Men Who Do and Men Who Don’t
ONE out of five men in this study were as actively involved at home as their wives. Some, like Greg Alston, shared in a “male” way, doing such things as carpentry; others, like Art Winfield, in a “female” way, as people imagined these ways to be. Since the men who shared the second shift lived happier family lives, I wondered what conditions produced such men. How do men who share differ from other men?
They were no more likely than other men to have “model” fathers who helped at home. Their parents were no more likely to have trained them to do chores when they were young. Michael Sherman and Seth Stein both had fathers who spent little time with them and did little work around the house. But Michael became engrossed in raising his twin boys, whereas Seth said hello and good-bye to his kids on his way to and from an absorbing law practice. Sharers were also as likely to have had mothers who were homemakers or who worked and tended the home as non-sharers.
Wives of sharing men eagerly offered complex explanations for why their husbands were so “unusual.” Yet each story differed from the next. For example, one woman explained:
Jonathan has always been extremely involved with the children. I think it’s because he grew up the son of Jews who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Canada after World War Two. He never felt a part of Canadian society, he always felt like an outsider. I think that’s why he never bought into conventional sex roles either. His mother worked day and night running a grocery store, so he rarely saw her. She didn’t like kids anyway; he was brought up by his grandmother so he didn’t believe only a mother could raise kids.
Another wife offered a different explanation: “Dwight is unusually involved at home because his father was away so much in the navy, and his mother stayed home to take care of the kids by herself. I think it was seeing her handle all that by herself that made him want to share, and I thank his mother for training him.”
The “upbringing stories” of such wives often focused on the impact of their husband’s mother. But the only recurring theme I could discover had to do with the son’s disaffiliation from a detached, absent, or overbearing father. John Livingston’s father, as he sadly described him, was a recluse who ignored his son. Michael Sherman’s father alternately praised and forgot his. Art Winfield’s biological father disappeared entirely. Many men had bad memories of their fathers, but the men who ended up sharing child care differentiated themselves from their fathers; seeing them as bad examples they vowed not to be like. The most involved father—Art Winfield, the father who played with the children at his adopted son’s day-care class—was both disenchanted with his real father, a “bad” model of fatherhood, and ardently devoted to his kindly stepfather, a “good” model. What seemed important was the combination of how a man identified with his father and what that father was like—not how much the father had helped around the house.
But most people believed that it was “upbringing”—how much a man helped around the house as a boy—that made the difference.1 Evan Holt, who did his hobbies “downstairs” while his wife cared for the “upstairs,” said he was just acting the way he was “brought up” to act. But Evan didn’t do many other things he was brought up to do, like go to church, avoid using credit cards, or wait to have sex until after marriage. In these areas of life he was his own man. Around the house, he said he was just doing what his mother taught him. The “upbringing” story seemed like a cover for a more illusive psychological predisposition.
Men like Art Winfield and Michael Sherman seemed to have two characteristics in common: they were reacting against an absent or self-centered father, and at the same time, they had sufficiently identified with some male to feel safe empathizing with their mothers without fear of becoming “too feminine.”
Did the men who shared the work at home love their wives more? Were they more considerate? It’s true, egalitarian men had more harmonious marriages, but I would be reluctant to say that men like Peter Tanagawa or Ray Judson loved their wives less than Art Winfield or Michael Sherman, or were less considerate. One man who did very little at home said, “Just last week I suddenly realized that my wife’s life is more valuable than mine because my son needs her more than he needs me.” Men who shared were often devoted to their wives, but so were men who didn’t.
Two external factors also did not distinguish men who shared from men who didn’t: the number of hours they worked or how much they earned. Husbands usually work a longer “full-time” job than wives. But in the families I studied, men who worked fifty hours or more per week were just slightly less likely to share housework than men who worked forty-five, forty, or thirty-five hours a week. In addition, fifty-hour-a-week women did far more child care and housework than men who worked those hours. Other national studies also show that the number of hours a man works for pay has little to do with the number of hours he put in at home.2
At first, I also assumed money would loom large. The man who shared, I thought, would need his wife’s salary more than other men, would value her job more, and also her time.
