Want it all? Try saying "thank you"

“Having it all” has been trending for two weeks, ever since Anne-Marie Slaughter’s blockbuster essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” went online at the website of The Atlantic magazine.

“It’s time to stop fooling ourselves,” says the Princeton professor and former State Department official. “The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

Feminist commentators on her essay have been quick to say that men as a group need to pick up the slack at home. “The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough,” writes author and activist Jessica Valenti in The Nation, citing a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that working women still do the bulk of housework and childcare.

I don’t quarrel with their arguments or their facts. But what’s missing from critiques like that one is an acknowledgement of how much men have evolved in just three generations.

“Men are changing very rapidly,” feminist historian Stephanie Coontz once told me. “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.” According to every single study, men today do more dishes and bring more kids to school than their fathers and grandfathers ever did.

Enter the awkward concept of gratitude. It’s awkward because many women frankly resent the idea that men should be thanked for doing the work they’ve always been expected to do. The resentment is personal and it’s political. It’s personal, because every woman who comments on these issues has had a man in her life that didn’t do his fair share. And it’s political, because the debate is fundamentally about the balance of power between men and women as groups. In fact, research shows that men will withhold gratitude as an expression of power over women.

“We should be grateful for anything that makes our lives easier,” says my friend Suzanne (not her real name), who is now divorced. “But at the same time, I’d grit my teeth because he was a big hero for doing a sink full of dishes.”

All partnerships have a division of labor, but Suzanne felt as though her specific labors had been imposed on her. Millions of women feel the way she did. This creates conflict, of course, but it also interferes with practicing fundamental relationship skills like gratitude. (Other skills like forgiveness and empathy are important, too, but here I'm just focusing on gratitude.)

Why should that be a problem? Because study after study shows that gratitude is essential to marital happiness. Suzanne didn’t just resent that her husband was a big hero for doing what she did every day. The bigger problem is that her daily work was thankless, and even denigrated by her husband: “If dinner wasn’t perfect,” she added, “he’d whine about it.”

The place of gratitude in marriage was explored by none other than UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who created a concept cited in Valenti’s article: “the second shift,” which suggests that working women go home to sinks full of dirty dishes to do. Hochschild came up with another catchy phrase, “economy of gratitude,” which turns up much less often in feminist commentary. Her theory says expressing gratitude for the labor of your spouse is more important to marital happiness than the precise division of labor. It’s not just who does the dishes; it’s also who gets thanked by whom for doing the dishes.

Researchers Jess Alberts and Angela Threthewey put Hochschild's “economy of gratitude” theory to the test in a series of focus groups, interviews, and surveys of heterosexual and same-sex couples. They “found evidence that gratitude isn’t just a way to mitigate the negative effects of an unequal division of labor. Rather, a lack of gratitude may be connected to why that division of labor is so unequal to begin with," as they write in "Love, Honor, and Thank."

So when a spouse expresses gratitude to an "under-performing" partner for picking up his socks off the floor, he's reminded that it's not fair that she's usually the one who does that. "And since people who receive gifts typically feel obligated to reciprocate, this insight can lead the under-performing partner to offer 'gifts' of his own by contributing more to household tasks. In addition, the over-performing partner is likely to experience less resentment and frustration once her efforts are recognized and appreciated."



Thus expressing gratitude does not necessarily perpetuate inequality, as some fear. Instead, it can help make relationships more equal. Unfortunately, the research suggests that men are worse than women when it comes to being grateful. This makes for an emotionally lethal combination: tradition imposes housework and childcare on women, and then individual men forget to be grateful for their wives’ contributions—a habit that might have a lot to do with maintaining their own social power. As psychologist Robert Emmons notes in his essay, "Pay it Forward":

It has been argued that males in particular may resist experiencing and expressing gratefulness insomuch as it implies dependency and indebtedness. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and to view it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.

While the research evidence for this idea is scant, it personally resonates with me. Averages don't tell us much about individuals, and certainly there are men who are better at gratitude than women. But I have struggled to weave gratitude into my life, and so do many men I know. So if American marriages need more gratitude, that change should start with men. Guys, I’m begging you: Go home tonight and thank your wife for everything she does. Be specific; the "meta-thanks" won't work, because it doesn't show that you recognize the contribution as a unique and personal thing. Here, just watch this video:



So, should women be grateful to men for doing the dishes? My own answer is yes and no. Yes, individual women should express gratitude to the men in their lives for what they do, for the sake of positive reinforcement and marital sustainability. But no, I don't think women should be thankful to men as a group for changing so much in recent decades. They could have and should have evolved earlier than they did, when women started taking jobs in large numbers.

This brings us to questions of power and how it shapes gratitude, which has been the subject of recent lab experiments.

One 2011 study by Yeri Cho and Nathanael J. Fast paired two study participants and asked them to perform a task together—designating one the supervisor and the other the subordinate. The results were fascinating, and have useful implications for marriages. They found that gratitude from supervisors made subordinates happier, of course. But they also found that supervisors who had been challenged in any way by their subordinates were more likely to turn around and insult that person.

This is a dynamic that defines many marriages. If a wife challenges her husband’s competency at home—“Don’t you know how to sweep a floor?!”—the research suggests he’ll end up denigrating her own contributions, a vicious cycle that might be depressingly familiar to some readers.

