strengthened marriage. Men who do more caregiving have more satisfying marriages, they are less likely to have their wives leave them, and their kids do better. It’s a win-win situation, because if the parents do divorce, men who have been involved in such caregiving are much less likely to walk away from their kids. They have developed an independent relationship with the kids that is no longer mediated through the mom, and they don’t have that old-fashioned idea that, “Since I no longer get the mom’s services, so I can’t relate to the kids either.”

So I think that there are all sorts of positive things about it. There’s a myth in sociology and among many feminists that there’s been a stalled revolution, that there’s been a lagged one, but the fact is that men are changing very rapidly. In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism. Every cohort of men is doing more in the house, and if you look within a cohort, the longer a man’s wife has worked, the more likely he is to do caregiving and housework. This is a huge change.

How has the rising importance of love in marriage contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian families?

Social conservatives claim, as James Dobson put it, that gay and lesbian marriage is turning 5,000 years of tradition on its head. I actually believe that 5,000 years of tradition has been turned on its head, but it was heterosexuals who did it, and they changed marriage in ways that encouraged gays and lesbians to say, now this institution applies to us – after, in fact, having rejected that institution, because of its rigidity and inequality. I think this is good evidence that the institution has been evolving in a way that means it is not inherently oppressive.

Now I have gotten attacked by a couple of feminist authors for saying that. They want me to keep arguing that there’s something inherent in the institution of marriage. I think, in fact, we’ve transformed it and discovered that it’s not inherently oppressive, except in so far as it is put forward as the only way to honor long-term obligations. But if it is not, then I think marriage has become much fairer through the ages and much more capable of really being equal, and I think that’s why many gays and lesbians have started to embrace marriage.

You describe a lot of change. What hasn’t changed?

There are still a lot of rigid gender roles. It’s a lot worse around the world, where women still face incredible amounts of domestic violence. There are massive gender inequities on a global scale to be addressed, and there is the residue, and a serious residue, of inequality at home, too. But the biggest problem we need to address is the peculiarly American assumption that individuals can learn individual responsibility without any social responsibility. We ask individuals to keep commitments that we don’t ask corporations or politicians to keep, and that needs to change.

Ted’s Story: Not his father's son

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on stay-at-home fathers and non-traditional families. For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Ted, a stay-at-home dad in Oakland, CA. All names have been changed.


Johnny lifts rock after rock, small two-year-old face focused, searching.

“Bug!” he says triumphantly, pointing to a salamander. “Bug!”

His dad Ted squats down. “It’s a salamander. That’s a kind of amphibian, Johnny.”

Ted plucks the finger-length salamander off the ground and slides it into Johnny’s hand.

“Gentle,” he says to his son. “Be very gentle.”

Tell me about your dad, I say.

Ted laughs sarcastically and doesn’t say anything. In another person, it would seem like a self-dramatizing gesture. I sense, however, that Ted is only thinking. Ted is 43 years old, but he’s boyish and stocky and he has a scholar’s face, quiet and a little bit sad. Words come slow to him.

I prompt him: What kind of role model is he for you, as a father?

“He saw himself as a breadwinner and not much else. His attitude was, I’m your father and you will respect me, because of all the things I’ve done for you. He didn’t see our relationship as going two ways. It was more of a one-way thing, from him to me.”

Ted’s parents divorced when he was eleven. At first he and his sister lived with his mom, then one day when he was fourteen, Ted was caught smoking marijuana. It was decided that he would go live with his father.

“I have a lot of fond memories from before, but after I went to live with my dad, I don’t know. It was a closed atmosphere. I didn’t have a lot of friends. The attitude about me was, he’s done drugs before, so let’s keep him in a cage so that he’ll never have a chance to do drugs again.”

What was your father like, during this period? I ask.

“My dad was an alcoholic….”

“Look at me, daddy!” cries Johnny. We look: he’s standing up on a pile of wood chips, legs spread, with one foot propped on a nearby fence, smiling as though he just completed a triple somersault.

“Way to go, Johnny, good job!”

About your father… I continue.

“He was a mean drunk. He picked on the family…”

Ted stops talking.

What do you think he did well? I ask.

Ted thinks. “I can’t think of anything right now. I don’t have a good relationship with my dad.”

When Ted went to college, he became a serious bicycle racer. He’d take classes for a semester, then race for a year. This went on for twelve years, until he got his undergraduate science degree.

“I wasn’t getting rich, but I’d make a couple hundred dollars a week, enough to get by with some other work, and I raced with professionals—some pretty famous guys. My dad wasn’t supportive, except when I won a race. I won about fifty races. I think winning was the only thing that made it worthwhile to him.”

One day he met Shelley, the roommate of the girlfriend of another bike racer. They married and two and a half years ago they had Johnny. The family spent Johnny's second year in China, where Ted worked as researcher for the United Nations on a conservation project. While in China, Shelley was offered a job as communications director of an international development organization in Oakland, CA. On their return to the Bay Area, the couple decided that Ted would stay home with Johnny while Shelley worked.

What does your dad think of you staying at home with Johnny? I ask.

"He’s insulting about it. Not so much about me taking care of Johnny. More about the fact that I’m not having a job right now. He’s in his sixties, his health is deteriorating, so he just lashes out at anything.”

Johnny wanders over to concrete steps that lead down from their street to next neighborhood. Ted lets him stand at a railing, looking down at a ten-foot drop.

I say: My wife would never let my son stand there.

“Shelley’s terrified of the stairs. She won’t let him go near stairs like that.”

Are you more careless than Shelley? I ask.

“I wouldn’t say careless…”

We both laugh.

“He is more likely to get hurt with me…well, not, like, hurt. I’m careful with him, but I like to give him a little bit more room to, you know, experiment, see what he can do. He’d never learn to walk down the stairs otherwise.”

What are some things a good father does? I ask.

For once, Ted doesn’t hesitate. “A good dad is close to his kids. He’s there emotionally. He’s supportive and encouraging, whatever the kids want to do, within reason.”

He pauses.

“But I think the most important thing is for a dad to set a good example. You have to be the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be. You can’t impose your ideas on him. You have to be the idea and just hope he gets it. If they see you being kind to other people, they’re more likely to be kind to other people.”

We stop talking, both of us pondering his words, watching Johnny, who squats for a long time, intently watching another salamander traverse the landscape of his tiny hand. Johnny starts to poke and prod at the salamander.

“OK, Johnny,” says Ted. “Let the salamander free.”

He squats down next to his son and helps the salamander back into its home under the rock.

“You don’t want to hurt him,” says Ted, taking his son’s hand.

You know, I say, Johnny really looks like you.

For the first time that afternoon, Ted really smiles: at that moment, he is the man he wants his son to be.