American wives in two-job couples in 1989 and 2006 averaged about one dollar for every three their husbands earn, and this average prevailed among the families I studied too.
In 1980 a wife in a two-job couple, like those in this study, earned thirty-three cents for every dollar her husband earned; today, such women earn seventy-six cents per husband dollar. Earlier many marriages reflected the labor force itself—a pilot married a flight attendant, a secretary married a boss, a dental assistant married a dentist—while today more couples marry those in similar jobs. But when couples’ jobs differ, as they often still do, it is usually the wife who has the less-well-paid—but steadier—job, and the husband who has the higher-paid but unsteady one. Men more typically work in the automotive industry or construction trades, for example, which are more vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, and recession. And among men and women in fulltime jobs in 2010, women earned eighty-one cents for every dollar a man earns.
I assumed that the man who shares would not earn more. Both spouses might agree that because his job came first, his leisure did too. I assumed that men who earned as much or less than their wives would do more housework, that being the least valued activity. A woman who wanted 50-50 in the second shift but had married a high-earning man would reconcile herself to the family’s greater need for her husband’s job and work the extra month a year. By the same token, a traditional man married to a high-earning woman would swallow his pride and pitch in at home. I assumed that money would talk louder than ideals.
If money explained who did what at home, that would mean that no matter how much effort a woman put into her job, its lower pay would mean less husbandly help at home. According to research about on-the-job stress, low-level service jobs, where women are concentrated, cause more stress than the blue- and white-collar jobs men more often do. Although working mothers don’t work the long hours fathers do, they devote as much effort to earning money as men, and many women earn less for work that’s more stressful. Thus, by using his higher salary to “buy” more leisure at home, he inadvertently makes his wife pay indirectly for an inequity in the wider economy that causes her to get paid less. If money is the key organizing principle to the relations between men and women in marriage, it’s a pity for men because it puts their role at home at the mercy of the blind fluctuations of the marketplace and for women because if money talks at home, it favors men. The extra month a year becomes an indirect way in which the woman pays at home for the economic discrimination outside it.
Money mattered in the marriages I studied, but it was not the powerful “invisible hand” behind men who shared.3 For one thing, this is clear from the family portraits. Michael Sherman earned much more than Adrienne but his job didn’t matter more. For years Ann Myerson earned more than her husband but put her husband’s job first anyway. John Livingston valued his wife’s job as he did his own, but she took more responsibility at home.
A number of researchers have tried to discover a link between the wage gap between working parents and the leisure gap between them, and the results have been confusing. Among couples in this study, these two factors were not related in a statistically significant way.
An intriguing clue appeared, however, when I divided all the men into three groups: men who earn more than their wives (most men), men who earn the same amount, and men who earn less. Of the men who earned more, 21 percent shared housework. Of the men who earned about the same, 30 percent shared. But among men who earned less than their wives, none shared.
If a logic of the pocketbook is only a logic of the pocketbook, it should operate the same whether a man earns more or a woman does. But this “logic of the pocketbook” didn’t work that way. It only worked as long as men earned as much or more than their wives. Money frequently “worked” for men (it excused them from housework) but it didn’t work for women (didn’t get them out of it).
Another principle—the principle of “balancing”—seems to be at work: if men lose power over women in one way, they make up for it in another way—for example, by avoiding the second shift. In this way, they can maintain dominance over women. How much responsibility these men assumed at home seemed related to the deeper issue of male power. Men who earn much more than their wives already have a power over their wives in that they control a scarce and important resource. The more severely a man’s identity is financially threatened—by his wife’s higher salary, for example—the less he can afford to threaten it further by doing “women’s work” at home.
