Me vs. Linda

Today's entry is all about me. I'll try to make it interesting and relevant to readers who are not-me.

First: Beacon Press has offered me a contract for my book, Twenty-First-Century Dad, which will argue that the role of the American father is rightly becoming more flexible, giving moms more options and enriching fathers' lives in the process. I haven't signed anything yet, but in many respects Beacon is an ideal home for the book and I look forward to the partnership.

I'm searching for more dads to interview, and I'm going to be in Chicago next week. I'm especially interested in talking to Chicago dads who were thrown into a primary caregiving role by sudden unemployment or disability, as well as former stay-at-home dads who are back at work. If you happen to fit the description, send me an email at jeremyadamsmith(at)mac.com.

Second: Toronto Star family reporter Andrea Gordon quotes me in her column today, entitled "Enough of the Mommy Wars Debate." I'd probably be linking to this column even if I weren't quoted, because it contains so much truth:

The problem with so much of the working mom versus stay-at-home debate is it is conducted outside the realm of the intense emotional rollercoaster that comes with parenthood. It doesn't incorporate that gut-level yearning that some mothers and fathers feel, to be with their children, even though it can be at times thankless and boring and hard. Or the non-financial rewards that family life can bring. As writer Joan Walsh of Salon.com wrote earlier this month, the pro-career arguments are often "deaf to the way a child and family-centered life calls out to a lot of women, and to some men."

Other times, it comes down to what your kids are like. Some children need their mothers. Or fathers. Some take early separation in stride. In the words of writer Jane Juska: "As mothers, we know which of our kids is which." And there's nothing that pulls harder than knowing your child needs you, no matter what the price.

The good news is this is gradually moving beyond being strictly a women's issue. Not that you'll see that in the mom lit, where dads are generally portrayed as useless, uninvolved or worse, written out of the whole equation. The newest wave of dads is more hands-on and increasingly willing to adapt their work arrangements around child care needs or their spouse's work.

Third: It's finally time to respond to Linda Hirshman's March 25 attack on me and Rebeldad. (Hirshman is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brandeis University and author of Get to Work, which argues that "housekeeping and child rearing [are] not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.") Here's what she wrote:

Men are not going to carry their share of the family until women force the issue by not choosing inequality. All the paid leave in the world does not change that fact. If I didn’t believe it before, I’d believe it now that I have studied up on the autobiographies of the legendary stay at home dads of the Internet, “Rebel Dad” Brian Reid and “Daddy Dialectic” Jeremy Adam Smith. Rebel Dad spent under three years at home with one baby, while creating his (now defunct) online personam [sic] of rebel dad and pitching a book proposal all over the internet. Once the second baby came Rebel took his rebellious self right into full time work in public relations, leaving his former lawyer wife with a newborn and a kindergartener [sic]. The Dialectical Smith didn’t even stay home a year, but lived exactly the life the mommy activists dream of. He posts: “You know, my wife and I tried [both working part time] (she . . . is fortunate to have a unionized part-time teaching job that provides full health care) and I must say that it was extremely difficult to maintain . . . I'm interviewing for jobs. For our family, it might better for one of us to work full-time while the other stays home . . . I'm sort of thinking that maybe it's my wife's turn to stay home.” A few hours later: “Well, for us the issue is resolved: yesterday I accepted a full-time job . . . Poof! I'm no longer a stay at home dad and now it's my wife's turn to stay home -- actually, she's still thinking about whether she wants to go back to work. I hope she doesn't; I want her to have time with the boy.”

Poof. I’d hate to be the woman with the desk next to Dialectical Dad, taking family leave while he minds the workplace.

Hirshman gets the details of both our lives wrong, but I'll let that pass, because I don't want my personal biography--which involves my wife and son as well as me--to be a point of debate. Yes, I do talk about my personal life here and elsewhere, but careful readers will note that, as a matter of policy, I restrict my observations to my own responses as a father and caregiver. Most of the blog is consumed with thinking politically about my experience, sharing research with readers, and debating ideas. My wife is seldom mentioned, except in passing. That's because I don't want, and she doesn't want, her life and choices to be subjected to the same public scrutiny that I sometimes receive. The same goes for my son, of course, though at the moment his biggest life choices consist of picking out which toy to play with.

I actually agree with much of what Hirshman writes about women and work. It's hard to say what, exactly, Hirshman is criticizing about my life and choices as she understands them, or what the examples of Rebeldad and Daddy Dialectic are supposed to prove. That men will always choose work over family and force their wives to take care of children? I submit to the reader that our choices, even as mischaracterized by Hirshman, show that this is not always the case. Men can and do choose to stay home with children, and they can and do find the experience to be one of the greatest things to ever happen to them.

Sure, many dads will continue to freelance or consult or work part-time while serving as primary caregivers; most stay-at-home dads ultimately go back to work. This is also true of moms, about eighty percent of whom go back to work at some point after the birth of a child. As those of us who live in the real world know, parental leave can last from two weeks to a lifetime, depending on a range of circumstances, most of them economic, some of them cultural.

It's true that men appear to put more emphasis on work, even when they are the primary caregivers, but I fail to see why this is a bad thing. When Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet studied 125 caregiving dads, she found that almost half of them kept a hand in the labor market and most planned to go back to work. While people like Hirshman might see this as an example of hypocrisy, Doucet sees it as a viable alternative to the career homemaker model. “I think that men do not face the same fatherload because they do carve out time for themselves, even when they are at home with the kids," Doucet told the Ottawa Citizen. "Perhaps there are some interesting things that [women] can learn from men.”

So what's really behind Hirshman's attack on caregiving fathers? Dads like me and Rebeldad are not really her target. Instead she is attacking the very idea of caregiving, a position ably dissected by my colleague Chip. Hirshman has argued that if taking care of children "were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it?" I'd like to turn that around: if no men are doing it, Linda, then why are you attacking me and Rebeldad? It is as if she finds the very fact of our existence threatening--as do a lot of people.

