Daddy Dialectic: The Interview

Back in April, Chicago Pop and I were interviewed by the blog Whinydad about Daddy Dialectic. Since this is a slow week here at DD and since there's a lot here that might be of interest to DD readers (both of you!), I'm reposting it:

WhinyDad: What was the biggest challenge to starting and continuing Daddy Dialectic?

Jeremy Adam Smith: The biggest challenge was translating my life into writing. I had been a writer for many years before I became a dad, but I mostly wrote about books, authors, and ideas for publications like The Nation, The Bay Guardian and the SF Chronicle. I was good at dissecting big ideas, but bad at dissecting my own (and other people's) feelings and experiences.

And yet when I became primary caregiver for my son, I found it to be really emotionally challenging, and I wanted to write about that as a way of trying to understand how I was changing. At the same time, I was fascinated by the social world of parenting and where I fit in as a caregiving father, and I wanted to understand the forces that shaped that world. I started researching the family — psychology, anthropology, history, biology, all of it. I used my experience to illuminate and guide the research, and I used the research to illuminate my life. I read during my son's naps; I read early in the morning, before he woke, and late at night, after he went to bed. I really put myself through several graduate-level courses in family studies.

I couldn't relate at all to the parenting magazines out there, but one day I did a Google search for "stay at home dad" and discovered this world of dad blogs, as well as smart, progressive mom blogs. I saw my life reflected in those, and I learned a lot. It took about a week for me to realize that I could start my own blog without too much trouble.

I tried to write when I got the time, in early-morning or late-night snatches. I discovered that blogging is really an ideal vehicle for writing when you're being constantly interrupted by a crying baby. My posts are still just a series of rough drafts; I think of the blog as a notebook. I've since turned many posts into magazine articles or integrated their ideas and information into my book. In the blog I try to be aggressive and adventurous and experimental. As a result, sometimes I am just wrong or off-beat — but I really try to listen to my reader's feedback. Some comments on the blog changed my ideas, or pointed me in new directions, or helped me to understand my life as a father better. I'm very grateful to my readers.

WD: Why and how did DD evolve from a lone blogger?

JAS: I wasn't seeing very many blogs out there trying to do the same thing I was trying to do at Daddy Dialectic — that is, writing thoughtful, introspective posts based on experience and evidence. I wanted a blog that tried to capture complexity and contradiction, intellect and emotion. I started to realize that were other dads out there who shared my sensibility and I thought that my blog might be a forum for different voices and get us talking to each other. Also, my role in my family was changing: my son got older and went to preschool, and I started work as senior editor of Greater Good magazine and I got a contract for my book Twenty-First-Century Dad. But I still wanted to keep that stay-at-home dad voice and continue to explore those issues, even as I moved on with my life and into a new stage of fatherhood.

And so I carefully sought out dads who might contribute. Some of them, like Chip, I found in the blogosphere; others, like Chicago Pop, I ran across in real life.

WD: Chicago Pop, recently you credited your dad with great philosophical wisdom when he said "it's fun" to have kids. Was that a guiding principle when you began blogging?

Chicago Pop: Not at all. I've only begun to realize how fun it is, and how right my father was.

WD: How much of your dad is in the blog?

CP: More than I even know. Being a parent is like going forward and backward in time, all at once. I am learning to be a father while remembering I was a child, and remembering my childhood father now that I am

WD: What have you written that you think might "horribly" embarrass your son years from now when he search engines it — or calls it up in whatever manner then exists?

CP: Nothing yet; once he hits puberty, everything; when he's 30, probably nothing

JAS: Tough to say. I've written about his imaginary characters; that might be embarrassing, but he also might think it's cool. Frankly, I hope he does read about my experiences as his caregiver, warts and all, because I want him to be a caregiver someday and I want him to be prepared for it. I've also written about how much I love him. That might embarrass him. Actually, I think Chicago Pop has the best answer to this question.

WD: Other than sometimes as subject, how does your child influence your writing?

JAS: He reminds me of my own fallibility. I try so hard to be a good parent, but I sometimes fail, and sometimes I feel so right about something but then later it turns out that I had it all completely wrong. It's important for a writer to remember that. Of course, you can come to believe too much in your own fallibility; I have to refrain from beating myself up all the time. You just have to do your best and hope for the best, but remember that you're not perfect and try to keep on learning. That sounds a bit like a cliché, but I think it's a good guideline for life.

WD: What is the most important thing you've learned about being a dad from working on the site?

JAS: I've learned that I have a lot in common with other parents; I get this from real life, too, but you can go much deeper in writing than in casual conversation. Paradoxically, I've also learned in a deep way that parents are different, and different things work for different people.

WD: Daddy Dialectic seems more political than most SAHD or Dadbloggers. Do you think it is a fair assessment and was it a conscious choice when you began?

JAS: I've always been involved with politics and that didn't change when I became a parent … well, I did become less politically involved, but my values didn't change. To me, parenting intersects with every sphere of life, including politics. Nobody parents in a vacuum. It's a social activity, and our choices are shaped by economic and political forces. Take, for example, parental leave: many dads aren't able to take time off after the birth of their child, they have to go right back to work. This hurts their relationship with the mother as well with as the kids. Parental leave for fathers is a political issue, because employers and their allies in Congress have battled against it tooth and nail for decades.

So if we want men to be better, more involved fathers, we need parental leave and we also need more flexible workplace policies for both men and women. Some people claim that dads won't take leave even when it's offered, but we know when it's been offered in places like Germany and Sweden and Quebec, men have indeed taken it and gotten more involved with their families. These changes didn't happen overnight. Public policy has to change, but so has the culture of the workplace and the way couples relate to each other, and the way extended families relate to couples. When bosses take leave, so will employees. When grandparents and aunts and uncles are supportive of dad's involvement, dads will be more involved.