Men who shared the second shift weren’t trying to make up for losing power in other realms of marriage; they didn’t feel the need to “balance.” Michael Sherman had given up the idea that he should have more power than Adrienne. Art Winfield talked playfully about men being “brought up to be kings.” But Peter Tanagawa felt a man should have more power, and felt he’d given a lot of it up when Nina’s career rose so dramatically. He’d adjusted to earning much less, but to a man of his ideas, this was a huge sacrifice. Nina made up for it by putting in more time at home.
More crucial than cultural beliefs about men’s and women’s spheres, were couples’ beliefs about the right degree of men’s and women’s power. Women who “balanced” felt “too powerful.” Sensing when their husbands got touchy, sensing the fragility of their husbands’ ego, not wanting them to get discouraged or depressed, such women restored their men’s lost power by waiting on them at home.
Wives did this balancing for different reasons. One eccentric Englishman and father of three children was a tenured member of the English department of a small college. He taught classes and held obligatory office hours but had abandoned research, minimized committee work, avoided corridor conversations, and long since given up putting in for a raise. He claimed to “share” housework and child care, but what he meant by housework was working on a new den, and what he meant by child care was reflected in his remark, “While I’m working on the house; they muck about by themselves.” He was touchy about his accomplishments and nervous, it seemed, about what he called the “limitless” ambition of his workaholic wife. Without asking him to do more, perhaps his wife was making up for her ambitions by carrying the load at home.
One architect, the fourth of four highly successful brothers in a prosperous and rising black family, had lost his job in the recession of the late 1970s, become deeply discouraged, taken occasional contracting jobs, and otherwise settled into a life of semi-unemployment. His wife explained: “Eventually we’re going to have to make it on my salary. But it’s awfully hard on my husband right now, being trained as an architect and not being able to get a job. I take that into account.” Her husband did no housework and spent time with his son only when the spirit moved him. “I do very little around the house,” he said frankly, “but Beverly doesn’t complain, bless her heart.” Meanwhile, they lived in near-poverty, while Beverly worked part time, cared for their baby and home, and took courses in veterinary science at night. As she let fall at the end of the interview, “Sometimes I wonder how long I can keep going.”
Other men earned less and did less at home, but weren’t “balancing.” They were going back to get a degree, and their wives were temporarily giving them the money and time to do this. The husband’s training for a job counted as much in their moral accounting as it would if he already had that more important job. For example, one husband was unemployed while studying for a degree in pediatric nursing. His wife, a full-time administrator, cared for their home and nine-month-old baby. The rhythm of their household life revolved around the dates of his exams. His wife explained: “My husband used to puree Stevy’s carrots in the blender. He used to help shop, and weed the garden. Now he studies every evening until ten. His exams come first. Getting that ‘A’ is important to him. He plays with the baby as a study break.” She didn’t mind doing the work at home and only got upset when he complained the house was messy. She said, “I keep myself going by reminding myself this is temporary, until Jay gets his degree.”
I heard of no women whose husbands both worked and cared for the family while the wives studied for a degree. For a woman, getting a degree seemed not so honored an act. There was no tradition of “putting your wife through college” analogous to “putting your husband through college.” A wife could imagine being supported or being better off when her husband got his degree. Husbands usually couldn’t imagine either situation. One husband had shared the work at home 50-50 when his wife worked, but came to resent it terribly and finally stopped when his wife quit her job and went back to school to get a Ph.D. A job counted but work toward a degree did not. Feeling deprived of attention and service, one man shouted into my tape recorder—half in fun and half not: “You can’t eat it. You can’t talk to it. It doesn’t buy a vacation or a new car. I hate my wife’s dissertation!” Women who put their husbands through school may have resented the burden, but they didn’t feel they had as much right to complain.
Taken as a whole, this group of men—semi-unemployed, hanging back at work, or in training—neither earned the bread nor baked it. And of all the wives, theirs were the least happy. Yet, either because they sympathized with their husbands, or expected their situation to improve, because they saw no way to change it, or because they were maintaining the “right” balance of power, such women worked the extra month a year. Meanwhile, their lower-earning husbands often saw their wives as intelligent, strong, “a rock.” At the same time they enjoyed the idea that, though not a king at work, a man had a warm throne at home.