In fact, men take care of children every day, which in her masculinist mind might make childcare a more worthy activity. But instead of allowing the reality of male caregiving to modify her ideas, she simply denies that it exists. To Linda, childcare isn't something to be shared equally and happily between men and women; that's not her agenda. Instead childcare is an unpleasant, undesirable task that the privileged classes should outsource to women who have less education, less money, and fewer options. I don't see how this is going to make the world a better place.

One last thing on this comment: "I’d hate to be the woman with the desk next to Dialectical Dad, taking family leave while he minds the workplace." Actually, the woman who sits next to me (well, in the office next to mine) is my boss, a Ph.D., and a former stay-at-home mother of two girls--and although our backgrounds are in many ways quite different, our shared experience of daily caregiving and trying to strike the right work-family balance has made us friends and allies.

Time to wake up, Linda. America has changed, but you seem to have slept through the past thirty years.

So it goes

I rolled out of bed at 5:30, the baby and Shelly still sleeping. I pulled on some clothes and went out the door in search of coffee. Walking down 24th St., hunched over, hands in pockets, I glanced at a newspaper box and saw a headline that stopped me cold: "Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84."

Until I was roughly 12 or 13 years old, I was a voracious reader but I read only comic books, trashy spy thrillers, and bad science fiction. I don't remember why I plucked Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five from the shelf of my school library (a book that conservative moralists have repeatedly fought to ban from library shelves). I was probably drawn to the science fictional premises -- time travel! aliens! -- and I vividly remember how absorbed I was by the end of the first chapter. Slaughterhouse Five, which depicts the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, was my first true introduction to literature, and it served as a gateway to deeper reading.

Why did that strange novel grab me? When I flip through my junior high yearbook, I see bleak, snowy Michigan fields, girls with feathered hair, boys in "Members Only" jackets, and pictures of teachers who seemed ancient at the time, but were probably much younger than I am today. I was a sad, confused kid, but not having a language or avenue to express my feelings, I drove the sadness and confusion underground. I felt sorry for my parents, my classmates, my teachers, my town, and myself, because we all seemed to be locked into schedules, obligations, and values that we did not create and did not want.

During the next year, I read all of Vonnegut's novels and short-story collections that had been published up until that point. I did not understand most of what I read (and today I still get something new out of Vonnegut, every time I re-read one of his stories), but I knew that he seemed to perfectly capture the world I saw around me, giving voice to feelings that I didn't have the words or maturity to express. I see now that sometimes his sadness shaded over into pure depression and that there is a very fine line between his universal pity, which caused him to prescribe kindness as the best basis of human relations, and his own private self-pity, which derailed his more autobiographical work and seemed to cut him off from his readers.

Was it healthy for so young a kid to be exposed to Vonnegut's experience with war, death, and depression? In 1988, the psychologists N. T. Termine and C. E. Izard studied the effect of mothers' sadness on their infants. They found that expressions of sorrow through face and voice slowed the exploratory play of the babies; additional studies show that sadness slows cognitive processes and enables deliberate scrutiny of self and situations. Though we might see happiness as the apotheosis of human existence, sadness has its place in helping us to slow down and reflect upon our experience. Whether we want to or not, we teach our children to be sad, and it's a good thing, too. Vonnegut (and others, of course) taught me how that sadness is something to cultivate alongside happiness. Both help us to get through our days.

Slaughterhouse Five also gave me my first glimpse at the real-world consequences of war and violence, something that American media and popular culture conceal from us. I gradually turned away from books, movies, and TV that portrayed killing as easy for the killers, war as a glorious endeavour, and aggression as a desirable trait. "God damn it," writes Vonnegut in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, "you've got to be kind."

I haven't always lived up to that advice, but I've tried. Thanks, Kurt, for the books.

The Opt-Out Myth?

In my March 26 post, I cited a widely reported-upon Bureau of Labor Statistics report that said more and more mothers are dropping out of the labor force to raise children. Today I read an interesting criticism of that report by economist Heather Boushey, prepared by the Council on Contemporary Families:

At first glance, the opt-out stories seem compelling because they appear to explain recent declines in mothers' labor force participation rates. It is true that fewer mothers were either at work or searching for work in 2004 than in 2000. However, between 2000 and 2004 participation rates fell not only for mothers, but also for childless women, childless men and fathers. By 2005 there were 4.8 million fewer men at women at work than would have been in the economy were doing as well as it was in 2000 -- and the majority of those who left the labor market were men.

In contrast to earlier recessions, women were especially hard hit by the rise in unemployment since the recession of 2001, but this applied to childless women as well as to mothers, suggesting that maternal "opt-out" was not the primary cause of recent labor market shifts. In fact, the impact of having children in the home on the likelihood that a woman will leave the workforce has become progressively smaller over the past two decades...

Among highly-educated women aged 25 to 45, the effect of having children on women's labor force participation rates has been negligible since 1984, and remains so today. So recent small changes in the behavior of some highly-educated women do not change the big story: The more highly educated a woman, the more likely she is to be in the labor force, despite the slight dip from 1993 to 2004. And for both college-educated and high school-educated women, the trend has been for mothers to become less likely, not more likely, to leave the labor force because of having children...

It is true that mothers are still more likely than fathers to stay home with a sick child or take a year or two off to care for a new baby. But this is changing. Women are less likely to leave the labor force today because they have children than they were two decades ago. This is a significant change in women's employment patterns and one that indicates that there is a revolution going-not an opt-out revolution, but an opt-in revolution.

All this is not to say that the increasing involvement of mothers in the workforce has not been stressful, for both women and men. Unfortunately, U.S. public policy still lags far behind that of other industrial nations, which provide far more generous family leave and flexibility benefits.

The Happiest Dads

...are, apparently, stay-at-home dads. The University of Texas just released a new study of dads who take care of kids, summarized in a most amusing manner by Mike Adamick over at Strollerderby. Well worth a read. Key finding: the less stereotypically masculine you are, the happier you are as a stay-at-home parent. Yes, at left you see my son in a skirt...

New Census Numbers

The New York Post has a nice summary of new Census numbers on families:

The bureau, which polled 100,000 homes nationwide, found that about 33 percent of the nation's 73.7 million children under the age of 18 live with only their mom or dad or unmarried parents - a statistic backed by a reported spike in the number of homes headed by single parents over the past 35 years...