Right now, the pressure goes the other way, to make more money. Until that changes, fear and anxiety will drive the choices that fathers make, and they bring that home with them. I want every father, both caregivers and breadwinners, to stand up together and for government and workplaces to recognize the essential role they play for their children and the mothers. I think this is a fight for both moms and dads together, not apart.

WD: Which are the two or three most interesting dadblogs ... other than yours?

JAS: I like Rebeldad for its consistent coverage of fatherhood issues. I love Lesbian Dad and Doodaddy for being so honest and real. I also really enjoy Rice Daddies. Equally Shared Parenting also has a lot of useful things to say, and Evolution of Dad is probably the closest blog out there to Daddy Dialectic's sensibility.

It's not a blog and it's not for dads, but I've always thought Mothers Movement Online has really smart coverage of parenting issues. I think dads can learn a lot from reading it.

I should also note that the Center for Law and Social Policy and the Council on Contemporary Families both do really important research and outreach.

That's more than two or three, I'm afraid. I could list even more.

WD: A few words on how you'll continue to cure the planet of evil?

JAS: There's a huge gap between public policy and the way people live in this country. Policy is designed to support suburban heterosexual male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families. But families today are very diverse. Most moms work; there are stay-at-home dads and highly involved fathers. There are gay and lesbian families. The divorce rate is falling, but it's still high and still a part of the landscape, and so are step families. And many people today have children without ever getting married. As the historian Stephanie Coontz once pointed out to me, policy needs to help these families to leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

I think MomsRising deserves a lot of support, though they do not recognize the stake dads have in their issues. They say they do, but I don't think they really get it. I know they started a companion project for all parents, but to me it feels like a token effort — sort of like those "parenting" magazines that are written from a mom's POV but toss in an occasional article designed to appeal to some stereotypical dad: the articles assume dad is an idiot who can't cook and doesn't know how to do the laundry, but here's a few helpful tips on how to manage the big lug. Well, not every dad is like that, and many dads have a strong interest and stake in the issues championed by MomsRising.

Still, I agree with every change they are advocating for, and, of course, it's true that dads have not started a parallel organization of their own — not one that's claimed wide support, anyway.

Fathers, I think, are either more prone to wrestle with these issues on an individual level or they are more likely to work on these issues through larger organizations like labor unions. To move men, I think the advocacy language needs to be crafted to appeal to a sense of self-reliance. It also needs to come from a position of respect for fatherhood and assume that fathers are looking out for their families instead of their social dominance as men. In other words, you have to appeal to their better natures and provide some hope and role models, not beat them over the head with the manifold failures of mankind. I think an advocacy organization for fathers will need to recognize this, if it to be successful. I wish the Democratic Party was more progressive on families. They're really not. They don't want to offend constituencies that think things went downhill after the 1950s.

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?

Yee Haw! Father's Day Media Round-Up!

Better Fathers: Courtesy of the Sexual Revolution: "Little attention has been paid to the impact that women's liberation has had on men. The unacknowledged truth is that men have been transformed too. Today, men have more freedom, flexibility and choices -- in the most meaningful ways."

When Mom and Dad Share It All: "Gender should not determine the division of labor at home. It’s a message consistent with nearly every major social trend of the past three decades — women entering the work force, equality between the sexes, the need for two incomes to pay the bills, even courts that favor shared custody after divorce. And it is what many would agree is fair, even ideal. Yet it is anything but the norm."

First-time dads have a few more gray hairs: "I've interviewed many people who became parents in their 30s and 40s who said that parenthood revealed to them how selfish and silly they had been in their teens and 20s - and I think that definitely applies to me."

When moms criticize, dads back off of baby care: "Both partners have moments of uncertainty over making the right decision for their child. But it may be that some dads need a little extra cheerleading is because, culturally, the father's role in caring for an infant isn't as well-defined as the mother's."

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage: "A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships."

When Father's Day is a double celebration: "Devin and Geoffery, both 44, can celebrate Father’s Day on Sunday secure in the knowledge that their ranks are growing. Gay, lesbian and bisexual people across the nation are pushing for parental rights and increasingly are seen as a valuable resource by the child welfare system in dealing with the tens of thousands of American children who need foster and adoptive homes."

My life as a stay-at-home dad: "One day I noticed something different. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't bored. I was a dad. I don't know when it happened or why. Perhaps, I just needed time to adjust to the new me, the stay-at-home dad."

Obama's Father's Day Speech: "He did it in front of a black crowd, and it was the right thing to say. But reporters need to stop acting like this dude is the only civilized black man in the world." See follow-up post here: "My heroes in this business are virtually all white (how many black people are doing long-form journalism these days? I'm still stuck on Baldwin)... And yet so often, these same writers whose minds are so nimble and nuanced, go rigor mortis when it comes to black people. I don't get it."

Why Obama and Cosby comparisons are annoying: "There is no doubt that Obama’s speech was tailored for his black audience, however his lessons are not limited to them. The importance that he gives to higher expectations, increased responsibility and teaching children empathy and self-respect are lessons that all can take away—black, white or brown. Unlike Cosby whose arguments are clearly framed as a problem restricted to the black community."

Spot Hits the Beach: A Father's Day Tribute

In honor of Father's Day, being a father now, and doing my best to do as my father himself had done, I thought it appropriate to put my family through a sort of major fiasco in the way that only fathers know how to do, generally ensuring, as a result, that whatever form of recreation was attempted during the fiasco is subsequently avoided by all the other family members for the rest of their lives.

So we went to the beach.

The tell-tale warning signs of a fiasco were all there, had I cared to notice them: a few hissed and disparaging remarks about "sand" from Spot's mom; the fact that Spot responded to the sand in the sandbox as if it were a kind of flesh-eating rash that had to be scraped off immediately; and that morning's Weather Channel radar displaying a pastel colored band of tornado-spawning storms, roughly three states wide, bearing due east upon the lower Great Lakes region from somewhere in Nebraska.

It is from volatile conditions such as these that the true family fiasco is made.