Some women had other ways of accumulating more power than they felt “comfortable” with. One woman M.D., married to a former patient, an impecunious musician, did all the second shift. As her husband put it, “She never asks.” Another woman, a teacher, secretly upset the power balance by having a long-term extramarital affair almost like another marriage. Life went on as usual at home, but she quietly made up for her secret life by being “wonderful” about chores at home.
In all these marriages, money was not the main determinant of which men did or didn’t share. Even men who earned much more than their wives didn’t get out of housework because of it. One college professor and father of three explained why he had committed himself to 50 percent of housework and child care:
My wife earns a third of what I earn. But as a public school teacher, she’s doing a job that’s just as important as mine. She’s an extraordinarily gifted teacher, and I happen to know she works just as hard at her teaching as I do at mine. So when we come home, she’s as tired as I am. We share the housework and child care equally. But [in a tone of exasperation] if she were to take a job in insurance or real estate, she’d just be doing another job. She wouldn’t be making the contribution she’s making now. We haven’t talked about it, but if that were the case, I probably wouldn’t break my back like this. She would have to carry the load at home.
Ironically, had his wife earned more at a job he admired less—and worked only for money—he would not have shared the second shift.
Other evidence also points away from the logic of the pocket-book. In a 1985 report, Joseph Pleck found that over the last ten years, men married to housewives have increased their contributions to housework nearly as much as men whose wives do paid work.4 Such housewives earned nothing ten years ago and earn nothing now. Yet husbands of housewives now help their wives at home more. That isn’t money talking, and not a matter of men “keeping the edge.” They had the edge, and gave some up.
These husbands of housewives may help more because of a rising standard of male consideration. Just as nonunion industries often try to avoid unionization by keeping wages in nonunion shops comparable to those in unionized shops, so husbands of housewives may be unconsciously responding to the women’s movement by helping more at home. Without quite knowing it, some “nonunion” (nonfeminist) women may be enjoying the gains won by “union” agitators. Again, the political struggle behind a cultural shift and not the timeless logic of the pocketbook seems to determine how much men help at home. To push the analogy further, the women who struggle to get their husbands to do more at home and whose husbands divorce them because of it may be like the trouble-makers who fight the company, win the point, but get fired. The outrageous few improve things for the “good workers” who make no noise.
This doesn’t mean money has nothing to do with the second shift. In two different ways, it does. In the first place, couples do need to think about and plan around financial need. Most of the men who shared at home had wives who pretty much shared at work. The men earned some but not much more. And whatever their wives earned, blue-collar men like Art Winfield really needed. Second, future changes in the general economy may press more couples to do “balancing.” Some experts predict that the American economy will split increasingly between an elite of highly paid, highly trained workers and an enlarging pool of poorly paid, unskilled workers. Jobs in the middle are being squeezed out as companies automate or seek cheaper labor pools in the Third World. The personnel rosters of the so-called sunrise industries, the rapidly growing, high-technology companies, already reflect this split. Companies with many jobs in the middle are in the so-called sunset industries, such as car manufacturing. As the economist Bob Kuttner illustrates: “The fast food industry employs a small number of executives and hundreds of thousands of cashiers and kitchen help…. With some variation, key punchers, chambermaids, and retail sales personnel confront the same short job ladder.”5 In addition, unions in sunrise industries often face company threats to move offshore, and so these unions press less hard for better pay.
The decline in jobs in the middle mainly hits men in blue-collar union-protected jobs. Unless they can get training that allows them to compete for highly skilled jobs, such men will be forced to choose between unemployment and low-paid service work.
The “declining middle” is thus in the process of creating an economic crisis for many men. This crisis can lead some men to feel it “only fair” to share the load at home, and other men—through their wives’ balancing—to do less.
Sharing men seemed to be randomly distributed up and down the class ladder. There were the Michael Shermans and the Art Winfields. In the working class, more men shared without believing in it. In the middle class, more men didn’t share even though they did believe in it. Everything else equal, men whose wives had advanced degrees and professional careers—who had what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”—were more likely to share than men whose wives lacked such capital. All this formed part of the social backdrop to the working man’s gender strategy at home.
Added to this was the influence of his wife. Nearly every man who shared had a wife who urged—or at least welcomed—his involvement at home. They did not hoard their children, as Nancy Holt came to do with Joey. When Evan had been about to leave to take Joey to the zoo for a father-son outing, Nancy had edged Evan out by deciding at the last minute to “help” them get along. At first awkward and unconfident with children, Michael Sherman might have retreated to the “downstairs” had it not been for Adrienne’s continual invitation to pitch in. Often, something as simple as the way a mother holds her baby to “see Dad” indicated her effort to share. Adrienne Sherman didn’t just leave her twins with Daddy; she talked to them about what Daddy could do with them. She fostered a tie. She didn’t play expert. She made room.
As a result, such men were—or became—sensitive to their children’s needs. They were more realistic than other fathers about the limits of what their wives provide, and about what their children really need.
Involved fathers had a much more elaborate notion of what a father was than uninvolved fathers did. Involved fathers talked about fathering much as mothers talked about mothering. Uninvolved fathers held to a far more restricted mission—to discipline the child or teach him sports. When asked what he thought was important about being a father, one black businessman and father of two said:
Discipline. I don’t put up with whining. It bothers me. I’m shorter tempered and my wife is longer tempered. I do a significant amount of paddling. I grew up with being paddled. When I got paddled I knew damn good and well that I deserved it. I don’t whip them. One good pop on their bottom and I send them down to their room. I’ve scared them. I’ve never punched them. And I’ll spank them in front of people as well as not in front of them.
To him, being a disciplinarian was being a father. As a result, his children gravitated to their mother. In a strangely matter-of-fact way, she remarked that she didn’t “feel comfortable” leaving the children with her husband for long periods. “If I go out to the hairdresser’s on Saturday, I might come back and find he didn’t fix them lunch; I don’t leave them with him too much.” Developing a “longer temper” didn’t feel to him like part of a father’s job.
When I asked uninvolved fathers to define a “good mother” and “good father,” they gave elaborate and detailed answers for “good mother,” and short, hazy answers for “good father,” sometimes with a specific mission attached to it, like teaching a child about cars, soccer, baseball.
I asked one man, “What’s a good mother?” and he answered: “A good mother is patient. That’s the first thing. Someone who is warm, caring, who can see what the child needs, physically, who stimulates the child intellectually, and helps the child meet his emotional challenges.” “What is a good father?” I asked. “A good father is a man who spends time with his children.” Another man said simply, “A good father is around.”
It is not that such men have an elaborate idea of fatherhood and don’t live up to it. Their idea of fatherhood is embryonic to begin with. They often limit that idea by comparing themselves only to their own fathers, and not, as more involved men did, to their mothers, sisters, or other fathers. As a Salvadoran delivery man put it, “I give my children everything my father gave me.” Michael Sherman gave his twins what his mother gave him.
Men who are greatly involved with their children react against two cultural ideas: one idea removes the actual care of children from the definition of manhood, and one curtails the notion of how much care a child needs. As to the first idea, involved fathers’ biggest struggle was against the doubts they felt about not “giving everything to getting ahead” in their jobs. But even when they conquered this fear, another idea often stood in the way—the idea that their child is “already grown up,” “advanced,” and doesn’t need much from him.
Just as the archetype of the supermom—the woman who can do it all—minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the “superkid” minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older. Often uninvolved parents remarked with pride that their small children were “self-sufficient” or “very independent.”