According to the bureau's portrait of the American family, there were 12.9 million single-parent families in 2006. Of those, 10.4 million were single-mother homes and 2.5 million single-father families.

By comparison, nearly a decade ago, there were a million fewer single-parent families. That figure broke down into 9.8 million single-parent families headed by women and 2.1 million led by men.

And in 2006, the poll found there were 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers and 159,000 stay-at-home fathers.

A decade ago, there were more than a million fewer stay-at-home moms and 100,000 fewer stay-at-home dads.

It's worth reading the whole article--but be sure to also see Rebeldad's criticisms of the way Census numbers are gathered...

peein like a boy, or the follies of fathering

Note: Just a quick announcement that I will be going up the Northwest doing readings with artnoose of the zine ker-bloom. Along the way will be one of my daughters and her best friend. Here are the dates:

Fri. 3/30 Arcata CA - 8 pm - Muddy's Hot Cup

Sat. 3/31 Portland OR - 6 pm - Laughing Horse Books

Sun. 4/1 Seattle WA - 7 pm - Z.A.P.P.

Mon. 4/2 Seattle WA - 6 pm - Left Bank Books

Tues. 4/3 Vancouver BC - 7 pm - Spartacus Books

Thur. 4/5 Victoria BC - 7 pm - Solstice Cafe

Sat. 4/7 Olympia WA - 7 pm - Last Word Books

Sun. 4/8 Eugene OR - 5 pm - Wandering Goat Café

Please come out and say hello! It will be a fun-filled night of storytelling. Oh, and rad dad 6 is out!

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I love being a dad; I feel like I need to say this because over the past few rad dad columns, I've realized that I've been writing about some of the more difficult topics, the ones that challenge my sense of self, my politics, my own securities: things like drug use, ethnicity, pornography. Believe me, it's been very helpful to talk about these things with others and to force myself to consider intimately and deeply how I want to parent, the relationship I want to foster with my children. But I gotta tell you for all the difficult times and moments I deal with, my experiences parenting have been the funniest of my life. Nothing makes me laugh, brings out the kid in me, or makes me realize how lucky I am more than the follies of fathering.

With that said, however, nothing really can prepare you for your youngest daughter announcing:

"Dad, I'm gonna stand and pee into the toilet. So do I need to lift the lid?"

Thankfully I was brushing my teeth, which allowed me to spit the contents of my mouth into the sink with little explanation.

"Ah, well, I don't think so."

And with approval given, she lets it fly. Literally.

I will now defend the ability of men to aim with pretty good accuracy after seeing the torrent of urine released by my daughter and the sheer span of toilet and floor and wall it showered.

"Well, that didn't work," I say.

"Why?" she asks very amazed and slightly embarrassed.

"I don't know. Did you aim?" I kinda stammer as my son sticks his head and demands, "What the hell are you guys talking about?"

Ella screams, and I take the distraction to consider what just happened. Assuming there is no book broaching the subject at the public library and trying to be a caring, supportive father, I remember a zine at the local infoshop on how to pee standing up.

Sure enough, it's there. I buy it for a quarter and pass it on to my nine-year old who tosses it in her room without thinking anything of it as if it was no big deal.

Later, sitting with some friends of mine, we all laugh at this story as well as at our recollections of how difficult it was to potty train our kids, working with angles, strategically aiming body parts, and of course the unavoidable contact with certain bodily excretions. We shared other stories of how parenting never fails to put you in positions of having no answer to queries and in territory totally foreign to anything you've experienced. But it sure was interesting and very entertaining to have every woman I know share some bit of advice for me to pass on to my daughter about the techniques of pissing standing up. "Tell her it's in the way you squeeze your butt cheeks."

So the next time, my daughter tells me, as I'm standing in the shower, that she's decided she no longer wants to pee like a boy, I say, "Well, if you ever try again, there's people who can help you, but you gotta promise to wipe the lid after."

Somehow I felt strangely satisfied saying that.

And that's the easy stuff. My headstrong 11-year old has decided she wants a bra-lette; now I have never heard of this word before (talk about foreign territory), but I have already told her when she feels ready to get a training bra (she rolls her eyes at my archaic language), I'd take her.

"No way!" she screams.

Apparently, I can see her in a bathing suit, I can still take a shower with her, but I am forbidden to see her in a bra-lette. I am promptly banished from any part of the store that she's in when we all next venture to Target to get some swimming supplies for a camping trip.

Trying again to be the understanding, supportive father, I keep my distance and watch from afar as my partner and her pick some out bras while Ella and I play with axes and solar showers. Ella holds my hand and shakes her head and says, "I think she's going into the pre-teen years, Dad."

When we all meet up again in the check out aisle to pay and I start taking the colorful assortment of bra-lettes out; I hear her plead, "Dad" as her older brother walks up. I quickly put them back in the bag as he demands again, "Hey, what are you guys buying?"

"Nothing," I say, "go see what your mom's doing."

He leaves and she smiles and leans her head on my waist and says, "Thank you." And it is then I see her again as the wild middle child and simultaneously as a young woman coming into her own. I feel honored to have been a part of that transition. I hug her back.

It is when that transition is almost complete that those moments of secret hugs and childhood flashbacks count the most.

My son at 16. My son, too busy to talk. Too busy to hang around. Never too far away though to ask for cash, for rides, for more time away. I won't lie; the last few years have put me to the test and as my dad used to say, "He been on the wrong side I right for too long now." So when it came to taking a two-week trip with just my son, I was scared shitless. Little did I know, shit would be the thing to bring us together.

Now let me segue to something seemingly irrelevant. I have lost more friends over my assertion that Dumb and Dumber is one of the great movies of the last 10 years than any other faux pas I've committed. And I realize why they disagree; most of them are kidless; anyone who has gone through the obsessive banter about poop from kids at each stage of development either must become apathetic to bowel humor or jump in and enjoy the fun.

Back now to our trip to Chiapas where the look on my son's face as he walked up to the door of our hostel was pure terror and fear. Big time. He nodded to his leg, and his chalky complexion gave it all away. To make matters worse, we were about to venture to a village in the jungle on horseback for the next four hours. But he's a trooper (and a pooper, I tease) because he held it together. Literally.

