Work and Family

What’s Going On with Your Partner

Physically

Emotionally

What’s Going On with the Baby

The baby looks pretty trim—he hasn’t started putting on much fat yet—and is starting to get covered with vernix, a thick, waxy, protective coating. His eyes are starting to open, he coughs and hiccups, and if you were inside the uterus you could see his unique footprints and fingerprints. The movements of your now foot-long two-pounder are getting stronger—no more of those butterfly kicks—and he can hear, and respond to, sounds from the outside world. Baby girls develop eggs in their ovaries this month, and according to some researchers, this is when your baby’s emotions begin to form. He learns about love through the comfort that your voice (and your partner’s) gives him. And when your partner is feeling stressed or angry or sad, the baby gets a tiny jolt of the same hormones that are affecting Mom.

What’s Going On with You

Reexamining Your Relationship with Your Father
As the reality of your prospective fatherhood unfolds, you’ll probably find yourself contemplating how you’ll juggle the various roles—parent, provider, husband, employee, friend—that will make up your paternal identity. As mentioned in earlier chapters, you may be spending more time reading about parenting and watching how your male friends, family members, or even strangers do it.

But eventually you’ll realize that your own father—whether you know it or not—has already had a profound influence on the kind of father you’ll be. And you may find yourself nearly overcome with forgotten images of childhood—especially ones involving your father. Just walking down the street, I’d suddenly remember the times we went camping or to the ballet, how he taught me to throw a baseball in the park, and the hot summer afternoon he, my sisters, and I stripped down to our underwear in the backyard and painted each other with watercolors. There’s nothing like impending paternity to bring back all the memories and emotions of what it was like to be fathered as a child.

Not all childhood memories of fathers are positive. Some men’s images of their fathers are dominated by fear, pain, loneliness, or longing. Either way, don’t be surprised if you find yourself seriously reexamining your relationship with your dad. Was he the kind of man you want as your role model? Was he the perfect example of the kind of father you don’t want to be? Or was he somewhere in between? Many men, particularly those who had rocky, or nonexistent, relationships with their fathers find that the prospect of becoming a dad themselves enables them to let go of some of the anger they’ve felt for so long. Don’t be surprised if you start having a lot of dreams about your father. Researcher Luis Zayas found that an expectant father’s uncertainty about his identity as father, his actual role, and the changed relationship with his wife and family are “among the psychic threads of fatherhood” that are fundamentally related to the man’s relationship with his own father and are frequently present in his dreams.

So, whether you’re awake or asleep, as you’re thinking about your dad, remember that what’s really going on is that you’re worried about what kind of a father you will be when your baby arrives.

There’s no question that the way your dad parented you will influence the kind of father you become. But despite all those silly aphorisms like “The acorn never falls far from the tree,” whether that influence is positive or negative is completely up to you.

According to researchers Kory Floyd and Mark Morman, father involvement is based on a combination of modeling and what they call “compensation effects.” On the one hand, if you feel that your dad did a good job parenting you, you’ll use him as a model for your relationship with your own kids. On the other hand, if you were dissatisfied with the fathering you received, or you feel that your relationship was unaffectionate or distant, you’ll “feel compelled to remake the fathering experience into something more positive” for your own children.

What’s especially interesting is that your dad’s relationship with your mother (when you were a boy) may also influence your fathering behavior, but not in the way you might expect. According to researchers John Beaton, William Doherty, and Martha Rueter, you’ll be more committed to being an involved father if your parents “disagreed about how you should be raised.” Apparently, in disagreeing with your mother, your dad was demonstrating that he wanted to be involved on his own terms. And you’ll want to do the same thing.

Bottom line: If you work at it, you can be the father you want to be, rather than the one you think fate might have planned for you to be.

A Sense of Mortality
I’ve always been more than just a little fascinated by death—I love the movie Harold and Maude, and I wanted to paint my room black and hang an “R.I.P.” sign over my bed when I was a kid (my parents wouldn’t let me). But it wasn’t until my wife got pregnant for the first time that death became something more than a mere abstraction. Suddenly it occurred to me that my death could have a serious impact on other people.

This realization had some interesting and fairly immediate results. The first thing that happened was that I became a much better driver—or at least a safer one. Overnight, yellow lights changed their meaning from “floor it” to “proceed with caution.” I began to leave for appointments a few minutes earlier so I wouldn’t have to hurry, I wove in and out of traffic less, and I found myself not quite so annoyed with people who cut me off in traffic. But besides becoming a better driver, I began to look back with horror at some of the risky things—parachuting, scuba diving—I’d done before I’d gotten married, and I began to reconsider some of the things I’d tentatively planned for the near future—bungee jumping, hang gliding. After all, now there were people counting on me to stay alive.