I asked the fifth-grade teacher in a private school how she thought her students from two-job families were doing. She began by saying that they did as well as the few children she had whose mothers stayed home. But having said that, her talk ran to the problems: “The good side of kids being on their own so much is that it makes them independent really early. But I think they pay a price. I can see them sealing off their feelings, as if they’re saying. ‘That’s the last time I’ll be vulnerable.’ I can see it in their faces, especially the sixth-grade boys.”
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as women were increasingly excluded from the workplace, the cultural notion of what a child “needs” at home grew to expand the woman’s role at home. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note in For Her Own Good, doctors and ministers argued strongly that a woman’s place was at home. The child needed her there. As the economic winds reversed, so did the idea of a woman’s proper place—and a child’s real needs. Nowadays, a child is increasingly imagined to need time with other children, to need “independence-training,” not to need “quantity time” with a parent but only a small amount of “quality time.” As one working father remarked: “Children need time to play with other children their age. It’s stimulating for them. Nelson has enjoyed it, I think, from when he was six months.”
If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are a cultural football in an economic and marital game.
An Orwellian “superkid” language has emerged to consolidate this sense of normality. In a September 1985 New York Times article entitled “New Programs Come to Aid of Latch-Key Children,” Janet Edder quotes a child-care professional as follows: “Like other child-care professionals, Mrs. Seligson prefers to use the phrase ‘Children in Self-Care’ rather than ‘Latch-Key Children,’ a term coined during the depression when many children who went home alone wore a key around their necks.” “Children in Self-Care” suggests that children are being cared for, by themselves. Unlike the term “Latch-Key Children,” which suggests a child who is sad and deprived, the term “Children in Self-Care” suggests a happy superkid.
Another article, in the August 1984 Changing Times, entitled “When You Can’t Be Home, Teach Your Child What to Do,” suggests that working parents do home-safety checkups so that a pipe won’t burst, a circuit breaker won’t blow, or electrical fire start. Parents should advise children to keep house keys out of sight and to conceal from callers the fact that they’re alone at home. It tells about “warm lines”—a telephone number a child can call for advice or simple comfort when he or she is alone. Earlier in the century, advice of this sort was offered to destitute widows or working wives of disabled or unemployed men while the middle class shook its head in sympathy. Now the middle class has “children in self-care” too.
The parents I talked to had younger children, none of whom were in “self-care.” The children I visited seemed a fairly jolly and resilient lot. But the parents I spoke to did not feel much supported in their parenthood; like Ann Myerson, many parents in the business world felt obliged to hide concerns that related to children. Female clerical workers were discouraged from making calls home. Many men feared that their doing anything for family reasons—moving to another city, missing the office party, passing up a promotion—would be taken as a sign they lacked ambition or manliness. As for John Livingston’s coworkers, the rule was: don’t go home until your wife calls.
For all the talk about the importance of children, the cultural climate has become subtly less hospitable to parents who put children first. This is not because parents love children less, but because a job culture has expanded at the expense of a family culture.
As motherhood as a “private enterprise” declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.
Every afternoon Art Winfield knew Adam was waiting for him at day care. Michael Sherman knew that around 6 a. m. one of his twins would call out “Daddy.” John Livingston knew that Cary relied on him to get around her mother’s discipline. Such men were close enough to their children to know what they were and weren’t getting from their mothers.
Uninvolved fathers were not. They imagined that their wives did more with the children than they did. For example, one thirty-two-year-old grocery clerk praised his wife for helping their daughter with reading on the weekends—something his wife complained he didn’t make time for. But when I interviewed her, I discovered that her weekends were taken up with housework, church, and visiting relatives.
Sometimes I had the feeling that fathers were passing the child-care buck to their wives while the wives passed it to the baby-sitter. Each person passing the role on wanted to feel good about it, and tended to deny the problems. Just as fathers often praised their wives as “wonderful mothers,” so mothers often praised their baby-sitters as “wonderful.” Even women who complain about day care commonly end up describing the day-care worker as “great.” So important to parents was the care of their child that they almost had to believe that “everything at day care was fine.” Not only was the role of caretaker transferred from parent to baby-sitter, but sometimes also the illusion that the child was “in good hands.”