It was on this trip that I made a startling discovery: the mind of a two-year old and a fifteen-year old are eerily connected. Especially when poop is the subject. My son couldn't stop talking about crap. And I was like a new father in love with changing diapers making cutesy little doo-doo sounds along with him. It's true; we bonded over poop banter.

We spent two wonderful, ruin-filled, Zapatista-focused weeks in Mexico and many of these days seemed to also take place in various bathrooms. Dylan's favorite phrase was, "It feels like I'm pissing out of my asshole." Now I don't know why, but we laughed ourselves to sleep many a nights over this phrase as well as devised ways of bringing back bottles of water and tricking various friends and enemies as well as his sisters into consuming said water to share the pleasures of "pissing out of one's asshole." And, of course, the toilet scene in Dumb and Dumber came up repeatedly as a measuring stick to our own bathroom experiences.

But it wasn't until the end, on our way home, we sat next to each other on the plane, and he looked over at me and smiled and said, "Thanks, Dad. This was a pretty good trip." Nothing more, but it was enough to remind myself just how damn lucky I am to have him in my life. To have all them in my life even if I'm never sure if the lid should stay up or down anymore, even if I am banned from parts of their life and certain departments in stores, even if I lose friends over shit jokes. For them, it's all worth it.

Stay-at-home parenthood: a privileged debate?

I hear it a lot: the debate over stay-at-home dads (and moms) is a privileged one, since, some say, most couples must work two jobs just to stay afloat. "The whole idea of there being just one person who earns the money is so foreign to most families now," writes Jeff at Feminist Allies, in response to my March 2 post on breadwinning moms. "Perhaps there are some class issues around couples who are having the sorts of problems that Jeremy is talking about?"

I used to think so--and I said as much in my very first post to Daddy Dialectic: "Dads-at-home will be a tiny minority for as long as parents have to scramble to keep their heads above water, trying to make enough money to survive and give their kids the best life possible, under the circumstances."

At the time I wrote that, I had thought about the issue for all of two seconds: like Jeff and many other people who should know better, I just reflexively assumed that stay-at-home parenthood is a luxury of the affluent. Since then, I've interviewed dozens of families with a stay-at-home parent, read scores of empirical studies and books, and spoken with leading family researchers.

As a result, I discovered that the reality is complex--as it almost always is, when closely examined. Let's start with the numbers. Men are sole breadwinners in 39 percent of families with children under the age of six. Meanwhile, seven percent of families are supported primarily by women. That means at least 46 percent of families with young children are supported by one breadwinner.

Even if this was a relatively privileged group, it is certainly not, as Jeff implies, a marginal group. That number represents millions of people, almost half of all families, and they are facing real and difficult trade-offs when it comes to balancing home with work. Mostly, of course, it's moms who stay home, and in recent years, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more moms are quitting their jobs to take care of kids. "The biggest percentage-point declines in work-force participation," reports the Wall Street Journal, "did come among mothers with a bachelor's degree or more, followed by women with husbands in the top 20% of earners." This confirms the impression that families with a stay-at-home parent are relatively privileged--that is to say, educated and affluent.

However, the same Bureau of Labor Statistics study cited by the Journal reveals that once the decision is made for one parent to stay home with the children, those same affluent families take a very serious financial hit. They lose the ability to save, invest, buy homes, or make discretionary purchases--in short, they are no longer affluent. They are simply getting by.

That by itself is important. But focusing on families who sacrifice affluence so that one parent can stay home obscures the experience of a huge number of families that are poor and working class to begin with. Almost a quarter of minimum wage workers are the sole breadwinners for their families. Many low-wage and even many middle-income workers find that childcare is too expensive; they crunch the numbers and discover that it's cheaper, or nearly, for one parent to stay home.

Others simply make life choices that put family and children first, based on a combination of (sometimes sexist) ideology and values: these are often immigrants or people of color. Recently I interviewed sociologists Ross Parke and Scott Coltrane, both at UC Riverside, about their five-year longititudinal study of how Latino and Anglo families in Riverside cope with economic stress. They are finding that Latino families are often willing to accept much higher levels of economic stress in exchange for time with children. "The middle-class profile of the Latino families would make them poverty level among the Anglo families," Coltrane told me. "A lot of the mothers are not employed. In one sample, only a third of the mothers, in another, only 40% of the mothers, are employed, and that’s very different from the Anglo families where 80% of the women are employed." Though we might arrogantly (and perhaps also rightly) see this as a sign of how much more patriarchal Latino communities are, I think the simple truth is that working-class Latino parents and educated Anglo parents want the same thing, to be the ones to take care of their own children.

Here's where issues of inequality arise: when more women than men opt to stay home, women as a group lose economic power and independence. Which is why the debate over stay-at-home dads matters: it is not a privileged, marginal debate, but one central to the real lives of millions of people, and key to building a more equitable society. "Will women ever achieve real equality with men?" asks Rhona Mahony in her classic 1995 book Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power. "I propose that the answer to that question is another question: Can a father raise babies and can a woman let him do it? This is a key question, because in order for women to achieve economic equality with men, men will have to do half the work of raising children."

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Update: A bunch of people just emailed me to say that I was personally attacked yesterday by Linda Hirshman. Go check it out; I'll respond sometime in the next couple of days, when I have more time.

Have you loved your at-home parent today?

I just stumbled across this really sweet list of "Ten reasons why I love my stay-at-home dad." Then I ran across this just-as-sweet appreciation of a stay-at-home mom by a working dad. So, yesterday I reminded all our readers, both of you, to enjoy your kids; today's reminder is to appreciate your spouse. As if you needed it...OK, I'll stop now...

Liko vs. Binary Gender, Part II

Said this evening, apropos of nothing: "I'm a pretty working man!"

Don't forget to enjoy your kids today!

Values Check

I just came across a list I made earlier this year, detailing the values I'd like to be teaching Cole. I like to write these things down every once in a while -- it helps me make sure that the life I'm living doesn't stray too far from the life I'd like to be living. Anyway, here's my list -- how's it compare to yours?