My preoccupation with my own mortality had other interesting consequences as well. I found myself strangely drawn to my family’s history; I wanted to learn more about our traditions, our family rituals, the wacky relatives no one ever talked about. I even put together a family tree and began bugging my relatives about their birth dates. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s quite common for expectant fathers to experience a heightened sense of attachment to their relatives—both immediate and distant—even if they weren’t particularly close before.

This really isn’t so unusual, especially when you consider that one of the main reasons we have kids in the first place is so that a little piece of us will live on long after we’re gone. I guess the hope is that one day seventy-five years from now, when my great-grandson is expecting a child, he’ll start to explore his roots and want to get to know more about me.

Feeling Trapped
As we’ve already discussed, you and your partner probably aren’t feeling the same things at the same time. Earlier on in the pregnancy, your partner may have turned inward, preoccupied with how the pregnancy was affecting her.

You may have felt a little (or a lot) left out. By now, though, your partner may be “coming out”—concentrating less on herself and the baby, and more on you.

Meanwhile, you may have just begun the process of turning inward that we began discussing last month (page 131). You’re going to be a father in less than four months, and you’ve got a lot of things to think about, many of which you need to work through on your own. The potential problem here is that just as you begin to focus on yourself, your partner is becoming increasingly dependent on you. She may be afraid that you don’t love her anymore and that you’re going to leave her. Or she may be worried—just as you are—about your physical safety. Although being doted upon is nice, it can sometimes get out of hand. And your partner’s increased dependence on you may cause you to feel trapped. As Arthur and Libby Colman found, a pregnant woman’s “sudden concern may make a man feel over-protected, as though his independence is being threatened.” If you are feeling trapped, it’s important to let your partner know in a gentle, nonconfrontational way. At the same time, encourage her to talk about what she’s feeling and what she wants from you.

A Few Positively Odd Things
Your Partner Might Be Experiencing
You’ve probably heard all about pregnant women’s strange and oddly timed food cravings—such as pickles and ice cream at two in the morning, or strawberries and garlic for breakfast. As repulsive as some of them may be, cravings like these are completely normal. Some pregnant women, though, crave laundry starch, wax, gravel, dirt, coffee grounds, paint, ashes, clay, cigarette butts, and even the smell of gasoline. Needless to say, such cravings are anything but normal. They are part of a fairly rare condition called pica, which generally affects only kids one to six years old and pregnant women (yet another reason I’m glad I’m not a woman). Women who grew up or live in the South or in rural communities seem to be at greater risk, as are women who suffered from pica as children. Some people believe that these wacky cravings are the body’s way of satisfying its nutritional needs; there is, for example, plenty of iron in clay. The problem is that there’s also a lot of really dangerous stuff in it.

Other experts discount the nutrition angle completely: if she’s missing some nutrients, she needs to eat better or take some vitamins. So if you catch your partner licking ashtrays, or if she wakes you up in the middle of the night asking for a handful of gravel or a candle to chew on, offer her a healthy snack, get her to sleep, and call her doctor first thing in the morning.

As if that wasn’t weird enough . . . if your partner has been forgetful lately, or seems to be losing a lot of things—including her memory—it may be because her brain is shrinking. Yep. Anita Holdcroft, an English anesthesiologist, found that during pregnancy, women’s brains actually get 3 to 5 percent smaller.

Now that you know this, it’s probably best that you keep it to yourself. After all, there’s really no nice way to tell someone that her brain is shrinking. You could mention it in the hope that your partner will forget it right away, but if she doesn’t, you’re in big trouble. And anyway, the shrinkage seems to be attributed to the brain cells being compressed—not to an actual loss of cells. And, oh yes, it generally clears up within a few months after the birth. (Several researchers have recently disputed the pregnancy brain-shrink theory—also called “mommy brain” or “mommy mush brain”—but most mothers will tell you that they’ve had issues with memory, concentration, and the ability to think straight.)

We’ve talked a lot about how just about everything your partner does affects your baby. But can the fetus affect the mother in return? This could very well be. Claire Vanston, a Canadian researcher, did a fascinating study on the brain function of women throughout pregnancy and beyond. She tested the women five times: during pregnancy at twelve weeks, twenty-four weeks, and thirty-seven weeks, then six weeks after the baby was born, and several months after that. She found that “women pregnant with sons consistently outperformed women pregnant with daughters” on several tests of working memory. And the boy / girl difference was there from the first test all the way through the last. As to why this happens, no one knows yet. But it’s still pretty interesting, isn’t it?