The reasons men gave for why their wives were wonderful—e.g., that they were patient—were often reasons women gave for why the baby-sitters were wonderful. Just as uninvolved fathers often said that they wouldn’t want to trade places with their wives, so wives often said they wouldn’t want to trade places with their day-care worker.
As one businesswoman and mother of a three-year-old boy commented: “Our baby-sitter is just fantastic. She’s with the kids from seven o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night. And some kids stay later. I don’t know how she does it. I couldn’t.” Another working mother commented: “I couldn’t be as patient as Elizabeth [the day-care worker] is. I love my child, but I’m not a baby person.”
The day-care worker herself was often in a difficult spot. She depended economically on the parents, so she didn’t want to say anything so offensive it might lead them to withdraw the child from her care. And parents didn’t have time to listen. As Katharine Wilson, a day-care worker for fifteen years, remarked:
One out of five parents just drop their children off and run. Another three will come in and briefly talk with you. Then the last person will come in and talk to you quite a bit. Not too many call during the day. They trust we know what we’re doing.
Some day-care centers even established a policy of check-in sheets that required parents to come inside the day-care center and sign their child in each morning, thus preventing the hurried few who might otherwise leave their children off at the sidewalk.
Pickup time was often hectic, and not a good time to talk. As one day-care worker observed:
It’s a hell of a life the parents lead. Every time I see them they’re in a rush. It’s rush in the morning and rush in the evening. They barely ask me what Danny had for lunch or how he seemed. I think they might feel bad when they see him around four o’clock in the afternoon. He gets kind of restless then. He’s waiting. He sees the parents of the other children come and each time the doorbell rings he hopes it’s his parents. But, see, they come in the last—six-thirty.
Sometimes a day-care worker becomes worried about a child. As Alicia Fernandez confided:
I’ve had Emily for a year and a half now. She’s never been real open with me and I don’t think she is with her mother either. I think, in a way, Emily was hurt that her former sitter had to give her up. It was a hard adjustment coming in to me and in fact I don’t think she has adjusted. One day she took the money out of my wallet—the money her mother had given me—and tore it up. I was so shocked. It was my pay. I slapped her across the knees. She didn’t cry. I felt bad I’d done that, but even worse that she didn’t cry. I thought, hey, something’s wrong.
Had she mentioned this to Emily’s mother and father? I asked. She replied quickly and quietly: “Oh no. It’s hard to talk about that. We just don’t get around to it. In a way, I feel badly about it but on the other hand if I told her mother, she might take Emily away.”
The day-care worker, who could best judge how Emily’s day had gone, felt afraid to confide her concerns to Emily’s parents, who badly needed to hear them. Other day-care workers also kept their opinions to themselves. As one noted: “You can feel sorry for them. I have Tim for nine hours. I have Jessica for ten and a half—now Jessie’s mother is a single mother. Like I say, at the end of the day they cry.” “Do you talk to their parents about the crying?” I asked.
They don’t ask, and I don’t bring it up. Don’t get me wrong. These children are adaptable. They’re pliant. As long as there’s a sense of love here and as long as you feed them, they know I’m the one who satisfies their needs. That’s all I am to them. The children love me and some little children, like Nelson, don’t want to go home. He’s three now but I’ve had him since he was seven months old; Stephanie’s three and I’ve had her since she was six weeks. But I do feel sorry for the children, I do. Because I know there are days when they probably don’t feel like coming here, especially Mondays.
When day-care workers feel sorry for the children they care for something is wrong. This woman, a thirty-year-old black mother of three, was gentle and kindly, a lovely person to care for children. What seemed wrong to me was the overly long hours, the blocked channels of communication, and the fathers who imagined their wives were “handling it all.”