Core values I’d like to communicate to Cole
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He should learn that he is loved unconditionally, always, and doesn’t need to do anything or behave any certain way to earn that love.

He should learn that food is something that should be enjoyed and appreciated, and he should always be provided with a variety of healthy, nutritious things to eat.

He should learn how to build a rich, diverse social community, and be encouraged to find common threads of connection with other people.

He should learn that our bodies are our own, and that no one should be hugged, kissed or touched without their permission.

He should learn that his ideas are important and that we will listen to his thoughts. When problems come up, he should be encouraged to help develop solutions as much as possible.

He should learn that animals should be treated with respect and care, and that they shouldn’t be hurt or killed unnecessarily.

He should learn that playing, fun and laughter are important.

He should learn that when he says he’s going to be somewhere or do something, he should actually follow through.

He should be encouraged to use his imagination, and value creativity over passive entertainment.

He should learn that it is important to find fun and enjoyable physical activities, and he should be encouraged to do some physical activity or exercise every day.

He should learn that violence, yelling, put-downs and threats are not effective tools for solving interpersonal conflicts.

He should be encouraged to do as much as he can to help other people.

Housework vs. the Rest of Life

Rebeldad points to this study that says dads do about 7 hours of housework and moms do twenty-one--which is consistent with other recent studies of domestic labor.

"From a gender equity standpoint," writes Rebeldad, "it's bad that dads are lagging behind moms... but 21+ hours a week on housework--no matter who is doing the work--seems like overkill. Surely there are better ways to spend three hours a day."

Here's how I responded over at Rebeldad:

Does my family do at least 21 hours a week of housework?

Let's see: my wife and I each do about 4 hours of housework over the weekend, and I spend about a half hour in the morning and a half hour in weekday evenings doing dishes or picking up clutter. I can only guess how much my wife does during the day (most of her time is consumed with childcare/playing), but let's say at least one hour (mostly picking up toys or washing dishes), plus an additional two hours one morning a week. I'm excluding cooking, which my wife does most of.

So we're doing at least 20 hours a week cleaning and maintaining our two-bedroom apartment (that's a pic, at top, doll in foreground), and we are not neat freaks. I can easily see how a rural/suburban residence would involve more hours of housework. So I guess those numbers don't seem unreasonable to me.

But I think the key line from the source report is this one: "Girls spend more time doing housework than they do playing, while boys spend about 30 percent less time doing household chores than girls and more than twice as much time playing."

In many respects, this is the thing that needs to change. If we can equalize those hours (and there's no reason why we as parents couldn't) then we might really see equality down the road, when our children have children. For me, this is a reminder that my son needs to learn how to do housework--something that I wasn't really raised to do, and when I got to college, it showed.

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After reading this post at Rebeldad, I scrolled down to see what I've been missing--and was surprised to see that Rebeldad nominated Daddy Dialectic for "best new daddyblogger," a contest being run over at the At-Home Dad site. From what I gleaned, the actual voting won't happen until the end of 2007.

That's good. Thanks, Rebeldad, and to everyone who has ever supported Daddy Dialectic by telling a friend or linking over here.

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Update: After coming home and reviewing our housework hours with my wife, I have to revise my estimate. In reality, I think we do an average of about 15-16 hours per week.

Breadwinning Moms vs. Alimony

More signs of the times:

The idea that men can receive spousal support from their wives may feel like a freakish concept, but as women have become higher earners, it's increasingly common.

And as men set their sights on women's earnings, women have become more protective of those dollars. In fact, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 44% of attorneys included in a recent survey said they've seen an increase in women asking for prenuptial agreements over the last five years, where in previous decades, prenuptial agreements were almost always sought by men.

A lot of women are indignant now that the shoe is increasingly on the other foot, says Carol Ann Wilson, a certified financial divorce practitioner in Boulder, Colo. "There's this sense of, 'What's yours is ours, but what's mine is mine,'" Wilson says. "My first response to that is, 'All these years we have been looking for equality; well, this is what it looks like.' I think women get angrier about having to pay than men do."

...

Wilson emphasizes that it's not just actresses or the wealthiest women who are seeking prenuptial agreements or paying spousal support. "I've seen thousands of clients," she says, "and almost every time I've seen a stay-at-home dad seek alimony, the wife--she's usually a software executive--goes ballistic."

...

Just as some women object to men's request for spousal support, some men are particularly uncomfortable seeking it. Either they find it emasculating to ask, or they find the idea of receiving an allowance from their ex-wives humiliating, according to divorce attorneys.

"The fact is that you still don't see too many cases where men seek alimony," says William Beslow, a divorce attorney in New York City. "One reason is that although women may earn more than men, they often wind up with custody of the children, and when a woman takes up primary responsibility for the children, men don't request maintenance."

The Measure of a Father

From the Guardian in the UK, courtesy of frequent Daddy Dialectic tipster Susan:

Children are more likely to suffer development problems if their fathers do not take paternity leave or spend enough time with them when they are very young, according to an analysis of thousands of babies born around the turn of the millennium.

A report published today by the Equal Opportunities Commission and based on research tracking 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001 found emotional and behavioural problems were more common by the time youngsters reached the age of three if their fathers had not taken time off work when they were born, or had not used flexible working to have a more positive role in their upbringing.

Previous research has highlighted the importance of a mother's involvement when a child is small, but the EOC says this is the first study to confirm that the close involvement of a father also has a significant impact on a child's future...

The EOC points to a "social revolution in fatherhood", in which fathers are increasingly involved with their children's upbringing and feel confident as carers, yet 63% felt they did not spend enough time with their new baby.

That fathers are being studied at all is part of the revolution. I recently interviewed UC Riverside Sociologist Scott Coltrane, author of many studies and books on fatherhood. In the past, says Coltrane, researchers looked only at whether the father was present and married to the mother. They might also have looked at demographic or economic information about the fathers. But they did not study how fathers interacted with their children or what impact fathers had on children's development. Until the 1970s, it was (unconsciously?) assumed that mothers were solely responsible for child outcomes.