To be fair, men aren’t the only ones who forget to be grateful. It’s commonplace for full-time caregivers—usually (but not always) women—to forget to thank breadwinning spouses—usually (but not always) men—for their efforts and sacrifices. Supporting a family is hard, especially in hard economic times, and can entail intense stress and deferred dreams. Even two-income couples, whose members are theoretically facing similar stresses, can fall into the ingratitude trap: They become too busy to see or appreciate what the other is doing.

Indeed, gratitude must go both ways to be effective. It’s the role of the spouse to serve as witness to their partner’s life. Gratitude tells the spouse that they are being seen, that their sacrifices and struggles are visible and honored.

But interpersonal power imbalances are pernicious in another way: They make us cynical about others’ motivations for expressing gratitude. In a study published in January of this year, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues ran five experiments testing how power shapes gratitude. They found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to curry favor down the line, not out of authentic feeling. This cynicism, the researchers found, made power-holders less likely to express gratitude to people with less power. In marriages, this gratitude corruption also led to lower levels of marital commitment in the more powerful spouse.

The bottom line from these and similar experiments is clear: Having power makes you less grateful, which just exacerbates power differences and all the resentments that go along with them. But expressing gratitude can help break that vicious cycle and change the balance of power. For me as a man, this amounts to a persuasive feminist argument. Power inequalities cut us off from genuine and necessary human feelings like gratitude—and that can push us a little further away from the possibility of happiness. It follows that it’s in our interest to act against power imbalances.

We can do that through our votes and political activism, I believe—it’s policies like flextime and paid parental leave that will best help women advance in their careers. But we can also make a small, positive contribution in our own homes by just saying “thanks.” It might not be equity that we as men are striving for, though that should be a goal and might be a glorious byproduct of this struggle. Instead, our greatest rewards will come in the form of meaning, authenticity, and, yes, happiness in our homes.

This originally appeared on the website of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.

Mommy Preference and Patriarchy

"The first crying of children is a prayer ... They begin by asking our aid; then end by compelling us to serve them. Thus from their very weakness, whence comes, at first, their feeling of dependence, springs afterwards the idea of empire, and of commanding others."

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or: Concerning Education

When my wife took a long vacation from work so we could all spend more time together, our family went through a strange regression. At the end of this transition, I had emerged as a slothful Patriarch, presiding over a career-woman-turned-harried housewife, who was herself now answering to every beck and call of an infantilized preschooler.

Our family had become, in other words, the opposite of what it had been before my wife took her sabbatical.

The transformation was driven by our son, who quickly revealed himself to be a rogue monkey with every intention of completely overturning the social hierarchy. It began when he demonstrated a strong preference for Mama during her first week or two at home. At first, this made perfect sense to me: Mama is a working woman and Spot doesn't get to spend as much time with her as with me. I was sympathetic, since I liked having her around, too.

But I had no idea that this shared desire, as expressed by my son, would launch our family unit into an unwitting sociological experiment, the sort of thing that might have been inflicted by scientists on hapless and undeserving primates in the 1950's, or by media execs on equally hapless but much more deserving humans on a reality TV show.

Falling to the bottom of the social ladder, though shocking, was not necessarily new to me. It had happened in catastrophic fashion at the beginning of 7th grade, and thereafter with smaller aftershocks in the years leading up to college. So although I wasn't emotionally devastated as I had been in 7th grade, I recognized what was happening. I was getting pushed to the bottom of the pack hierarchy. Lower than Grandpa, maybe even lower than my brother-in-law, and probably about on par with the dog. I was denied high-fives and daddy-hugs. I was bummed.

This was disturbing, of course. It was an injury to my self-love. Or so I thought, until I realized that in truth it heralded my liberation. For, as I was being spurned, my wife was being enslaved. She was shackled by Spot's preference for Mama. And for the first time in nearly four years, vistas of freedom opened up before me, of Rabbits running on Updike-like getaways, or of simpler, more local bouts of laziness. It was my one and only chance, in the artificial circumstances of my wife's sabbatical, to don the mantle of pater familias, Patriarch, Godfather, master of the kinship clan.

A few posts back, I described an earlier expression of this atavism. Little did I know then that it provided a foretaste of what was to come:

I descended the staircase one morning to be met by the same Oedipal glare that my father must have known well. In a bath of soft light before me I saw the heartwarming scene of a mother, dressed for work and feeding breakfast to her son, holding a boy in a puppy-covered sleeper with puppy ears flopping off the side of each foot. Yet this boy, shattering the Norman Rockwell charm of the scene, frowns when he sees me, and raises an accusatory, pointed finger into the air.

"Daddy, you go back upstairs!"

Although he had since learned to sheath the knife of this raw Oedipal hatred, he immediately took advantage of Mama's sabbatical to demand her services not just for breakfast, but for dinner as well. "I want Mama!" became not just a breakfast demand, but a cry uttered to ward off Daddy whenever he approached. But this preference soon turned into imperialism. Mama had to be the one to draw the bath and wash him. Mama had to help him with the potty. Mama had to brush his teeth. Mama had to carry all 37 pounds of him up two flights of stairs. Mama had to come sit with him on the couch for yet another episode of "Ni Hao, Kai-lan." Mama had to handle every case of crisis management.

Spot's relationship with his Mama has always had this potential to regress towards infantile dependency. This doesn't surprise me, since I had the same problem with women well into my 20's. But now it was evolving into sheer despotism, something I had never managed to achieve. I realized this when Spot began telling -- not asking -- Mama to pick up little things that had fallen off the couch and onto the floor. When Spot began saying things like, "Mama, I want YOU to pick up the block!" that was six inches away, we both knew it was time for her to go back to work. In the meantime, there was nothing for me to do but lie back on the couch, pop the button on my jeans, and flip on the game. Aside from being on-call as in-house Bad Cop, my time was now my own.

I thought I might finish all sorts of projects, paint a few rooms, and get started on the novel I've been meaning to write for 20 years. In reality, seeing the hours and days of my wife's sabbatical consumed in the service of a tyrant marooned me with guilt. I couldn't help her -- Spot wouldn't let me -- and I got nothing done for myself. Looking back, I can't say that Mama's sabbatical was relaxing, or that my temporary position as default patriarch was terribly satisfying. But we were all together more often than usual, and we wound up packing quite a lot of activity into that one summer month. Looking back on that time now gives me the pleasant feeling of having richly lived.

So what does it all mean? Short answer: All is flux. The lust for power resides within us all. Patriarchy is really not all that enjoyable if you like an emotionally engaged relationship with your child and have any respect for your partner.

Long answer: Emotions don't obey contracts, not even 50/50 co-parenting contracts, or more exotic reverse-traditional ones. They ebb and flow and shift around, collecting around one person for a while before melting away and collecting more closely around someone else. Spot's shift in preference was only as abrupt and extreme as the sudden change in our domestic routines. And by the end of Mama's sabbatical, his attachments had begun to even out again. He let me carry him, and we picked up some of our exclusive father-son routines again. My brief stint as Patriarch, as close to the real thing as a weekend re-enactment is to the Battle of Gettysburg, was nonetheless close enough to reassure me that such a role was not for me.

Spot clearly has a different relationship with both of us, tending ever so slightly towards dependency with Mama, and ever so slightly towards imitation and competition with Daddy. But there is plenty of dependency on Daddy, and some imitation of Mama, too. So I really can't say with any confidence that our particular arrangement has affected Spot's emotional preferences one way or another, or that he will "bond" with either of us because one of us happens to leave the house in the morning while the other does not.

It is with Spot's emotional attachments as it is with subatomic particles: the likelihood that they will be there over the long run is more certain than the existence of a singular, passionate attachment at any one point in time. A few months of breast-feeding in infancy, or one ten-day fishing trip in adolescence are probably not, in my opinion, enough to guarantee a bond one way or another over the course of a lifetime. The hours, days, and years of effort made to sustain the existence and happiness of someone else stand a far better chance of doing so.

This is something I remind myself during those stretches when I am not the "favored" parent, and -- when I'm not feeling like a favored spouse -- something that probably applies to marriage as well.

Who changes the diapers in your house?

In The Daddy Shift, Jeremy Adam Smith explores the ways in which perceptions of parental roles and responsibilities are changing and argues that gender is becoming less of a factor in the fundamental decisions families make about raising children.  The broad scope of Smith's project is alluded to in the book's subtitle, How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

Many aspects of Smith's argument resonate with me as a novice stay-at-home dad, and one thread in particular corroborates a hunch I had based on the logistics of my own household.  Smith cites research that suggests an increasingly equitable division of "unpaid family work" within American families; however, he cautions that this doesn't signify an inexorable move toward an egalitarian utopia.

Although he characterizes the trend of men taking on more family work as "tenuous," Smith's profiles of non-traditional families serve as models for a much more balanced distribution of household labor than in the "traditional," male breadwinner/female caregiver home.  (Although the single-income household is a rarity these days, the legacy of the "traditional" family often manifests in women doing the bulk of the housework and caregiving even when they work outside the home.)  He suggests that in "reverse-traditional" (i.e., caregiver dad and breadwinner mom) and same-sex parent families, there tends to be less specialization, so that the breadwinner is likely to participate more in caregiving, and the caregiver may dabble in breadwinning--thus the workload is shared more equitably.  

This pattern became obvious to me when my wife returned to work after spending the first four months of our twin girls' lives at home with them.  At that point I became the primary caregiver (who occasionally gets paid to build something or teach a class); but contrary to what the term "reverse-traditional" may imply, my wife didn't suddenly transform into a disengaged patriarch.

I often receive more credit than I am due--and rarely try to deflect it--for the amount of work people assume is involved in taking care of two toddlers.  And it would be a lot of work for just one person.  But when my wife, a family practice doctor at a non-profit community clinic, comes home from work, she wants to spend every minute that she can with the babies.  There's no time for reclining with a pipe and the evening edition of the Mayfield Press for her--it's all about feeding, bathing, reading to, and playing with the kids.  But people tend to expect that from a mom, regardless of how much work she does or money she makes outside the home.

I know breadwinning fathers who likewise come home from work and immediately engage in as much caregiving as they can in the few hours before bedtime.  But I also know fathers who try to squeeze in as much time away from their families as possible.  This is unfathomable to me for a number of reasons (but who knows--maybe I'll develop an interest in golf and multi-day fishing trips in the next couple of years).

As much as I am philosophically down with the notion that work is work, and certain things need to be done to keep a family as healthy and happy as possible, and it's all equally important, I have to admit that there are times when I feel like the archetypal frustrated housewife.  When I'm just finishing cleaning up the mess from lunch in time to start making dinner, for instance, it's hard for me not to dwell on the Sisyphean nature of my labors.

But there are two things that assuage my frustration.  First, I have worked for decades outside of the home as a carpenter, contractor, and more recently as a teacher; and I know that any job can at times be tedious and seem endless and thankless.  When I grouse about rinsing out diapers (we use cloth as penance for the environmental havoc wreaked by raising kids) or washing bottles, I only have to remind myself that my wife could very well be gritting her teeth while doing her tenth pelvic exam before lunchtime instead of playing with her babies.  Would I rather be building a deck than scraping poop?  Probably.  But on the other hand, I would rather feed a baby than grade a stack of essays.   

Secondly, I receive plenty of recognition for my housework.  Not only from my wife, who notices my domestic achievements (and if she doesn't, I point them out), but also from acquaintances and strangers.  Unlike many of the caregiver fathers profiled in The Daddy Shift, I have not heard any withering comments or noticed any sideways glances about my domesticity (of course, this could be due to my self-preserving oblivion).  Instead, I am lauded almost universally for my willingness to face not only the supposedly daunting task of raising twins, but also the censure (yet to be felt) of our sexist culture.

The only sexism I have encountered in discussions about my stay-at-home status is of the condescending, mildly misandristic variety; e.g., "Oh my God--you watch them every day?  I can't even leave my kids home with their dad for the weekend!"  These comments usually make me seem heroic, and may reflect more on the speaker's perception of her schlub of a husband than on men in general, so I let them slide.

Although I'm usually perfectly happy to be compared favorably to other men, a couple things irk me about the attention I get for being a competent (as far as they know) parent.  The first troubling aspect is that it's still sometimes considered noteworthy that a man can take care of children and "keep house."  The other side of that coin is that women don't get enough credit when they do the same, since to do so is considered a function of their chromosomes.  The bar is set much lower for fathers, which is unfair to all parents.

My wife is reading this over my shoulder and thinks that the fact that men are perfectly capable of, and responsible for, doing every bit as much "unpaid family work" as women is a no-brainer, hardly worth discussing.  It's true that among the progressive types we usually hang around with, it goes without saying.  But in my conversations with moms at the dog park, members of my Asian mommies group (yeah--I'm the white guy with the double stroller), and even my stay-at-home dads group (members of whom often encounter incredulity at the idea that they can be trusted with kids), the assumption that men can't or won't contribute as much as women to the glamorless aspects of family life is a common theme.  Also, on the mommyblogs I lurk around on, casual kvetching about shiftless husbands surfaces regularly, especially in reader comments.

In The Daddy Shift, in other print and electronic media, and in his appearances on TV and radio, Jeremy Adam Smith has been an advocate and spokesperson for stay-at-home dads.  But he also stresses that gender equity in the home is not a done deal, exhorting us--especially caregiving fathers--to share our stories so that we can contribute to the evolution of the American Family toward this end.

What do you think?  Is the idea and/or practice of gender equity within the family so mainstream that we don't even need to talk about it anymore?  Or is someone doing more than their fair share of dishes? 

Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I'm much less serious and tell stories about my mommy group, daddygroup, and post adorable pictures of my kids

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.

Does parenthood make men more conservative and women more liberal?

A new study says that parenthood pushes men and women in opposite political directions:

"Parenthood seems to heighten the political 'gender gap,' with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues," says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study.

"Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home," Greene says, "which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the 'Security Mom' label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids." Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.

You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.

This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.

Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.

This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.

To which I say: Wow.

Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:

We argue that this long-standing liberal motherhood effect is grounded in the gendered experience of parenthood. The societal expectation as well as the reality that women play the primary role in nurturing their children and take primary responsibility for their health care, day care, and educational needs fosters an appreciation for well-funded, domestic government programs.

Moreover, with the vast majority of mothers working outside the home, mothers are required to rely on people or programs outside the nuclear family for at least part of their children’s care, which may also foster their appreciation for a supportive and generous social welfare state. The fact that the liberal effect of motherhood remains highly significant even in the regression model (Table 2) when potentially confounding variables are controlled, means that it is not simply Democratic or unmarried or poor mothers that are driving the liberal motherhood effect. Consistent with some feminist theories, there seems to be something about the experience of being a mother that leads to more liberal social welfare attitudes (Ruddick 1980, 1989; Sapiro 1983). It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others.

Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."

That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.

Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?

I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.

The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."

Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.

If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.

[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]

Why Not Dad?

Why Not Dad?, says the film's website, "is the result of 9 months of ethnographic collaboration between the filmmakers and a group of stay-at-home fathers in San Francisco. Weekly contact with the men and their children gave rise to an unprecedented filmmaking collaboration in which the fathers were able to help shape the direction and development of the film." Which sounds a trifle dry; the film is actually warmer than one would expect an "ethnographic collaboration" to be. You can can watch it here:

Why Not Dad? @ Yahoo! Video

Nick Clegg is right

It's a new media trend: Since 80 percent of people laid off in the recession have been guys, pundits and journalists are asking themselves if this will cause men to do more at home. More women as breadwinners and more men at home is "a thought to file under 'let's try to find a silver lining,' " writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times. Slate's Emily Bazelon takes a dimmer view, imagining "a family with a husband rattling around the house, unemployed and unsettled about it, while his wife keeps working but brings home a paycheck that's less than half the income the two of them used to make together."

Over in the United Kingdom--which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here--Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work." He's been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.

Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.

During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.

And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.

Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s--and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom--which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad--was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.

But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.

In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids--whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.

A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children--and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house. No one gets paid for sniping at his or her spouse.

When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."

America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't--who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives--break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.

"God calls you a bum..."

Something I found via Here Goes Everything:



Stay-at-home dads are going to hell! Hot damn!

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

10 questions on profeminist fatherhood

Yesterday I posted a list of questions about feminism and fatherhood that were adapted from "10 questions on feminist motherhood," posed by Australian feminist mommy blogger Blue Milk. I promised that I would try to answer them. Here it goes:

1. How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become profeminist? Was it before or after you became a father?

On its most personal level, feminism is a reminder to me to do my utmost to treat the women in my life with respect, something I admit often falls to the wayside in the heat of an argument—more on that, below.

On a more abstract level, I think feminism reminds me of how my individual decisions have political and social dimensions—and how political events and social trends shape my individual decisions. 

In short, the personal is political!

When did I come to think that feminism was a good idea?

I have always felt like an outsider when in the company of guys, though I’m more or less straight and no one has ever described me as “feminine.” I just felt like every other guy had learned a secret handshake that I never did.

As a result, I have always felt instinctively sympathetic to other outsiders, including girls who weren’t girly enough. This laid the emotional and social foundation that made me open to learning more about feminism when I got to college.

In my sophomore year, a male friend asked me to get involved with a “Men for Choice” group he was starting, which evolved into a guy’s auxiliary for our campus NOW chapter. As the years went by, my activism deepened and branched out into other issues, but pro-choice activism was definitely the gateway.

During college, I also read my way through the feminist canon, starting with The Second Sex and concluding with a great deal of feminist literary theory which now makes me yawn with boredom. These ideas played a decisive role in shaping the way I see the world.

2. What has surprised you most about fatherhood?

My answers to this question and the next one are long. Stick with me, or just skim to the end. Frankly, I prefer that you skim.

After college, I put my profeminism on cruise control. I was in a stable, monogamous relationship and in my work with various progressive nonprofits, I usually had solid, respectful relationships with female co-workers. I watched guy co-workers get into trouble for sexist remarks or actions (inadvertent and otherwise), but that never happened to me and my policy was to duck and cover if it turned into a major issue.

Every once in a while, a female co-worker would even go out of her way to tell me how refreshingly non-sexist I was—“When Jeremy talks to me, he never looks at my breasts,” said one person, whose breasts I did, in fact, secretly glance at once or twice.

These pats on the head were always reassuring and contributed to a decade-long mood of complacency about gender issues. Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I played it safe, and I just never faced any personal challenges to my profeminism. As a result, I don’t think I grew very much when it came to my views on women, men, and gender politics. I figured it was enough for me to avoid acting like an obvious jerk.

Then I became a dad. And I was shocked by the degree to which my now-habitual commitment to feminist values was put to the test. In fact, habits went out the window; everything took conscious effort, as if I’d had an intellectual and emotional stroke and needed to learn how to walk and talk all over again.

I’m not even sure where to start in talking about this—I just wrote an entire book that was partially on this topic and I find it hard to boil it all down into a short answer to a question. It’s also hard to talk about because it’s so very intimate, and involves my wife’s choices as well as my own—something I’m reluctant to discuss in public. For this reason, the reader will have to accept a certain degree of vagueness.

I’ll put it this way: As soon as we became parents, I think the power in our relationship started to inexorably tilt in my direction, as perhaps it always did. Even when I took time off of paid work to serve as my son’s primary caregiver, the tilt continued. It didn’t seem, and still doesn’t seem, to matter what I want or decide—I just keep growing more powerful in the relationship.

What do I mean by power? In this context, we might say it’s the ability to do and say what we want and need to do or say. From this perspective, we’ve both lost power: Parenthood constrains our choices in countless ways, which I don’t think I need to explain to other parents.

But there is no question, absolutely none, that my wife has lost more power than I have. This won’t surprise moms who are reading this, but it certainly surprised me.

The biggest reason for this, I would say, is that I have simply not been as absorbed by the physical and emotional demands of caregiving, even when I was primary caregiver; and at this writing, I am the one who is making most of the money and feels most driven to advance in my so-called career.

Though I have faced setbacks, right at this moment I have achieved, or will soon achieve, many of my well-defined personal and professional goals, thus giving me a sense of efficacy and thus power. At the same time, my wife has struggled more to figure what she wants out of life and how to get it. (Here’s something I’ve learned: Having goals is a form of power; having a plan to pursue them is a form of power; accomplishing goals adds to your personal power. If these are just illusions, there’s power in them.)

This might change in the long run, of course. In fact, I’m counting on it. I’ve experienced setbacks in the past and I will surely experience more of them, and my wife, I hope, will surge ahead. The trick, as with all partnerships, is to avoid experiencing setbacks at the same time! Right now, however, I’m worried: I see a discrepancy growing between us in the context of parenthood, and I fear that it might turn into a lifelong pattern. In earlier stages of our lives, a situation like this wasn’t as weighty; hardly noticeable, in fact. Today, it feels very perilous. And that surprises me.

Mind you, I have been vastly more involved with care than many other fathers and I have explicitly designed my work situation to be flexible. And yet it is still the case—this is the important thing, the most important thing that needs to be said—that parenthood has fueled my own power and diminished my wife’s--or, to put it a different way, constrained her ability to make choices.

3. How have your profeminist values changed over time? What is the impact of fatherhood on your profeminism?

Think about the implications: If a guy like me—who has every good intention and a history of profeminist activism, and who even served a stint as a stay-at-home dad—is failing at the task for forging a perfectly egalitarian family, then what does that tell us about the prospects of wider social change?

Some people reading this probably think they have this one all figured out. They’ll say I was naïve for ever even imagining that equality in one family was possible—what we need, they’ll argue, is nothing less than the overthrow of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Only after the revolution can our piddling interpersonal relationships be lastingly altered.

You might not know people who believe this, but I do. Before becoming a father, I was one of those people.