So we get to the beach, which is a place we here in the Midwest call The Dunes. Properly speaking, it's not a beach, really, it's much wilder than that, though there are no sharks, and it is interspersed with power plants and steel mills.

If you hit the Dunes on a day when a strong wind is blowing onto the Lake from the shore, which is relatively rare, the effect is one of a sandstorm, a cloud of fine grain that rushes toward the water at up to six inches in elevation. Since Spot himself doesn't rise that much more than six inches in elevation, he wasn't too keen on this phenomenon. So mom sat down with her back to the wind and formed a shelter in which he wailed for the next 45 minutes.



Perhaps a trip to water's edge with Dad might help things? After all, that's what we came for, fun in the water. Up and over to the waves we go, mild waves, but still noisy and much more violent than the ones Spot makes in his bathtub. I can only attempt a crude, but honest, translation of Spot's reaction as we approached them:

motherfuckerstopstopstopmotherfuckerwhatareyoudoingstopthisisbullshitstoooop!

Discouraged, I returned Spot in the shelter of his mom, where he wailed some more in the sandstorm, and the mixture of sunscreen and makeup on my wife's face began to liquefy into a whitish substance with the consistency of Hollandaise sauce. I swam out to the sandbar and back, did this again, and even thought about running down the beach for a few miles.

But I had to check on Spot first. "How's he doing?"

"He's really not enjoying this. I think I'm ready to go."

"You're sure? Some women pay hundreds of dollars to get exfoliated at the spa, you're getting it for free."

"I think it's time to go." That was it. Spot's mom had raised the red buoy. Out of the water.

It is in the nature of The Fiasco -- and it shares this in common with The Wild Goose Chase -- that Dad usually enjoys himself almost to the end, up to a certain point when he realizes that he has alienated absolutely everyone around him, and when he has to admit that reality didn't conform to his fantasy in some way, that maybe Spot won't be the little beach comber companion that he secretly hopes for, maybe he'll be like all the other videodrome joystick babies that won't be able to tell which way is north, or the difference between a maple and an oak tree. Mom is already a lost cause, she hates the beach, we conveniently forgot that fact, and probably will again, but she's never coming back. But Spot?

"I think it's time to go," said Spot's mom again.

Indeed, it was. It was getting dark out, a line of heavy gray clouds appeared on the western horizon, and within 30 minutes, the Upper Midwest was sacked with the latest in an unending series of downpours. Visibility on the road fell to 20 or 30 feet. I can only imagine what it was back on the beach. We crawled home along the southern toe of Lake Michigan at 35 miles an hour.

But at least we had an hour on the beach. And just before we left, in the shady picnic area, off the beach and out of the wind, Spot had regained his composure, began circling the picnic table and waving his spoon, erring in widening loops towards the edge of the woods. What was back there, anyway? Surely a curious tot would want to know. Next time, we'll find out. If Spot's mom lets us.

How to Reclaim Father's Day from Ties and Work

The other night, we had a wonderful “celebrating parents” event at Book Zoo in Oakland, California. It was amazing to see so many kids running around, parents relaxing, and parent allies enjoying the stories the readers shared with the audience. We fantasized about doing a reading and softball game next year…..

One of the things I shared from rad dad 7 was a list of ways fathers (and others) can fight patriarchy. Feel free to add more things and I’ll include them in the next issue of rad dad…Here it is:


Things Fathers (or really anyone) can do to challenge Patriarchy

1. Remind yourself and others that parenting does not equal mothering.
2. Wear your baby in a sling.
3. Take your kids with you everywhere you can—grocery stores, errands, to your place of work, Sunday afternoon celebrations, meetings
4. Believe in other men’s ability to parent. Talk to other men about fathering.
5. Vocalize your support of breastfeeding moms
6. Consider being a stay at home dad.
7. Take any parent infant class you are interested in. Be proactive in your parenting.
8. Talk to your kids about gender, class, and racial privilege. Be proactive in addressing the subtle ways these things are taught to your kids.
9. Start a new dad’s group, one where you take the baby with you.
10. Volunteer to help set up child care in the organizations you are a part of.
11. Ask others, especially non-parents, to help. Be a parent ally!
12. Make a point to ask if there are changing tables in the men’s restrooms everywhere you go.
13. Fight gendered parental roles – make dinner, do the laundry, mop the floors, clean the bathroom, watch the kids.
14. Combat images of bumbling fathers in the media. Talk to your kids as you encounter these stereotypes ala “Daddy Day Care,” “Mr. Mom,” “The Pacifier,” “Big Daddy.”
15. And, of course, write for Rad Dad as well as create your own fathering/parenting projects. And invite others to participate.

Evolution of Dad

Dana Glazer is a New Jersey-based documentary filmmaker. His film, The Evolution of Dad, is due out on Father's Day 2010, and here's a trailer:



I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Also: If you live in the Bay Area, I'll be joining Rad Dad tonight (Thursday, June 12th) in celebrating "the pleasures, pains, and politics of parenting." The reading will be held at 7:30 at Book Zoo, 6395 Telegraph Ave at Alcatraz Ave, in Oakland, California. Open mic to follow. If you're a Daddy Dialectic reader, say hello.

Father's Day Books!

It's an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children's books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children's books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children.

No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids and there’s no point in nursing a sense of grievance over the invisibility of fathers in children’s books.

But where does that leave families who don't fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?

There are books out there, few and far between, that depict dads as co-parents and primary caregivers. In an effort to find them, I consulted bookstores in San Francisco as well as my local children’s librarian.

My list is not exhaustive; these are only the ones I can recommend, and there are many titles I found online that I wasn’t able to read in real life. And because these kinds of books are so rare, I’m willing to bet that there are plenty out there that few people know about.

I look forward to reading your own suggestions!