Coltrane describes how "in the late Seventies researchers started saying, 'Wait a minute, why don’t we measure what the fathers are actually doing? How do they parent? What do they do?'" Today scholars "tend to include father variables in their studies, so we are doing a better job of tracking the father participation that is occurring. And we are considering that men might be doing housework beyond taking out the trash and mowing the lawn. And because women are more likely to be employed and earn good wages, more families are sharing more of the family work - so when we look we see shifts." Applying the same measures of mothers and fathers, says Coltrane, is still "relatively novel, as simple an idea as that is."

The Guardian article concludes: "The government last night pointed to moves including the introduction of paid paternity leave and more than doubling of maternity pay as evidence of commitment to helping families balance work and caring responsibilities."

Ah, sounds lovely.

Mom vs. Herself

There's something in the air. After a wave after MSM articles about stay-at-home dads, we're now hearing from the other side: their wives. And boy, are they pissed--or so we are led to believe.

I found too many pieces to list, but I'll cite some articles and blog postings:

One blogger (a "life coach," whatever that is) finds "feelings of resentment, jealousy, frustration" on the part of breadwinning moms. "Many of the women I know who are the bread-winners of their family tend to be controlling. Not necessarily a 'control-freak' or not necessarily consciously but by default. Husbands in the role of a stay-at-home dad may relinquish their role and behave in a subservient manner. The frustration for women comes when they not only work long hours in their career but are also expected to oversee or manage the household despite having someone capable at home."

In "A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles," M.P. Dunleavey writes that breadwinning moms "are seething--with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration." While her own husband "cooks, cleans, shops and takes care of our son," Dunleavey is filled with "terror that I'll be the breadwinner forever."

But the mother of all these pieces is this essay in the women's magazine Marie Claire entitled, "Why I Left My Beta Husband." Initially author Amy Brayfield loved it when her first husband Mark stayed at home with their daughter, which allowed her to focus on the career she loved. Then she found herself "mortified" when co-workers discovered that her husband was a stay-at-home dad. "I had it all back then," she writes, "including a gorgeous toddler and a cool job. What I didn't have was a husband I felt proud of." She continues:

I felt guilty about being glad to go back to work, and in my head, I made it Mark's fault. Because he couldn't find a job, I blamed him when I was working late and had to miss the baby's bedtime; it was his fault I had to go in early every day, since the fact that he couldn't find a job meant that I couldn't afford to lose mine.

And when I got home, I seethed. I couldn't walk across the living room without tripping over some plastic toy or container of wipes. The baby was in the same little nightgown she'd slept in the night before. There wasn't a hint of dinner on the horizon. He was home all day—couldn't he at least run a freaking load of laundry?

Eventually, communication between Mark and me deteriorated to the point where all we talked about was the baby. Had she gotten enough sleep? What had she eaten for lunch? How could she have run through an entire value pack of diapers in one weekend? "Wait till I tell you what she did," he'd say every once in a while, as we gazed adoringly at the baby and at each other. In those moments—watching him gently rock her to sleep while singing "Punk Rock Girl"—I was reminded why I had once thought Mark was the sexiest man in the world.

But our sex life was in ruins. I chalked it up to the transition period all new parents go through. Then one day, I realized it had been almost a year since Mark and I had made love.

Perhaps we should stop there, before it gets uglier. Amy divorces Mark, and gets custody of their daughter. But there's a twist ending: "Nobody was more surprised than I was when I went ahead and fell for another stay-at-home dad."

Which, of course, allows her to continue to pursue her high-powered career.

Many breadwinning mommy bloggers disowned the image of the "seething" working mom who doesn't respect her "subservient" stay-at-home husband: see, for example, Elizabeth at Half-Changed World or Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math. But we should not dismiss the feelings expressed by Brayfield and Dunleavey--there's obviously a parallel between the fish-out-of-water feelings they express and the angst of a new stay-at-home dad who finds himself alone on the playground.

So what should we think?

Let me tell you a story. One day I was talking with another stay-at-home parent on the playground. While our kids chased each other around the slide, we got to commiserating. I told her how overwhelmed I felt by the daily routines of childcare and housework.

"Well, now you know how women have felt for centuries!" she said, almost cheerful.

Right. I get it. It's a good perspective. And so, to all you ladies out there in reverse role families, let me return the favor.

When I read about women who "seethe" with resentment against the obligations that supporting a family forces on them, or when I hear that they live in "terror" that they'll be the breadwinner "forever," I'm afraid that there's only one response.

Get ready.

You can feel it coming.

Here it goes:

"Well, now you know how men have felt for centuries!"

So there. This is not to imply that we exist in a state of equality. Women still face the glass ceiling, the double shift, sexual harassment, and so on. Men are still the privileged group. We still run the world, though our overthrow is well on the way to happening.

But do women like Dunleavey and Brayfield (elite members of the East Coast media) really carry more burdens than, say, an African-American dad who works as a custodian in a place like East St. Louis or perhaps a Latino migrant worker dad who sends money back to his family in Mexico or a gay dad in Lincoln, Nebraska who works every day to support his husband and children, despite all the obstacles society throws in their way? Or even just a regular Euro-American dad in a regular Midwestern city whose life has thrown him one too many curve balls?

Dunleavey and Brayfield sound to me like they have (or had) damn good husbands, not to mention good jobs and happy, healthy kids. The husbands' main failing is that they don't measure up to Dunleavey and Brayfield's image of traditional fatherhood: "Someone who walks out the door with a pressed shirt on, a leather briefcase, and a confident gait. Someone who wins bread." But whose failing is that, really? As their writing makes clear, the problem here is not that their husbands are failing as partners and parents. The problem for Dunleavey and Brayfield is that their image of the father and their image of the mother are both stuck in the 1950s, a long-gone era.

My simple point is that when we talk about these things, we need some perspective and we need some empathy--and we need to look forward, to what we really want and where we're really going.

When I read stuff like this, I just want to take these women gently by the shoulders and tell them this is the way it is. "I write here a fair amount about what I call 'reverse traditional families'--families with working mothers and at-home fathers," says Half-Changed World. "One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners. We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don't do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do. Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we're good enough mothers, and decide that we're damned good fathers."

These are wise words. It's certainly better than the angry and unhealthy alternative described by Dunleavey and Brayfield. To them I say, as a working father: Welcome to the club! Stop by and talk anytime! We're all in it together!

-------------------

Readers should also see my February 28 post, "Shelley's story," for another perspective on being a bread-mommy.

Family vs. Political Involvement

Naazneen Barma reports:

Julianna Sandell Pacheco and Eric Plutzer analyzed the effects of three important teen life transitions—adolescent parenthood, early marriage, and dropping out of high school—on later political engagement. In a paper published in American Politics Research, Pacheco and Plutzer report that the three transitions “can contribute to a pattern of cumulative disadvantage because experiencing one teen transition often leads to another.” Teen parents are much more likely to drop out of school, which in turn sets of other chains of events that dampen political participation, making it unlikely they’ll be able to advocate effectively for their needs and opinions.

Interestingly, the scholars find that the effects of these life transitions on voter turnout differ across racial and ethnic lines, with the impact of teen parenthood applying more to Whites than to Blacks or Hispanics. They suggest that the differences across racial groups may reflect divergent norms about educational achievement and early parenthood and marriage. This hints that providing the right kinds of social support to teens could offset the negative impacts of their life transitions...

The authors demonstrate that supposedly “nonpolitical” life events can have an influence on political behavior. From a harm reduction viewpoint, it may be possible to cut into the causal chain to prevent one bad choice from leading to another. Their results suggest that efforts to help teen parents in a way that makes it easier for them to stay in school could carry great benefits—both for their immediate educational success and their lifelong political engagement.

I have been thinking recently about how tough it is, period, to be a parent and stay politically active. This past weekend I attended a board meeting for an organization that I've been involved with for about a year, and as I sat there looking at spreadsheets I had a revelation: it's not just me volunteering my time, it's my entire family. I normally take responsibility for Liko over the weekend, which allows my wife to do whatever she wants (hanging out with us is one option, but it's her choice; she spends a lot of time cleaning the house and doing laundry, I'm afraid). When I go to a weekend-long meeting, my wife loses the break from caregiving, and of course my son loses my company. I've started to recently think that maybe it's just not the right time in my life to be politically active, but I fear that if I drop out completely I'll never go back. (I also just had a short story published, "What Do We Want? When Do We Want It?" that touches on this topic--one of my few stories to be available online!)

Ted’s Story: Not his father's son

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


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

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

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

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

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

Tell me about your dad, I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My dad was an alcoholic….”

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

“Way to go, Johnny, good job!”

About your father… I continue.

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

Ted stops talking.

What do you think he did well? I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you more careless than Shelley? I ask.

“I wouldn’t say careless…”

We both laugh.

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

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

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

He pauses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liko vs. Binary Gender

After Liko and his mom set up a hummingbird feeder on the back deck:

"I'm not a girl or a boy!"

"What are you?"

"I'm a hummingbird!"

"Really? Cool."

"I'm a hummingbird woman!"

Which reminds me: I recently did a blog search for "feminism" covering the previous 24 hours and found that eight and a half of the ten most recent posts were anti-feminist rants. I say "eight and a half," because of this politically curious post on the politics of daycare in the U.K. -- the only one I'll link to, because it is serious and thought-through and contains some ideas that I think are good.

Two noteworthy things here: the apparent prevalence of antifeminist hatred on the Internet and the bankruptcy and misogyny of antifeminist politics, as represented in these posts. Sample quote: "Businesses are there to make money. All this forcing of businesses to ensure people (primarily women) get their work/life balance in order is fucking the economy up... The old way was pretty good. Men worked and made money, thus able to do their jobs and provide for the children. Women stayed at home and ran the home, thus able to devote themselves to the kids... Businesses, men, women and children were happy."

Uh, sure. Everyone was happy. Here's a guy who has never read a novel published prior to 1962.

Alpha vs. Beta

More reasons to feel guilty: a new study says insecure infants are probably screwed for life. "The kid learns, 'I can count on my parents to calm me down,'" says a researcher. "They learn to turn to others. Whereas insecure kids learn that my parent is either rejecting or they learn my parent is neglectful. Or 'I have to protest to get attention.'"

But the upshot of the study has some interesting social implications:

Contrary to the popular American myth that people left to fend for themselves become strong and independent, the psychological research seems to show exactly the opposite is true: It is the people who are confident enough to reach out to others for help -- and to whom help is given -- who become truly capable of independence.

Meanwhile, Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford's School of Medicine, has some good advice for young men:

For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man—if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important—balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What's clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don't waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that's not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25.

We vs. Me

Over at the Greater Good blog, Christine Carter McLaughlin and Kelly Corrigan continue their dialogue on childhood happiness, this time with a focus on social connections:

Kelly: So about connection. You know how there's this prevailing desire for space and privacy? People dream of a home with a long driveway on five acres but if and when they get there, it's too quiet, too isolated, too removed from the comforting sounds of a neighborhood. At least for me, the thing I like most about my home is seeing people walk by as I do my dishes or bumping into friends as I walk my kids to school.

Carter: This is what sociologists call social integration, and the upshot of all the research on it is that social connectedness is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated. Robert Putnam wrote a really interesting book, Bowling Alone, about how we Americans are becoming less and less connected to one another.

"Countless studies document the link between society and psyche [he writes]: people who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors, and supportive co-workers are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping…The single most common finding from a half century's research on the correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections (Putnam 2000, p. 332)."

Many people would love to have the kind of connections Putnam talks about, yet still find themselves living lives of lonely desperation. "Families are isolated," says Carolyn Cowan, a research psychologist with the UC Berkeley Institute of Human Development (also my employer). With her husband Philip, Carolyn studied 200 nuclear families and found that up to a third experienced "tension, conflict, distress and divorce in the early years after the arrival of a first child," conditions that thrive in social isolation.

"Increasingly, new families are created far from grandparents, kin, and friends with babies the same age, leaving parents without the support of those who could share their experiences of the ups and downs of parenthood," write the Cowans. "Most modern parents bring babies home to isolated dwellings where their neighbors are strangers."

Sounds dire, yes? And probably familiar to many readers.

At the moment I'm working on a set of interlocking writing projects, all of which involve interviewing families with young kids, all in the Bay Area. I'm struck by two things: 1) how isolated many of them are; and 2) how differently individuals react to the isolation. One stay-at-home dad I interviewed knew that he was isolated, but he only worried that his son wasn't being properly socialized--he honestly didn't care that he had few parent friends (important caveat: he's only three months in to his stint as a SAHD). I've also talked with people who have what appear to be busy social lives--but they lament the quality of their social contacts, which they feel lack the kind of intimacy they found in school-age friendships.

But what's most interesting is that many new parents seem to have chosen lives that leave them isolated; for example, by moving away from parents and hometowns. Why? When I quiz people about this, the kneejerk response is that people in general are following jobs. But when I drill down and ask, "Why don't you live in the place where you grew up?" I find the answers vary a great deal.

Some people did indeed follow jobs and careers. Others (this applies to me) grew up moving from place to place, and don't have any one town to call home--often, their relatives are dispersed. The most interesting group consists of people who came to the Bay Area seeking some degree of social freedom--this is true, for example, of many gays and lesbians. Here many such people discovered, for the first time in their lives, communities in which they were not the outsiders.

Then they had kids, and found themselves once again on the outside, but this time they were far away from family.

Last week my short story, "Same Street Twice" appeared in the literary magazine Instant City. (Sorry, the story's not available online, but you can order the magazine at its website. You can also find Instant City on sale in fine bookstores like Pegasus in Berkeley or Adobe in San Francisco. It's a publication well worth supporting.)

In the thinly fictionalized "Same Street Twice" I document the experience becoming a parent, but I also unconsciously dramatize the social trends I'm now writing about: our young urban couple, Rachel and Graham, find themselves saddled with a baby, far from family or friends, and uncertain of their new roles and responsibilities. They're surrounded by the raunchy street life of the Castro, but it comes to seem like a "slightly boring play" that they can only watch.

It had been a while since I read the story and there's something about seeing your work in print that makes it seem like it was written by someone else: this allows me to feel some degree of pity for the writer. I wrote "Same Street Twice" while in the thick of the experience being described, two and a half years ago. Reading it today, it seems to me that at certain points the story is about to collapse from exhaustion and anxiety.

Ah, so sad. But there's a yet-unwritten sequel: the young urban couple survive the experience of becoming parents. They meet other parents on the playground who are exactly like them. They form playgroups; join community associations; rendezvous every Saturday at the neighborhood Farmer's Market; hold parties. They start helping each other out. Their kids get older and the kids become friends. The couple grows to accept their new identities and the limitations the identities impose, and they craft roles for themselves that make sense and seem fair. In the wreckage of their lives, they build new lives and create new social capital.

"Sure, kids'll destroy your life," someone once told me. "But don't worry: you'll get a new one."

This might also be the sequel to the Cowans's study, though happy endings are not as common as we'd wish. The happy ending (what is that anyway? a good death?) might even be the exception. Many of the couples they studied ended in divorce; many doubtless continue to struggle, even if they stay married. A great deal, I suspect, depends on geography, the community's existing social capital, and individual circumstances too numerous to mention.

If we're honest with ourselves, I think many of us will admit that we gain a certain amount of freedom in our modern isolation: it's part of the landscape of our lives and therefore we, tough little monkeys that we are, learn to love it. But I've discovered, slowly, that Christine and Kelly (and Putnam) are right: social connections are key to happiness, if happiness is something that we want.

Knowing that is small comfort to people who are lost in the city, or the suburbs, or anywhere. It's not so easy to find those connections, when a thousand obstacles, many of them self-imposed, some of them not, cut you off from your neighbors and co-workers and relatives--and community, once achieved, is by no means an unmixed blessing. But, you know, if you're struggling, all you can do is keep going. Don't stop. You're probably not as alone as you think you are.

The U.S. vs. the Rest of the Post-Industrial World

The Council on Contemporary Families released a new study of how the U.S. ranks in family-friendly work policies. The study found that the U.S. ranked high in protecting the right of all people to work, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age or disability. The study also found "marked success in lowering the poverty rates of the elderly, although they have been less successful than other affluent nations in protecting children from poverty...In addition, the U.S. is also one of 117 countries guaranteeing a pay premium for overtime work."

All to the good, and thank your lucky stars for the labor, feminist, and Civil Rights movements. Beyond that, however, the U.S. left much to be desired:

Out of 173 countries studied, 168 countries offer guaranteed leave with income to women in connection with childbirth; 98 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks paid leave. Although in a number of countries, many women work in the informal sector, where these government guarantees do not always apply, the fact remains that the U.S. guarantees no paid leave for mothers in any segment of the work force, leaving it in the company of only 4 other nations: Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

65 countries ensure that fathers either receive paid paternity leave or have a right to paid parental leave; 31 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave. The U.S. guarantees fathers neither paid paternity nor paid parental leave.

107 countries protect working women’s right to breastfeed; in at least 73 of these the breaks are paid. The U.S. does not guarantee the right to breastfeed, even though breastfeeding is proven to reduce infant mortality.

137 countries mandate paid annual leave, with 121 of these countries guaranteeing 2 weeks or more each year. The U.S. does not require employers to provide any paid annual leave...

145 countries provide paid leave for short- or long-term illnesses, with 127 providing a week or more annually. More than 79 countries provide sickness benefits for at least 26 weeks or until recovery. The U.S. provides only unpaid leave for serious illnesses through the FMLA, which does not cover all workers. Moreover, the U.S. does not guarantee any paid sick days for common illnesses.

And so on. I suspect that very few Daddy Dialectic readers will be surprised by these findings. The press release concludes:

There is an enormous payoff to improving working conditions -— from lowering long-term family poverty to improving population health and education and increasing their associated economic and social benefits. The comparative data do not support the common notion that establishing good working conditions leads to job loss. Our studies found that none of these protections is associated with higher unemployment rates on a national level. In fact, on a global scale, countries that provide longer parental leave, as well as more leave to care for children, are among the most economically competitive.

At the top of this post you'll see my son Liko, fighting for everyone's right to work...