Gen Y, parenting, and asking the right questions

The Daddy Shift, Part II

On Monday, I posted the first part of a two part interview series with author and father Jeremy Adam Smith, whose book “The Daddy Shift, How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family,” came out on Father’s Day from Beacon Press. The name of my game is Generation Y, and when my colleague Liz and I spoke with Smith, our real interest lay in finding out how his wisdom regarding men and women’s roles and parenting pertained to our target group. A lot, actually.

After reading the interview with Smith, my boyfriend, a prime example of an urban American Gen Y:er, sat with his head in his hands repeating, “I don’t know what I want.” He had begun to question his ideals and expectations, wondering if his stint with me— a socially progressive Swede— had only served to alter his mindset for the short term. Did he really want the dual-earner/dual-caregiver model we’d always talked about, or was he actually, honestly, invested in the role he’d been raised with: a manhood defined primarily by breadwinning?

My boyfriend is the perfect reader for Smith’s book. He is a member of the youngest generation of professionals and to-be-fathers who have a lot of role-examining to do. He, and men like him, may need help asking the right questions. While there are plenty of advocacy groups fighting the fight for mothers (such as MomsRising.org etc.), “The same cannot be said of fathers,” Smith writes. “Too often, we as a group have docilely accepted the ‘ideal worker’ model, which pretends our families don’t exist.”

Basically, what Smith highlights is reverse discrimination. The gender equity debate tends to revolve around “women’s issues.” But, as Smith points out, our patriarchal system can also put men at a serious disadvantage. My own dad always tells me he thinks women have it easier these days because we have more choices. As a woman, I can choose to have a career, but I can also find respect if I choose to take a slower work path and dedicate myself to my children. Men are not as lucky. Most feel they have to have careers in order to be respected. This was truer of my dad’s generation, but it still resonates with my own.

Here’s more of what Jeremy Adam Smith had to say:

What is your take on the biology argument—that women are somehow biologically pre-ordained to be closer to their children and therefore are the rightful primary caregivers?

Smith: Well, women do carry burdens that men do not–they gestate and give birth to children, and can breastfeed. That’s why paid maternity leave and caregiver protections are so hugely necessary, for the health of both mother and child.

But for many couples, those first months of parenthood set a pattern that lasts for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t have to be that way. Study after study, plus decades of experience, tell us that dads are fully capable to taking over care of young children, and everyone–moms, dads, kids– will benefit. Empathy is a skill that can be developed, not a fixed trait, not something unique to women. That’s true of all of the emotions and behaviors we need to take care of kids.

One breadwinning mom I interviewed, Gina Heise in Kansas City, argued that a mother’s special biological attachment to her children is actually a good argument on behalf of stay-at-home fatherhood. It creates a bond between dads and kids that might not exist otherwise, and deepens the father’s attachment to the family as a whole. The dad might not know what he’s doing at first, but that’s also true for many mothers. We have to respect each other’s learning curves.

Besides your work, it is rare that we’ve come across men advocating for shared parenting. Why do you think this is? To what degree is this changing?

Smith: Historically, men have seen breadwinning as the most important part of parenting. When my grandfather went to work at a quarry every day, he saw himself as being a good father. And, by the standards of his time, he was a very dedicated father. So when working-class men organized themselves into unions and fought for pay, respect, and benefits, they were fighting for their families. It was all about a paycheck, not care. And robbing a man of his paycheck could destroy him, and the family.

That dynamic has changed. Eighty percent of mothers work and a third of wives make more money than their husbands. During the past twenty years, and especially during the past ten, rates of male caregiving have risen and we’ve seen more and more men ask for things like paternity leave.

However, we shouldn’t expect that men will talk about these issues using the same language that women have; when we do, we miss the ways that men’s values have shifted. Women talk about equality, and they have the feminist movement to back them up. As far as I’m concerned, that’s right on. But for me and for many men, shared parenting is mainly about living a meaningful life. It’s about love.

That may sound dippy compared to a powerful feminist slogan like equal pay for equal work, but what are we talking about when we talk about shared parenting? We’re talking about love and care. It should be seen as something wonderful, not as drudgery–though taking care of a kid every day is indeed very hard work. It was right for the feminist movement to push men to take on more housework and childcare, but we’ve reached a point where men have started to pull each other in, mostly just by example. There’s still push, but also pull. That’s a very powerfulcombination.

Given the way the American system works, some people fear that practicing shared parenting (where presumably both parents have to make some sacrifices in terms of career, or at least cannot work 80+ hour weeks), means that the couple has to accept that they will likely not become very, very successful monetarily. In other words, can you be a jet-setting i-banker and still practice shared parenting? Or are some career paths out of the question?

Smith: In my opinion, it’s not possible to have a super-high-powered career and still be an involved parent. I’m sure President Obama, to name one example, is not there for his daughters as often as he and they would like him to be. Does that mean that Obama should have remained a constitutional law professor, and never pursued politics? In terms of my own small life, writing “The Daddy Shift” took time away from my son, but does that mean I shouldn’t have written it? Each person, each family, has to answer these questions for themselves. You have to know what you want, and know what you want will change over time. Maybe in eight years Barack Obama will feel called to become a stay-at-home dad!

The problem, as I see it, is not people making use of their talents and pursuing careers–or, conversely, choosing to stay home with children, which feminists like Linda Hirshman say is a problem. I think the problem is when people do what they do out of fear. They stay at their job and chase money and accomplishment because they’re afraid to stop, or, in some cases, because they’re afraid that they’re letting down the feminist movement. Or they retreat to the home because they’re afraid of the world or of not being womanly enough.

The challenge, for every individual human being, is to be courageous, to be who you’re are going to be. And I think children benefit when they see that example.

**

I hold Smith in the greatest esteem. But I do have a bone to pick with his terminology. Smith calls himself a stay-at-home-dad, but he was only home full time with his son, Liko, for a year, after his wife had, in turn, been home for a year. In my mind, that is not stay-at-home parenthood. That is parental leave. Granted, I’m from Sweden, a country that offers eighteen months of paid parental leave. To me, stay-at-home parenthood would have to entail several years to a lifetime out of the paid workforce.

My issue is with the labeling. The interviews that I’ve done with Gen Y:ers have shown that young men and women shy away from labels like stay-at-home-mom or stay-at-home-dad. In their long-term plans, they mention wanting to take some time off (several months to a year or so) when they have children, but they would never want to call themselves a stay-at-home parent. They want to continue to identify themselves as professionals, throughout their time off. That is, I think, an important distinction. And it points to a crucial issue, which Smith also wrestles with. The Unites States offers fewer provisions to help working families than any other industrial nation in the world. Because there is no federally mandated paid parental leave in America, as little as one year out of the workforce to care for kids makes you a stay-at-home parent. The equivalent time out in most European countries allows you to remain a “professional” on temporary leave.

What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out. If taking time off to care for children is automatically labeled stay-at-home parenthood, it will affect the willingness to do it, since doing so has obvious implications for a person’s career, earning power, and sense of self— as my Gen Y interviews showed. I support Smith’s recommendation that the US adopt more reasonable parental leave policies. Maybe then we can finally get away from unnecessary labels.

- Astri