And so I never thought utopia in one family was possible; I was really just trying to muddle through, as I still am. Here’s the thing: Most of the people I’m talking about aren’t parents—and the ones who are, are not what I would call dedicated parents. In fact, too often left-wing activists and leaders neglect their family responsibilities, especially the guys.

Am I judging them? Sure, a bit—the fathers, anyway—but mainly as a warning to myself and others. They’re workaholics in the service of social change, as I once was, and I suspect that they will regret the things they missed just as much as their corporate counterparts.

As a result, the problems parents face are all very abstract to them. They don’t see, they can’t, how vital and immediate it is for heterosexual couples to establishing a domestic division of labor that makes both parties happy. They have no idea—I had no idea, before becoming a parent—how difficult and urgent it is for fathers and mothers to figure this one out.

It’s all very well to talk about universal health care and parental leave and so on—but who will take the baby to the doctor? What do you say when a breastfeeding mother just wants to stay home and take care of her baby? Do you condemn her, as some have done, for being insufficiently feminist? Or do you say society and the economy made her do it, thereby denying the importance of her perception of what she needs and what the baby needs?

And what about the fathers? Are their feelings and needs irrelevant? What happens when a father yearns to stay home with his child, but can’t, because his wife wants to be the one to do that and he has to earn the money? Or what if he does stay home, and spends his days feeling like a fish out of water? No social movement can help him; feminism can tell him that he’s doing the right thing—God knows, nothing else in our culture will—but that won't matter much to the average stay-at-home dad. He mainly needs a supportive community as well as role models. 

Here’s something I think progressive feminist folks need to understand in a deep way: Parents aren’t soldiers. We don’t take marching orders. And none of us is a general. You can’t tell your partner what she should want out of life, even, perhaps especially, when her decisions make you more powerful in the relationship. You can’t control the way the world thinks of you, and you don’t get to say what social and economic conditions you’ll face as a parent. This breeds feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, anger.

At the end of the day, your main task is to survive and support your family and raise happy children; how you respond to the things you can’t control reveals a great deal about your character, some of it good and some of it bad. You might discover (have you noticed my retreat to the safety of the second person?) a capacity for sacrifice and care that you never knew was there.

On the flip side, the dark one, you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner. In those scary moments, when our worst emotions take over and drive our ideals and aspirations over a cliff, it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission.

What does that have to do with feminism? Everything, and nothing.

Pledging allegiance to feminist ideals doesn’t make you a good person or a good parent or a good partner, but it might remind you of the power you have—we always have power, if only over ourselves—and the need to restrain that power or share it with other people. It can also remind fathers of something that I think is crucial: There are alternatives; you do have choices, and your choices matter. You don’t have to be the man your father was; you don't have to be the idiots we see on TV; you can be a new kind of man, and you can help your sons become that kind of man.

4. What makes your fathering profeminist? How does your approach differ from an anti-feminist father’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

At the start, I saw participating in infant care as being the most important thing I could do to make my fathering profeminist, and maybe that was correct—it had the merit of being a pretty straightforward mission. I did my best.

And that’s a fundamentally different framework than the one an anti-feminist or non-feminist father brings to fatherhood—for the best of them, fatherhood involves an uncomplicated commitment to breadwinning above all else, which, whatever its shortcomings, is definitely an important role to fulfill; for the worst of them, fatherhood becomes another opportunity to dominate women and expand their egos.

On this front, I don’t sell myself or profeminist fathers short: A commitment to care is crucial, and makes a real difference for mothers and children. A person who denigrates such efforts, on feminist or antifeminist grounds, is not helping families.

I also think a commitment to profeminist fathering leads in a very direct way to supporting profeminist public policies: antidiscrimination policies, subidized daycare and preschool, universal health care, paid parental leave, and so on. Enacting these policies will provide a nurturing context for our personal decisions and make profeminist fathering more likely to flourish. That's another difference between a consciously profeminist and a non-feminist father: There's a political dimension to your fathering that, I think, must be expressed through voting, activism, writing, and, ultimately, public policy.

5. When have you felt compromised as a profeminist father? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a profeminist father?

At this point, I’m compromised every freaking day; I fail every single day. This is not false modesty. The commitment to infant care was straightforward, though in retrospect I see those halcyon days as a simpler time. As the years have gone by, I’ve fallen further and further short of my ideals, and profeminist fathering has started to look increasingly complicated to me.

I confess that I feel really quite lost when it comes to applying profeminist values to my relationships with my wife and my son as they are right now. From that perspective, this is an awkward time for me to tackle these ten questions—I’m struggling toward the answers, but don’t yet have good ones, and it’s possible that I never will.

For example, I’m struggling to figure out ways to raise my son in non-sexist environment, to free him from gender roles (or at least teach him to play with those roles instead of locking into them), to see women and men as equal. Again, our efforts are crashing up against the larger culture, and I find myself fretting much more than I would like about the possibility that Liko will be too different from other kids.

For instance, he likes to wear dresses to birthday parties, and we let him. The other parents, even here in San Francisco, raise their eyebrows, and I wonder what they’re thinking, and if we’ll be invited to next year’s birthday party, and I wonder how that will affect Liko. And I feel ashamed and cowardly for wondering. I know I'm not the first, but that's cold comfort.

And then there’s my relationship with my wife—what does it mean to be a profeminist co-parent? What can I do to support her freedom and happiness? Again, in talking about this, I run up against the limits of our privacy. I can only admit here that I struggle with this on a daily basis, and, right now, we both lose more often than we win. This might be the natural condition of the profeminist father.

6. When has identifying as a profeminist father been difficult? Why?

I’ve gotten some shit from the outside world, but I can deal with that. The difficulties I face are internal, and stem primarily from feeling like a hypocrite, when the state of my family falls short of my ideals.

7. Parenthood involves sacrifice, and mothers must typically make more sacrifices than fathers. How do you reconcile that with being profeminist?

I can’t right now. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

8. If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your profeminist fatherhood? What is the impact of your commitment to feminism on your partner and your relationship?

You know, I have no idea how my wife feels about this and I don’t care to speculate in public. It has shaped our relationship in positive ways that I don’t think we always appreciate. Taking the long view, feminism has made it possible for our relationship to have more freedom and flexibility than couples in previous eras could have. In the short run, it has driven me to try to be as involved as possible in care and housework. I can describe my intentions; it’s not for me to say how successful I’ve been in meeting my own standards.

9. If you and your partner practice attachment parenting--such as bed sharing or positive discipline--what challenges, if any, does this pose for your commitment to feminism, and how have you tried to resolve them?

One word: breastfeeding. Nothing has done more to inhibit my involvement with caring for my son. For years—literally, years—Liko couldn’t fall asleep without the breast and would grow more irritable the longer he was separated from it. We both had to struggle—and I struggled hard, believe me, and so did he—for us to develop a direct, day-in-day-out relationship that was not mediated by the breast. I’ll say that the struggle was worth it—over time we’ve developed a close relationship that exists on its own terms. Attachment parenting has been good for our family, but it took longer for Liko and me to find that attachment than it did for him and his mother.

10. Do you feel feminism has failed fathers and, if so, how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given fathers?

“Feminism” is, of course, not monolithic.

I would say that individual feminist thinkers and leaders have certainly failed fathers, in the sense that they have behaved as though fathers don’t matter or don’t exist or can only serve a purely oppressive role within the family. Another group of feminists has actually attacked the emergence of caregiving dads—I submit Linda Hirshman as an example.

But I would describe those two groups as a minority; I think a majority of feminists can foresee a positive role for fathers and, indeed, desperately want to see fatherhood redefined in a positive and progressive way. I don’t think feminism has offered a well-articulated vision of fatherhood, but that’s OK: It really falls to fathers to redefine fatherhood.

This is the great thing that feminism has given fathers: Its success has triggered culture-wide dialogs among men about what a good father should be and do. Feminists themselves are not always comfortable with these arguments, and certainly there has been much to criticize.

But, as an old Bolshevik once said, revolutions don’t happen in velvet boxes. They’re messy, contradictory, sometimes downright revolting—but usually also thrilling and necessary. Women have been rising for over a century, and only recently have men started to really change in response. From that perspective, it’s an exciting time.

This leads me to another thing (returning to the topic of the second question) that has surprised me about fatherhood and feminism: In a perverse way, fatherhood has strengthened my commitment to feminism. By revealing the limits of my good intentions and scope of action, fatherhood has pushed me to seek new answers to feminist questions I thought I had answered in my early twenties, on both personal and political levels.

Fatherhood has also reminded me, in a visceral way, of the inequalities that persist between men and women, and, in particular, the burdens carried by mothers. Those burdens and inequalities shape and poison our most intimate relationships whether we want them to or not.

Here again, feminism is useful for fathers and mothers: It gives us perspective, or it should.

It’s easy to be overcome by day-to-day difficulties and despair of the possibility of changing the balance of power between men and women. But if we lift our eyes and look at the sweep of the past through feminism’s eyes, we can see that the balance of power has changed, on this and many other fronts. History doesn’t stop just because we personally feel stuck. If we look at the lives of the people who came before us, we see that our actions in the present do matter, both our individual choices and the act of speaking out in public.

Finally, returning to question three, fatherhood has changed my relationship with feminism in one other way: If I speak out now, it is with a lot more sadness and less righteousness than I did when I was a college student. At this point, I’ve failed so many times that I can hardly denounce others for their imperfections.

But I still feel like we as fathers need to speak out, even if it’s just to friends or through blogs with a few hundred readers. The alternative is silence—but worse than that, meaninglessness. If I’m going to fail, the failure has to mean something. It has to be recorded (if only for myself), examined, put to use, leveraged, transmuted. Feminism gives us a way to do that, to transform our private pains into social change.

Wife Swap!

This sounds amusing:

IT'S A BATTLE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS WHEN A LIBERAL CHRISTIAN CAREER MOM WHOSE STAY-AT-HOME HUSBAND COOKS AND CLEANS SWAPS LIVES WITH A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN HOUSEWIFE WHO OBEYS HER HUSBAND'S EVERY COMMAND, ON ABC'S "WIFE SWAP"

This week on "Beckman-Heskett/Childs," a theologically liberal high powered corporate executive mother with a stay-at-home husband swaps lives with a born again Christian mom who believes women are created to be men's help-mates, on "Wife Swap."

Each week from across the country, two families with very different values are chosen to take part in a two-week long challenge. The wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover just what it's like to live another woman's life. It's a mind-blowing experiment that often ends up changing their lives forever.

Kim Beckman-Heskett (42) of Colorado is one of only three female vice presidents in her company. She works while her husband, Randall, stays at home and takes care of all of the chores, cooking and cleaning. A former preacher, Randall is now a self-professed modern Renaissance man, artist, poet and mystic who speaks 12 languages and possesses masters and PhD degrees in religion and theology. He is still a man of faith, but is skeptical of others he calls "bible thumpers" after 30 years of preaching and witnessing religious fundamentalism. Both Kim and Randall are devout Christians, but strongly disagree with literal interpretations of the Bible. They have a liberal approach to their faith, and Randall often incorporates humor in his beliefs and prayer. Kim doesn't believe that women should stay at home, "barefoot and pregnant," and encourages daughter Allison (12) and stepdaughter Hannah (12) to follow in her footsteps. The girls aren't required to do chores and are exposed to dating.

Kim travels to Rhode Island, where the Childs are born-again Christians who interpret the bible literally and use it as a guide for life. In the Childs' family constitution, God comes first, husband Christopher comes second. The family have to serve God at all times with a cheerful heart, and they follow the words of scripture to the letter. Lee-Ann is a stay-at-home mom who home schools her children, Laurie (18), Chrissy (18), Coburn (16), Columbia (12), Daisy (10) and Cambria (2). Christopher is an ultra traditionalist father who is head of his household and calls himself the "gatekeeper," setting the rules, enforcing discipline and expecting cheerful obedience. The children all must do a five-minute power clean before Christopher gets home from work. Mom is molding Coburn to be the man of the house so he can provide for a wife and family. As for the girls, she's training them to be stay-at-home moms who will live out God's calling in marriage and motherhood. Dating is not allowed for any of the children. Instead they pray daily for God to send them a spouse when the time is right. Lee-Ann is happy to be her husband's "help-mate," and says that women are the weaker link. The children feel it's ok to be at home as they feel safe, sheltered from the corrupting influences of the outside world.

Haven't seen the episode (don't own a TV!), but from what I've gleaned from the blogosphere, each family came away with strong feelings of disgust for the other. This reminded me of another second-hand description of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days, which had a Christian fundamentalist mom join a household of gay fathers for a month. That's the happy trio above.

My friend Jodi (a fan of 30 Days, which, similar to Wife Swap, specializes in putting social opposites together) says that participants normally come away with newfound respect and compassion for people different from themselves. Not so with the Christian fundamentalist, according to Jodi: She left the gay dad family with her prejudice intact.

"Part of what’s so fascinating about this episode is how this woman, who is clearly neither stupid nor insane, can hold two sets of absolutely contradictory views: that foster care is terrible for kids and that Dennis and Tom are fantastic parents, but that all gay couples, including Dennis and Tom, should not be allowed to adopt, forcing more kids into foster care," writes the entertainment site AfterElton.

I know from a great deal of empirical research that evangelical families are much more flexible on the ground about gender roles that we might expect, with many stay-at-home dads among them--nothing gives me more hope that gender egalitarianism is the wave of the future.

But "evangelical" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different traditions and variations. There is definitely a hardcore of believers who will never accept non-traditional gender roles or the gay and lesbian families in their midst, no matter how much contact they have with each other or what evidence suggests the parents are doing a good job.

Has anyone seen these episodes? Care to comment?

Comment dit-on "stay-at-home dad" en français ?

I think this is real interesting:

The idea of being a stay-at-home dad is five times more popular in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, due in large part to generous parental leave programs available only in that province, a Statistics Canada report released Monday has found.

In 2001, the federal government changed its parental leave program for new parents, increasing the length of government-paid benefits to 35 weeks from 10 weeks and eliminating a second two-week unpaid waiting period for parents sharing the responsibility of staying home with children.

Five years later, Quebec introduced its own parental insurance program as a substitute for the federal program. It offered higher benefits rates and coverage for self-employed workers, eliminated unpaid waiting periods before benefits are paid out, and introduced a five-week leave solely for fathers.

As a result, Statistics Canada saw the number of Quebec men claiming parental benefits nearly double in just one year, jumping to 56 per cent in 2006 from 32 per cent in 2005.

For fathers outside Quebec, participation in the federal program remained constant over three years, at just 11 per cent

Changing Your Name

Lisa Belkin at the NY Times writes on her blog:

One surprise while writing this article [about equally shared parenting] was how most of the women had taken their husband’s last name. While that is clearly the norm in the country as a whole, I would have guessed that this subgroup, which had made equal sharing their priority, would be more likely to keep the name they were born with or create something hyphenated with their spouse.

I also found this to be true of many of the couples I interviewed for my book about reverse-traditional families--in many of them, the breadwinning mom changed her name.

I never asked why, but perhaps I should have. I suspect for many of the couples there's no "why" about it; they just did what was traditional. The fact that they later embraced a reverse-traditional arrangement as parents speaks volumes about the degree to which new gender roles are more of a response to changing social conditions than the product of a left-wing pinko conspiracy.

My wife and I gave our son an awkwardly hyphenated name--his full name is Liko Wai-Kaniela Smith-Doo. Many people consider it noteworthy that we stuck her name at the very end, and I had the impression it was important to my wife, but I just thought "Smith-Doo" sounded marginally better than "Doo-Smith." Neither of us even considered just giving him my name. We married a year after he was born (that's us, below, getting hitched) and decided to just keep our separate names. "Jeremy Adam Smith-Doo" just didn't do it for me.



One interesting nuance in this discussion: I've encountered many lesbian couples (OK, three lesbian couples) who gave the name of the non-biological mom to the child, as a way of establishing the parental relationship. This makes sense and casts a new light on the tradition of giving the father's name to a child--since the child wasn't born of his body, perhaps it's culturally important to provide a personal and social link between the two of them.

So I'm curious: How did your family come up with its last names, and why?

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.

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[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.