Staying Involved

Having Fun
Besides being a time of great change—physical as well as emotional—pregnancy can be a fun time, too. Here are a few ways to amuse yourselves:

Work and Family

FAMILY LEAVE
Let’s face it: while your partner is pregnant, it’s going to be kind of tough for you to put in a lot of quality time with your unborn child—a little before work, a bit more after work, a few hours on weekends. But what about after the pregnancy? Is a few hours a day going to be enough time to spend with your child? If it were, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book. Contrary to the common stereotypes, work-family balance is not just a women’s issue. It’s something that most working dads strive for too. But it’s not easy. Eighty-seven percent of working fathers report at least some work-vs.-family conflict. And according to the Families and Work Institute, dads in dual-income households report “significantly higher levels of interference between their jobs and family lives than do women in the same situation.”

Despite all this, today’s dads really want to make some changes. Consider the results of a few recent studies:

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately, despite their good intentions, only about 10 percent of new dads take any more than two weeks off after the birth of their child. So what accounts for the contradiction between what men say and what they actually do? First of all, the vast majority of family-leave plans (including the Family and Medical Leave Act, which we’ll talk about in a minute) are unpaid, which makes them unworkable for most families.

Over the past decade or so, there’s been a definite increase in the number of companies that offer family-friendly benefits. But when it comes to male employees, the messages about whether it’s okay to actually use those benefits are mixed at best. For example, about 13 percent of U.S. employers offer paid paternity leave. But even at those companies, only about half of eligible men take it. Why? People generally see taking maternity leave (beyond the disability component) as a normal thing for women to do; but taking paternity leave is seen in many circles as a sure sign that the man isn’t serious about his career. It’s no surprise then, that so many men have a deep-rooted conviction that getting on the “daddy track” will hurt their careers. Tom, an attorney friend of mine who elected not to take advantage of his firm’s paid family-leave plan, told me: “I wanted to take the leave, but I knew I’d never make partner if I did. All the male associates knew it would be career suicide.”

Unfortunately, Tom’s fears are not entirely unfounded. Julie Holliday Wayne and Bryanne Cordeiro studied the ways people perceive family leave in the workplace and found that men who take leave to care for a newborn are rated much more negatively than their male counterparts who don’t take leave. And, sadly, men are more judgmental of other men than women are. The result of all this? Sixty-five percent of fathers work more than forty hours per week (vs. 36 percent of working moms). Compared to mothers, fathers were only one-tenth as likely to have ever used parenting leave, one-sixth as likely to have ever used part-time work hours, and about half as likely to have ever used child-care referral services.

But dads are certainly not giving up. Even those who don’t take paternity or family leave manage to take some time off from work in order to be with their newborns. They do it by cobbling together sick days, comp time, vacation days, and so on. On average, that adds up to a little over a week.What it comes down to is what attorney Kari Palazzari calls the “daddy double-bind.” Men are still expected to be the primary breadwinner, so “success” at work means spending less time at home. But today’s dads are now expected to be actively involved in every part of their family life, and “success” at home requires spending less time at work. You can see that there’s no way out.

“Adorable, Kravitz, but from now on
baby pictures will suffice.”

The good news is that it looks as though some cracks are developing in what I like to call “the other glass ceiling”—the obstacles that make it hard for men to be with their children as much as they’d like.

A growing number of companies are discovering that not having father-friendly policies can be incredibly expensive, and that having them is just plain good for business. Let me give you a few examples, some of which were drawn from a wonderful report, “Defining Paternity Leave: Shifting Roles, New Responsibilities in the Family and the Workplace,” produced by the Boston College Center for Work & Family.

The Family and Medical Leave Act
The Family and Medical Leave Act (usually referred to as the Family Leave Act) is a relatively straightforward document, and I suggest you familiarize yourself with it before you start making too many plans. You can find thousands of references to it online, but for the latest, take a look at the Department of Labor’s Web site, www.dol.gov/dol/topic/benefits-leave/fmla.htm.

Here’s a quick summary of what it means for fathers:

Individual states may offer family-leave benefits that are more liberal than those of the federal program. In some states, for example, companies that employ as few as twenty-five people are required to offer their employees family leave. And a small number of states are now offering family leave that’s paid (although you probably won’t get anywhere near your current salary). And remember: these benefits are completely separate from the (potentially more liberal) ones your company may offer. Be sure to check with your employer’s Human Resources department.

LONG-TERM WORK SCHEDULE CHANGES
So far we’ve talked about taking a few weeks off just after the birth of your child. But what about after that?