In a time of stalled revolution—when women have gone to work, but the workplace, the culture, and the men have not adjusted themselves to this new reality—children can be the victims. Most working mothers are already doing all they can. It is men who can do more.
Fathers can make a difference that shows in the child. I didn’t administer tests to the children in the homes I visited nor gather systematic information on child development. I did ask the babysitters and day-care workers for their general impressions of differences between the children of single parents, two-job families in which the father was uninvolved, and two-job families in which the father was actively involved. All of them said that the children of fathers who were actively involved seemed to them “more secure” and “less anxious.” Their lives were less rushed. On Monday, they had more to report about Sunday’s events: “Guess what I did with my dad….”
But curiously little attention has been paid to the effect of fathers on children. Current research focuses almost exclusively on the influence of mothers. A panel of distinguished social scientists chosen by the National Academy of Sciences to review the previous research on children of working mothers concluded in 1982 that a mother’s employment has no consistent ill effects on a child’s school achievement, IQ, or social and emotional development.6 Other summary reviews offer similar but more complex findings. For example, in charting fifty years of research on children of working mothers, Lois Hoffman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, concluded that most girls of all social classes and boys from working-class families, whose mothers worked, were more self-confident and earned better grades than children whose mothers were housewives. But she also found that compared to the sons of housewives, middle-class boys raised by working mothers were less confident and did less well in school. But what about the influence of the fathers? Research documents a fact one might intuitively suspect: the more involved the father, the better off the child. Professor Norma Radin and her coresearchers at the University of Michigan conducted a number of studies that show that, all else being equal, the children of highly involved fathers are better adjusted socially and emotionally than children of noninvolved fathers and score higher on academic tests. In Dr. Radin’s research, “highly involved” fathers are those who score in the top third on an index composed of questions concerning responsibility for physical care (e.g., feeding the children), responsibility for socializing the child (e.g., setting limits), power in decision making regarding the child, availability to the child, and an overall estimate of his involvement in raising his preschooler. In one study of fifty-nine middle-class families with children between the ages of three and six, Dr. Radin found that highly involved fathers had sons who were better adjusted and more socially competent, more likely to perceive themselves as masters of their fate, and had a higher mental age on verbal intelligence tests.7 A 1985 study by Abraham Sagi found Israeli children of highly involved fathers showed more empathy than other children.
A 1985 study by Carolyn and Phil Cowan, two psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that three-and-a-half-year-old children of involved fathers achieved higher scores on certain playroom tasks (classifying objects, putting things in a series, role-taking tasks) than other children. When fathers worked longer hours outside the home, the Cowans found in their observation sessions, the three-and-a-half-year-olds showed more anxiety. The daughters of long-hours men were, in addition, less warm and less task oriented at playroom tasks, although they had fewer behavior problems. When fathers worked long hours, mothers tended to compensate by establishing warm relations with their sons. But when mothers worked long hours, husbands did not “compensate” with their daughters. In spite of this, the girls did well in playroom tasks. When fathers or mothers worked more outside the home, the parent established a closer bond with the boy.8
The results of active fatherhood also seem to last. In one study, two psychologists asked male undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to respond to such statements as “My father understood my problems and worries and helped with them, hugged or kissed me goodnight when I was small, was able to make me feel better when I was upset, gave me a lot of care and attention.” They were also asked to describe his availability (“away from home for days at a time, … out in the evening at least two nights a week, … home afternoons when children came home from school,” and so on). Young men who ranked their fathers as highly—or even moderately—nurturant and available were far more likely to describe themselves as “trusting, friendly, loyal, and dependable, industrious and honest.”9
The effects of a man’s care for his children are likely to show up again and again through time—in the child as a child, in the child as an adult, and probably also in the child’s own approach to fatherhood, and in generations of fathers to come. An exceptionally warmhearted man, like the stepfather of Art Winfield, could light a future way. In the last forty years, many women have made a historic shift into the economy. Now it is time for a generation of men to make a second shift—into work at home.