My list is arranged according to target age, from youngest to oldest:

Mama’s Home! By Paul Vos Benkowski, illustrated by Jennifer Herbert (Chronicle Books, 2004; ages 1-3): I bought this board book, which tells the story of a stay-at-home dad and toddler waiting for mom to come home from work, for Liko when I was taking care of him. It turned out to be a genuine comfort for him to read (over and over!) in the hour before his own mom came home from work, and he delighted in the simple, fanciful storyline: “Is that Mama? / No, that’s not Mama….that’s just a pirate ship.” Strongly recommended.

Kisses for Daddy, by Frances Watts and David Legge (Little Hare Books, 2005; for ages 1-5, I’d say): This is a simple, lightweight picture book with bears, whose title pretty much says it all.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George, by Margaret and H.A. Rey (Houghton Mifflin, 1941-1966; ages 1-5): Is the Man with the Yellow Hat the equivalent of George’s father? If not that, I’m not sure what he is.

Daddy’s Lullaby, by Tony Bradman, illustrated by Jason Cockcroft (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2001; ages 2-5): Dad comes home late from work and sings a lullaby to his baby. A very tender book, which shows a working Dad in a caring role.

My Dad, by Anthony Browne (FSG, 2000; ages 2-5): With one or two lines of text per page, the goofy pictures dominate. Dad (in a bathrobe, PJs, and slippers) engages in various fantastical adventures, from jumping over the moon to singing opera with Pavarotti. Silly and sweet.

A Father’s Song, by Janet Lawler, paintings by Lucy Corvino (Sterling, 2006; ages 3-6): A simple, somewhat solemn verse story about a father and son’s day in the park, beautifully illustrated.

Mama’s Coming Home, by Kate Banks, pictures by Tomek Bogacki (FSG, 2003; ages 3-6): Similar to Mama’s Home (above), a solid and heartfelt portrait of a reverse-traditional family in action. Dad and the kids clean up, cook dinner, and set the table, as a parallel narrative shows Mom trudging through sleeting rain and New York subway stations on her way home from work. Especially recommended.

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by Mo Willems (Hyperion, 2004; ages 2-6): Why is this story such an instant classic? There's something about Willems's tone, pacing, and combination of words and pictures that kids think is tons of fun, and I confess this is one of the books I most look forward to reading to Liko. Don't miss the sequel, Knuffle Bunny Too. Willems's daughter shares a name with the protagonist of his books, and these stories feel like mini-memoirs, depicting a dad who shares life with his growing little girl.

Daddy Calls Me Man, by Angela Johnson, paintings by Rhonda Mitchell (Orchard Books, 1997; ages 3-6): Dad doesn’t actually appear until near the end. And yet I think every previous page points to that moment, as a little boy paints a picture of everything that’s most important to him.

Papa, Do You Love Me? By Barbara M. Joosse, illustrated by Barbara Lavallee (Chronicle Books, 2005; ages 3-6): A father in a Kenyan village tells his son how much he loves him. This is a lovely book; the images in the words might be even more evocative than those in the pictures.

Tell Me One Thing, Dad, by Tom Pow, illustrated by Ian Andrew (Candlewick Press, 2004; ages 3-7): Dad reads Molly a story, but she’s not sleepy yet. She asks to hear one thing he knows about polar bears, crocodiles, and so on; at the end, Molly tells Dad things that she knows about him. This is a gentle, unusually paced, and interestingly illustrated story.

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, illustrated by Henry Cole (Simon & Schuster, 2005; ages 3-7): This picture book tells the somewhat-true story of Roy and Silo, two boy penguins in Central Park Zoo who shacked up together and adopted a baby penguin of their own, named Tango. And Tango Makes Three isn’t a boring “message” book that tries to teach your kids to be tolerant. It’s genuinely fun for kids to read. Gay dads might also want to check out Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite.

A Father Like That, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (HarperCollins, 2008; ages 3-7): This picture book is actually about a boy who doesn’t have a father, but fantasizes about all the things they’d do together if Dad was around. In the end, his mom assures the boy that while he might never have the dad he wants, he could grow up to be the father he imagines. Yes, it’s somewhat depressing, and yet I think this could be a great Father’s Day gift for boys who really don’t have a dad in the picture. Single moms raising boys, take note.

Finally, for older kids, I’d like to mention Danny, Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake (Knopf, 1975; ages 8-12): “When I was four months old, my mother died suddenly and my father was left to look after me all by himself,” says the narrator, Danny. “There was just the two of us, my father and me.” This is a beautifully told, amusingly imaginative, politically radical, and profoundly emotional tale of a son’s devotion to his father and a father’s devotion to his son. I read this out loud to my 3 year old. He followed the story and liked the characters and incidents, especially the bit when 9-year-old Danny drives a car. However, the plot is driven by the father’s desire to poach a rich man’s pheasants, which was too far outside of Liko’s experience for him to find it interesting. But this book is an outlaw classic that older kids (boys especially) may find evocative and thrilling.

The issue is power

From the June 5 New York Times:

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine.

The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

For instance, the widest racial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, with a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rate. But the country’s lowest rate for blacks — 48 percent in California — was 24 percentage points below the highest rate — 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics were for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005.

I automatically related this to more research showing the degree to which feelings of powerlessness affects health:

Research shows that members of poor communities do not merely experience higher levels of violence; they are also more likely to have high blood pressure and frequent periods of increased heart rate, which contribute to a higher mortality rate. What's more, similar health problems have been shown to afflict the least powerful members of nonhuman primate species. Taken together, these and other findings suggest that the psychology of powerlessness can wreak havoc on people who sit low on the totem pole of any social structure.

"Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money", says Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University. "It's about the stressors caused in a society that tolerates leaving so many of its members so far behind."

Which made me think of this:

According to a study by the Families and Work Institute, a decade ago, 27 percent of employers offered fully, paid six-week maternity leaves. Today, just 16 percent do, which means fewer working mothers can now afford any leave at all.

"I had my son on Thursday and, on Monday, I had to go back to work," said Selena Allen, a 30-year-old mother who was working at a non-profit agency near Seattle when she had a baby five years ago.

No paid maternity leave for Allen meant leaving her premature son, Conor, in the hospital for weeks without being able to care for him.

"I was an emotional wreck, I was devastated, but in order to feed my family, I had no other option," Allen said.

Parental leave is usually framed as an issue of equity and work/life balance, but, ultimately, it's a mental and physical health issue, for both parents and children. It's also an issue of power: If poor and working- and middle-class parents had more of it, you can bet we'd see policies that benefit their health. The evidence is clear: The absence of those policies is harmful.

The Next President of the United States

Or at least, I hope so.

Dropping the Baby

Today, the family spent most of the afternoon together at the playground. We enjoyed the late spring sunshine, Spot met a little girl with a lollipop, and mom and dad schmoozed with other parents, some known, some unknown. Back home, we hung out upstairs and got Spot ready for bed.

All together, in the course of the afternoon, my wife dropped the baby twice.

I should clarify: Spot's mom didn't really "drop" the baby, as you would "drop" a ball. She just "dropped the ball," as it were, in a way that exposed Spot to some of the more powerful forces of nature. Like gravity.

But before I get to gravity, I should mention convection. In terms of fluid dynamics, it's what makes Chicago the windy city, and the atmospheric turbulence of our continental geography is only aggravated by the presence of irregularly-spaced tall buildings. In this kind of environment, it's easy for an untethered stroller to be transformed into a four-masted schooner by a sudden gust.

This is what happened when Spot's mom decided to duck into a new popcorn store down the block. She rolled Spot up in front of the display window, full of caramel and buttered popcorn, and went in. The dog and I colonized a nearby parking meter. I noticed she hadn't put on the stroller brakes.

It took about 10 seconds for the stroller to start moving eastward along the sidewalk, more or less in the direction of Lake Michigan, rolling about 6 feet before Spot's mom reemerged. She saw it blowing away, charting a straight course for America's longest lake, and managed to grab it. I mentioned the thing about stroller brakes and schooners.

The gravity incident came much later, long after the popcorn store and the girl with the lollipop, who I have since convinced myself will be Spot's first great romance. I turned Spot over to Mom for the evening wind-down, as I do every night. A few moments later, Spot launched himself off the bed, just when Spot's mom wasn't looking, and accomplished a resounding face-plant on the carpet floor.

Wailing ensued. "That was my fault," said Spot's Mom, as the comforting began. "Yeah, it was," I agreed. I decided at that moment that, due to her poor parenting skills, I could no longer leave my wife alone and unsupervised with Spot.

The irony of this story is that, until today, Spot's Mom probably thought the same thing about me. In fact, the sum total of today's Spot damage probably puts her about even with Dad in our 16 months of reverse-traditional parenting. It was only a month ago, after all, that I gave my son a gratuitous fat lip, and a sizable abrasion across his nose, all of which he was able to proudly display, fresh and swollen, on his first day of toddler playgroup an hour later. And this because I hadn't properly balanced Spot in his backpack as I leaned him against a tree. Stuck in Dad's contraption, he fell face-forward, like a bookcase in an earthquake.

So who's the worse parent, Mom or Dad? Believe it or not, that's a question I hardly ever ask myself, because it's clear there is no answer. Despite the statistically unusual cluster of Mom's lapses today, I still have the deepest confidence in her ability to take care of Spot. We all drop the ball once in a while. Occasionally, we drop it a few times in a row.

But what did come home to me was the fact that, at the end of many days, in which the likelihood of many such mishaps presents itself, many parents will successfully prevent a lot of them from ever happening. Inevitably, however, there will be a few that get past the safety net. With another parent around -- or just another caring body -- that person may be able to spot the mishap before it happens, intervene as it's happening, or catch it before it gets too bad. And even if that other person can't do any of the above, they can stick around to help make it better.

At the very least, I feel better knowing I have some solid backup for the times when, despite all my best efforts, I drop the baby.

Would You Marry This Man?

Here's a nice post from the blog, "Knocked Up (and in Law School)" about the benefits of co-parenting:

I have heard many women say that a father could just never love a child the way a mother does, and can't take care of them the way a mother does either. I don't believe that's true at all, and I think it's disrespectful to all the men who are spectacular parents. And I want to know why no one tries to make men feel guilty because they work outside the home? That's the real question. Why does Law School Mom state that it matters whether she or a nanny takes her kids to school, but makes no mention of her husband in that scenario? Why do we as mothers put all of the guilt on ourselves (and on other women) instead of equally between both parents? Why is his career important, not to be inconvenienced by taking care of children, but hers isn't? Why is she a bad mother for working, but he's a good father for providing for his family? These double-standards are harmful for all parents, and perhaps the work environment for all parents, not just women, would improve if society expected men to take a more active role in all aspects of parenting, instead of viewing it as an abomination. Just because I'm the one with the uterus doesn't mean all of the responsibilities of child-rearing fall on me. Having full responsibility ends at delivery.

To Husband and I, co-parenting means both of us being equally responsible for the care of our child. When Cora was born, Husband took a nine week paternity leave to take care of her. When I started back to school full time four weeks after she was born, he got up with her during the night, and cared for her during the times I was in class. I don't feel like I'm a bad mother and not bonding with my child because my husband does an equal share of the parenting, and sometimes even more than half. Since he went back to work, I'm on my own three nights a week. He takes over when he gets home from work in the morning and lets me get a little more sleep. On the days he doesn't work, he takes care of Cora during the day while I'm either in class or at work, and gets up with her at night if she wakes up. He takes her to all of her doctor's appointments, whereas I handle all the bill paying/fighting with Evil Health Insurance Company and Incompetent Medical Billing Agencies. We divide the tasks that way because those are our areas of expertise, and because that's what our schedules allow, not because any gender role dictates as such.

The Dad Jeans Problem

One of two things has happened since I bought my last pair of jeans a few years ago.

Either a) I have experienced a late-onset growth spurt, in which an elongation of my lower spine has increased the distance between my crotch and waist, making it impossible to insert myself into a pair of men's jeans without damaging my genitalia, or b) the corporate couturiers at GAP have decided that I, almost-40-full-time-father-of-one, need to wear my jeans about an inch below the crack of my ass.

And so a quiet revolution has transpired: I've given up jeans. More than that: I've passionately rejected them. They can go to hell. I've switched entirely to chinos. It's not a perfect solution, but it's no longer the anatomical crisis it was shaping up to be. And it most certainly marks the end of a long, denim-clad era.

It wasn't an easy process. At the end of it, I basically gave the finger to the GAP-J.Crew-Express-Levis-Diesel global conglomerate dedicated to making men look like this:


Now, one of the privileges of youth is to freely choose to look like a fool, but not really know it; one of the privileges of maturity is to know that young people look like fools, several decades before they figure it out for themselves, as they inevitably will when they consult their yearbooks at future high-school reunions.

But to stick to my point: it seems to me that there is a dad jeans problem. It arises when you reach that fork in the road between low-rider/girl jeans, or boxy jeans with the capacious fly that zips up to your navel. I didn't like the choices, so I opted out of the game.

This is interesting only because it allows me to challenge the notion of mommy particularism. What is mommy particularism? It's the idea that, to paraphrase my wife, there is a certain unspoken social threshold with moms beyond which men (or dads) just can't pass, because they don't get certain things.


"So there's an analogy to the problem of moms and mom jeans," I propose, thinking this might help close the phenomenological gulf between motherhood and fatherhood.

"There's no analogy. You don't want to look like the guy in the picture. You're happy with your chinos. The mom doesn't want to wear mom jeans because it means she's not sexy anymore."

"But the common problem," I reply as our dialectic unfolds, "is that neither the mom nor the dad can find jeans that fit once they hit parenthood. So their fashion changes and it's a rite of passage. They're squeezed out of one style and can't stand the prospect of fitting into another."

She's still not convinced. I could have gone to L.L. Bean, I remind her. I could have walked into Eddie Bauer and come out looking like George Costanza. I could have gone for the full-comfort, baggy crotch in powder blue. Part of me still wants to. Her friends would be pulling her over and asking, "What happened?" and she would then understand the problem of dad jeans.

The controversy was settled the other day with a late-morning trip to "the mall," where Spot's mom saw for herself the reality of the dad jeans problem.

But it's not really the dad jeans problem I care about, since I've found my "third way", my chinos. What I care about is throwing another bridge between the allegedly separate spheres of mothers and fathers, comfortable in their mommy ghettos and daddy ghettos, talking about things that only authentic members of each ghetto can understand.

But the mom jeans-dad jeans problem can't be segregated.

The issue is not the jeans problem in and of itself. The jeans problem clearly transcends gender lines. The issue is who we decide we're going to discuss the problem with.

Baby Bonding

The Baby Bonding Book for Dads takes dads step by step through a child's developmental stages and suggests ways for them to bond with their children at each one. Written by husband-and-wife team James di Properzio and Jennifer Margulis, with photos (three at left) by Christopher Briscoe, this new book reminded me (once again) how much fatherhood has changed over the past century.

It's easy to take the changes for granted, and many people do. A century ago--a quarter-century ago, even--an ideological concrete barrier with barbed wire on top divided fathers from infants and toddlers. In real life, the wall was breached every day. Fathers have always cared for children. But the barrier I'm talking about was was real and it did shape men's caregiving behavior.

Today, that barrier is dissolving. When The Baby Bonding Book for Dads urges the new father to "take off your shirt, pick your baby up in just his diaper, and hold him," the authors are tapping a sensual dimension of fatherhood that was once taboo. This book very much assumes involved fatherhood is the healthy norm, and that's nothing but good.

This slim little book is designed to be a gift book and it is, essentially, a pep talk for new and almost-new fathers. Most of the dads reading this blog entry will never read The Baby Bonding Book themselves. But they might buy it for a baby shower, and I think they should. Remember how ignorant you were, before your child was born? We as parents know that nothing really prepares you for the experience of becoming a parent (how often have those cliched words been uttered?) but it only helps when almost-dads get tools like The Baby Bonding Book that help them to imagine themselves as fathers.

My one serious complaint about The Baby Bonding Book is that its pictures do not depict fathers of color in any substantial way. There is one photo of a visibly African-American hand holding a baby foot, and two pictures of African-American babies (one of whom is alone and the other is being held by a white father, which is interesting), and one dad who may or may not be Asian, I couldn't tell for sure. But overall the book portrays fatherhood as strictly a Euro-American affair.

I don't write this to self-righteously condemn the authors and photographer. I'm guilty of my own biases and I get called on them from time to time. Some will accuse me of just being politically correct for raising this point. To which I say: Sticks and stones, etc. We live in a multiracial America; many of us are part of multiracial families. Hell, the next President is (I hope) going to be biracial. The quicker we all start thinking multiracially, the better. It's a practical matter, and a moral one. And I think The Baby Bonding Book for Dads would have only benefited from embracing that perspective.

Otherwise, I recommend it as a gift for new dads. And you can buy it here.

The Real Boy Crisis II

A follow-up from the New York Times on yesterday's post. Is a college degree overrated? asks David Leonardt. His answer is worth quoting at length:

There has been an enormous natural experiment on precisely this subject over the last few decades. In the experiment, one big group of Americans has become vastly more educated, while another group has not. The two have created an excellent case study.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s refer to the first group as “women” and the second as “men.”

From the founding of the country’s first (all-male) colleges in the 17th century until just a few decades ago, men received far more education than women. But the two sexes have now switched places in a remarkably short time.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about one out of every three young men got a bachelor’s degree. In the years that followed, the share fell somewhat, both because Vietnam War draft deferrals were no longer an issue and because college became more expensive. In the 1980s and 1990s, the share rose again.

But the shifts have been fairly small. For the last four decades, somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of men have graduated from a four-year college by the time they turned 35 years old.

The story is quite different for women. In the 1960s, only 25 percent received a college degree. Among today’s young women almost 40 percent will end up with one. At one commencement ceremony after another this month — be it at Boston College, San Francisco State University or Colby College — women in caps and gowns outnumber men.

The relevant question is how much of a return women have gotten on their education. And the answer isn’t especially subtle. The return has been enormous.

Armed with college degrees, large numbers of women have entered fields once dominated by men. Nearly half of new doctors today are women, up from just 1 of every 10 in the early 1970s. In all, the average inflation-adjusted weekly pay of women has jumped 26 percent since 1980.

And men? Their pay has increased about as much as their college graduation rate — it’s up just 1 percent since 1980.

Education obviously isn’t the only reason. Gender discrimination has become less prevalent in recent decades, and today’s female college graduates are less likely than their mothers and grandmothers to choose modest-paying jobs, like teaching. The decline of manufacturing jobs, meanwhile, has disproportionately hurt men. But research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn of Cornell suggests that, over the past two decades, education played the biggest role in narrowing the pay gap.

There are two statistics that I think do a particularly good job of capturing this point. The first shows that the gap between the pay of men and women with college degrees hasn’t budged over the last 15 years. Full-time female workers with a bachelor’s degree made 75 percent as much as their male counterparts in 1992 — and 75 percent as much in 2007.

Women still face discrimination, after all, and they’re still more likely than men to become teachers. More women also choose jobs that trade some pay for flexibility and reasonable hours. (Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing or neither needs to be a subject for another day.)

Yet even though the pay gap among college graduates hasn’t changed, the overall pay gap between men and women has continued to close in the last 15 years. That’s because so many more women have become college graduates and earned the pay premium that a degree really does bring. Across the whole work force, full-time women made 79 percent as much as full-time men last year, up from 75 percent in 1992.

To put it another way, women would have made almost no progress in narrowing the gender pay gap over this period if they hadn’t been so thoroughly trouncing men in the classroom.

And it’s not as if women’s gains have come at the expense of men. By becoming more educated — and able to do more productive, higher-wage jobs — women have increased the size of the economic pie. The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”

The Real Boy Crisis

Two, seemingly contradictory, articles:

1) The New York Times reports:

The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity, has turned its attention to debunking the idea of a “boys’ crisis.”

“Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense,” says a new report by the group, to be released on Tuesday in Washington.

Echoing research released two years ago by the American Council on Education and other groups, the report says that while girls have for years graduated from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, the largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels...

The report points out that a greater proportion of men and women than ever before are graduating from high school and earning college degrees. But, it says, “perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.”

2) Then I read this piece in Business Week:

They eat from the same dishes and sleep in the same beds, but they seem to be operating in two different economies. From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not.

What's going on? Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst — manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care.

This situation is hardly good news for women, though. While they're getting more jobs, their pay is stagnant. Also, most share households—and bills—with the men who are losing jobs. And the "female" economy can't stay strong for long if the "male" economy weakens too much.

My comment: This has been going on for decades--over a century, in fact. Women made up only 2.5 percent of the clerical workforce in 1870. But by 1930, women were 52.5 percent of all clerical workers. Women's education and employment jumped in every decade of the twentieth century, including in the 1950s. These trends continued right up through the 1990s and they continue today.

In many respects, the genders traveled through the twentieth century on separate tracks—but by the end of the century women were catching up, economically, socially, and politically. “It was inevitable that women would rise out of property status,” writes novelist and social critic Jane Smiley. “Capitalism wants every consumer, and ultimately distinctions among consumers according to gender, age, geographical location or ethnic background must break down as the market extends itself.”

Thus women’s accomplishments didn’t come at men’s expense. Women responded more quickly and nimbly to social and economic change and so they were able to benefit from the evolution of capitalism from industrialism to post-industrialism.

Meanwhile, men who were too invested in the status quo fell behind. Feminism did not cause these social and economic changes, but by preaching equality between genders, it tried to teach women and men how to live with them. Feminism also provided role models that helped girls and women adapt to new realities.

Now, I think, men have to do the same for boys, moving from rigid notions of manhood as breadwinning and domination to something more flexible and cooperative, from one economic paradigm to the next. It's that lack of new role models that constitutes the real boy crisis.

Holy Shit

The new head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, is an old buddy of mine. We've lost touch in recent years, but Ben and I knew each other through our work supporting independent newspapers and magazines--he was the director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association and I was deputy director of the Independent Press Association. Last we lunched, about two years ago, he was president of Rosenberg Foundation and expecting his first child. Time flies.

What does this have to do with topics we normally cover at Daddy Dialectic? Nothing, yet. I'm just startled.

This is what love looks like

It's Thursday and the news alert pops into my email: California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage. I think, "I'll have to blog on that.” That afternoon I meet with a colleague. He’s a gay dad who has raised two children (now grown) with his partner of many years, and he’s overjoyed. I don’t find the time to write a blog entry.

I get home and my wife calls: She and my son are stranded at a bus stop—the twenty-four bus, she says, is being routed around the Castro because of spontaneous street partying, but a friend is coming to pick them up.

I can’t resist: I jump on my bike and ride down Castro and walk through the gathering throng. People are dancing and talking in small circles on the street, and I see many couples wander through crowd with dazed looks on their faces: the mood somehow combines wary happiness with giddy disbelief. Cops stand at barricades, but they look relaxed and they laugh and joke with the people streaming into the Castro. A DJ sets up at the intersection of Castro and Market.



When I get home, my family is there. That night, it’s warm enough so that you can leave your house without a coat. This happens maybe five or six nights a year in the usually very cool and foggy city of San Francisco, and so I drag the mattress out onto our deck and the three of us go to bed outside.

I look up at the clear sky and the big dipper is directly overhead. The tree in our yard rustles in the breeze. The street party at the bottom of the hill is now in full swing, and we drift asleep to laughter and the thump-thump-thump of electronic dance music. Liko throws an arm over my chest and snuggles into my neck.

Friday, another hot day, I get a text message from our friends Jessica, Jackie, and their little boy Ezra: Do we want to have dinner that night? We meet at Savor and get a table on the patio, and two other families join us.

Jessica orders wine. We want to celebrate, she says.

Why? I ask.

We’re getting married, says Jessica, throwing her arm around Jackie.

It hadn’t even occurred to me: our friends can now get married.



A feeling of happiness sweeps through my body; I feel a smile pop onto my face. It’s a rare kind of happiness I’m feeling, the kind that has nothing to do with me. I happy for Jackie, Jessica, and Ezra, genuinely happy for them, through them.

Why? I’ve never been a great friend of marriage. I’ve always seen it as optional. But I see how much it means to my friends: They never expected it, never dreamed of it, but here it is, marriage. They are silly with plans: they quiz the straight couples on venues, clothes, vows, invitations, costs, the whole crazy thing. Mark volunteers to get the food; Karen says she’ll design invitations. Their marriage becomes one more thread that ties our little community together.

Now I am thinking of the California Supreme Court judges who wrote the decision. Their working lives consist of books, papers, arguments, precedents, a place apart from our small, private lives. Did they know this one decision would create such happiness and improve so many lives? Could they have imagined it? And do we as a society have the courage to embrace the happiness they helped create?

Contemplating Disaster

As soon as I heard there had been an earthquake in central China, I emailed my dad, who on May 12 was in the ancient capital city of Xian. It's 400 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake in nearby Sichuan Province. They said the shock had been felt as far away as Beijing and Bangkok.

"It was a big one," he wrote back, "but we're ok." I was relieved.

In a follow-up email a day later, he shared a few more details. The buildings had swayed. Some tiles fell off the roofs of nearby buildings. All the shops had closed, and everyone came into the streets. Around the city, parents congregated outside the schools, all of which were still standing, to find their children.

Then, for the most part, life in Xian went on.

So, too, did life in Chicago. My family was intact, and my worries abated. I went upstairs, got Spot dressed, and went out to walk the dogs. The weather was beautiful, Spot enjoyed running around the playground and sitting on my lap as we went down the slide. He ate his favorite lunch of rice and tofu and complained loudly as I strapped him back into his stroller.

His life is very simple now, and because so much of my life is fit to meld with his, my life is simple, too. So it is, I imagine, for many parents everywhere, who can think of things and places and events beyond the horizon only briefly or occasionally, if at all, during the first years of their children's lives.

Yet images from the far corners of the world have the strange effect of penetrating the most distracted consciousness, of making the faraway seem next door, or of making someone else's life feel like my business; of making the moral violation of someone I've never met the source of my personal indignation, and the misfortune of others the source of my impotent frustration.


As the week progressed I learned more about the schools collapsing in Sichuan, one story after another, the numbers adding up and nowhere near the final tally, with hundreds and hundreds of children still inside. Then came the pictures, the few fortunate rescues, the many more grieving parents, and then still more parents facing the news that no parent wants to hear. I can't bring myself to post some of the pictures I've come across, of rescuers digging through the rubble of a school and coming across catacombs of children.

I can't shake these images. There have been plenty of natural disasters in my lifetime, most of them covered in the media, but not as heavily: earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, volcanic eruptions and mudslides in Central America, famines in Africa, floods around the world, many of these with higher final death tolls than what we are witnessing right now in Asia. Yet few of them kept me from sleeping at night.


But I was not the parent of a 16-month old boy then. The parent of an only child, like so many parents in China. Now, I am a father, and these images of the schools are nearly unbearable to behold. I just can't shake them.

At first I didn't dwell, as I have when I've worried about my own death, about the last minutes of these children's lives. Maybe the identification was there someplace, overwhelmed by the egoism that joined with my empathy for the parents, who sat by the rubble with their kid's backpacks full of fresh clothes, waiting for them to come home from school.

My ailing mother-in-law helped shake me out of that empathetic egoism last night. I held Spot up to the window after dinner, 10 floors above the lake, to watch the traffic and the waves. "Imagine," she said in her deteriorating English, "a child not much older than him, maybe one who can say a few words, like Mama come. But no one comes."

That feat of emotional imagination was something that I had never performed. It's so basic, I felt ashamed it hadn't come before. It took prompting from someone who has seen much more of life than I have. But it worked. And I have a feeling that once you've had a realization like that, it never leaves you.

Unfortunately, the experience of this new dimension of empathy doesn't make it easier to sleep at night. To the contrary. And it doesn't change anything in Sichuan Province.

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.

Let's Play!

The new issue of Greater Good magazine (which I help edit) focuses on play:

Can We Play?
Play is essential to positive human development, but kids are playing less and less, says psychologist David Elkind. What can we do to build a new culture of play?
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Games Animals Play
Animal play is serious business, say scientists Lee Alan Dugatkin and Sarina Rodrigues.
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Confessions of an Anxious Parent
Are today’s parents afraid to let their kids play? Jill Suttie tries to strike a balance between safety, freedom, and success.
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The Wild Ones
Adults have always tried to control children’s play. But Howard P. Chudacoff argues that the kids will always win.
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Playing the Blame Game
Video games stand accused of causing obesity, violence, and lousy grades. But new research paints a surprisingly complicated picture, reports Jeremy Adam Smith.
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With Friends Like These...
Marjorie Taylor and Alison B. Shawber explain what imaginary friends can reveal about the kids who create them.
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You’re It!
Play isn’t just for kids, reports Karen Solomon.
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Q&A: Playing Doctor
An interview with Patch Adams
Download PDF

Plus:

Why the time is right to celebrate female superheroes, by Lisa Bennett
The Postpartum Brain, by Anna J. Abramson
The Forgiveness Instinct, by Michael E. McCullough
How can scientists beam altruism into outer space? by Alex Dixon

And don't forget:

I'm hosting a conversation with video-game researcher Lawrence Kutner on May 6 at North Gate Library on the UC Berkeley campus.