Not long after our first daughter was born, my wife left her big, downtown law firm and found a less stressful, three-day-a-week job closer to home. Almost everyone we knew applauded. But when I made the announcement that I, too, would be cutting back to three days a week, the reaction was quite a bit different. At work, I was hassled repeatedly by my boss and coworkers, and a lot of my friends and relatives began to whisper that if I didn’t go back to work full-time, my career might never recover.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should cut back their work schedules to three days a week. Clearly, that just isn’t practical for most people (although it sure would be nice if you could, wouldn’t it?). Frankly, you may never be able to resolve your work/family conflicts completely. But if you want to spend more time with your children on an ongoing basis, the only way to make that happen is to make some changes in your work schedule. Fortunately, there are a few ways you can maximize your time with your family, minimize your stress, and avoid trashing your career.

Here are some rather painless flexible-scheduling options you might want to run by your employer:

WORKING LESS THAN FULL-TIME
If you can afford to, you might want to consider one of the following options:

WORKING AT HOME (TELECOMMUTING)
Years ago, when I was a commodities trader, I used to spend eight or nine hours a day on the phone haggling with people—most of whom I never met—about grain prices. My coworkers were similarly occupied, and my boss was two thousand miles away. Realistically, there was no reason I couldn’t have been working at home. It was pretty much the same story when I started writing full-time. Most of the people I’ve worked with—often very closely—I’ve never met (or did so only years later).

Granted, commodities trading and freelance writing aren’t typical jobs, but the fact is that many Americans do work that doesn’t require their physical presence in any particular place at any particular time. If you’re not a construction worker or a retail salesman, you might be a prime candidate for telecommuting.

Now before you start to panic, I’m not suggesting that you rent out your office to someone else—most telecommuters work only a day or two a week at home. The point is that by telecommuting you may be able to reduce the time you spend getting to work and spend it with your family instead. Remember, though, that telecommuting is not meant to be a substitute for child care; you’re supposed to be working when you’re at home.

Telecommuting is good for your employer too. As the cost of office space rises and the cost of telecommunications equipment falls, many companies are finding that they save money by having their employees work elsewhere at least part of the time. And to top it off, employees who telecommute are more productive and get more and faster promotions than their office-bound coworkers.

Chances are you won’t be the first person to raise the issue of telecommuting to your employer. Over 17 million people telecommute at least one day per month, according to undress4success.com and World at Work (worldatwork.org). That’s more than double what it was a decade ago. And nearly 40 percent of those who didn’t telecommute regularly said they had job-related tasks that could be done from home. Thirty-five percent of those non-telecommuters said they’d be willing to take a slight pay cut in exchange for being allowed to telecommute two days per week.

Another major advantage to telecommuting is that you don’t have to shave and you can work in your underwear. But as great as working from home (or the library or coffee shop) is, there are still a few disadvantages. Some of my friends began to think that since I was always at home, I wasn’t really doing anything, and since I wasn’t doing anything, I could run errands for them. If this happens to you, you’re going to have to learn to say no. Working at home can also get a little lonely—you might miss hanging out around the water cooler and schmoozing with your buddies at work. And if you have a tendency to be obsessive about your work (as I do), you’ll have to train yourself to take frequent breaks.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve realized—at ten at night—that I hadn’t eaten all day and that the only time I had gone outside was to take the newspaper in from the porch.

Family Leave If You’re an Employee

Creating a More Family-Friendly Workplace for Dads If You’re an Employer (or Supervisor)

A WORK-FAMILY SOLUTION YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE THOUGHT OF
On pages 298–304 we’ll discuss a number of the child-care options you and your partner will have to sift through sometime soon. But what if you’d both really prefer to have your child raised in the arms of a loving parent? Most families that make the decision to have a parent stay home automatically assume that it has to be Mom. Sometimes, though, that just won’t work. She might have a more stable career than you, she might make more money, or she might simply have no interest in staying home. Well, all is not lost. If you and your partner truly want to have your children raised by a parent, the solution may be only as far away as the nearest mirror: you.

Now before you throw this book down and run out of the room screaming, take a minute to consider the idea. It may not be as crazy as it sounds, particularly if there aren’t any other interested family members nearby. Let’s start with some of the benefits:

In reality, you won’t be quite as alone in making this choice as it might seem. At least two million stay-at-home dads are doing it every day, and the number is rising all the time, according to Peter Baylies, founder of the At-Home Dad Network. You may have to do some digging, but there are also a lot of great resources out there. Peter’s organization, www.athomedad.net, and www.slowlane.com are terrific places to start. For more, see the Resources section of this book.





Notes: