Showing posts with label Caregiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caregiving. Show all posts
Friday, April 01, 2011
I'm Bored
This post is about boredom. Because of the subject matter, it may also be boring to read, so if that's a problem for you, go back to Facebook or the activities of your otherwise exciting life. For those fellow bored parents who remain, let me state the problem: I'm bored.
Boredom is a taboo topic of modern parenting. I'm bored right now, and I've been seriously bored quite a lot lately. This seems like the kind of thing which, if said too loudly among prospective parents, might lower the rate of human reproduction and adversely affect the future of the species. No one wants a boring job, and parenting is certainly a job that is often boring. But there's a kind of general rule that you just don't go there. Instead, you suck it up and go release on Facebook. Maybe you post some vapid pictures of your kid, get some ":-)" and some "♥♥♥" feedback, and take that buzz to bed with you instead of another shot from the bottle of Bacardi that you're about to run out of anyway. To confess to boredom, or to whine about it, is to give hostages to all sorts of enemies who would be happy to devalue parenting for all sorts of reasons, most of them not in the best interests of children. For me to mutter, "How f*cking boring," or "God I'm bored watching this crap on TV" or "I can't wait for Mama to get home and relieve me of this utterly boring sh*t Junior is making me do," suggests that I don't love my kid, that I'm not infatuated with everything he does and says and thinks and eats. Parenting is not for anyone with a brain, anyone who has seen the world, parenting is for nannies, etc. All bunk, of course. But knowing that doesn't help me with the fact that, as I said a moment ago, I'm bored.
The thing about boredom is that, because you're bored, you're afraid that anything you write about boredom will by definition be boring, revealing that you are in fact a boring person, and deserving of your fate. So I've held off. Until now. Because I don't care anymore. Partly this is because I'm over 40, partly it's because I'm really bored. Perhaps I can take satisfaction in knowing that, in about nine years, it will be my son's turn to be bored out of his mind by everything that has to do with his father, family, and the home we provide him. At that time, rather than be personally hurt, I will instead savor the payback for what I am enduring right now. But nine years is a long time to wait.
So I'm trying to figure out what's going on: why the sense of boredom has become acute at my fourth year into the parenting stint? Am I tired of my job? Has it lost its novelty? Am I just played out as a parent? Is it really just over? Or is this just a phase, a plateau that has my son and I cruising across the family version of rural Indiana? Despite all my past bloggery in which I waxed lyrical about jungle gyms and long walks and soccer class and preschool moms and diaper genies and everything else, the one thing I haven't touched on is how very often, how defining and foundational, is the experience of utter boredom.
I say this all while knowing, by virtue of hard-earned wisdom, that the one constant thing about both parenting and life is that all things change. Was the infancy thing hard? Immensely. But it was over in a heartbeat. My son will spend far longer with gray hair pushing me in a wheelchair than we ever spent changing his diaper. So maybe we are driving through Indiana now -- or, God forbid, Kansas, or West Texas -- but eventually if you drive far enough, you hit the Rockies, or West Virginia, and things get interesting again. But right now, to pursue the analogy further, we are driving through rural Indiana, and there's not much to listen to on the radio.
So why am I bored now, while I wasn't when Spot was six months old? At six months, he was an all-consuming project, and nothing else mattered. My individuality was like a well-charged car battery that could run all the auxiliary features for a good long while before going dead and needed a jump. And frankly, the novelty was sharp. It truly was a new world, and I enjoyed entering into it.
But here's the crux: this was all before Spot could talk, before he could express his own view of things, or act with any degree of independence. That has all changed, and Spot, now become Junior, is a semi-automaton, capable of thinking and talking and doing quite a lot, though a lot of it not quite all the way. This, I have determined, is the source of my boredom. Imagine walking a dog. Not for half an hour three times a day, but all day. You've got an animal on a leash, you want to let them sniff around, entertain themselves, read the book of the world in the litter of the sidewalk, you pick up their poop and intervene when they start trash-talking the dog next door -- all this for about 13 hours. It would be nice to instead open the back door at around 7 o'clock in the morning and then check back at lunchtime, but that's not how it works right now. The leash has me hooked to the dog as much as the dog is hooked to me. So I am, more than at any point previously, in his world most of the time.
And after a while, as fascinating as it has all been, that gets boring. Junior can't find something in his toy box? He calls me from upstairs while I'm on the computer. Junior gets hungry? He lets me know from upstairs, once I've gotten back to the computer. Once Junior is well fed, he now feels a bowel movement coming on. Again, he lets me know from upstairs, and I ascend to help facilitate. In all these cases, Junior is able to handle a part or most of the process of finding a lost toy, feeding himself, or taking a dump and wiping his ass, but not all. And so I live la vida interrumpida, a life of fragments. In fact, right now, as I write this, I am leaving Junior upstairs to his TV and Lego's, feeling moderately guilty that the Nickelodian Moose is subbing for me as primary caregiver so I can share this all with you. Four times now, Junior has called down to me, "Daddy, are you done working?" and four times I have replied "Hell no, leave me alone! Can't you entertain yourself for an hour?"
When he was an infant, I could strap Junior into my Baby Bjorn and head off on my rounds. Some feeding, some attention to matters of hygiene, and all was well. Now, he is so burgeoning with thoughts, with the most astounding and surreal and hilarious musings on language and reality, endless questions that must each be answered (a point of principle for me), so full of commentary that must be processed, that a much larger portion of my brain is now used to deal with him than before. Subtract the much-missed naptime break, and add the ability to verbalize his needs without the ability to fulfill them, and you have the roots of my predicament.
So I thank you, gentle reader, for providing me with an excuse for diverting myself for a little while. But I can tell, from the nervous, rhythmic hopping I hear on the floor above, that Junior feels the need to visit the potty, and so my prosody must be cut short. Until, that is, the next installment, when we meet together as writer and reader again, perhaps when Junior and I are at least on the border of Indiana and Ohio, somewhat closer to West Virginia.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Cold Weather Parenting; or, For the Love of Snow
People don't complain about the fact that they will eventually die. The same is not true of taxes or the weather. Though immortality remains a dream, the earthly draw of the next best thing -- a sunny locale, tax-free and with yearly lows around 65°F -- remains powerful for those who feel that more spiritual satisfactions are unattainable. Thus the popularity of such strange places as Arizona and Florida -- a desert and a barren swamp -- not just for retirees, but for those who seek to trade the certainty of death for the hope of a painless earthly transit; to trade a snow shovel and jumper cables for the tax-deferred serotonin boost of high-volume sunshine. The post-orgasmic lull of uniform, indistinct seasons stands as a questionable rebuttal to the wisdom of Job, or a defensive denial of what Melville knew as the cosmic significance of anything powerful, vast, and white -- like a really big whale, or a howling blizzard.
We do not trade in sunshine futures, Junior and I. We attend to the fundamentals of making a life, the way factories used to make things, where it makes most sense to do so. We take what comes with, and let it infuse us with the energy and beauty and dynamism of all the changes that accompany a planet's traverse around the sun.
We are adventurers of the polar season that visits our city once a year. This is our story.
********
My son was born on a particularly cold and clear day in January. One of the first instructions I was given as a father came from a nurse of the maternity ward, concerned that my child might freeze to death because I had chosen to sit close to a window while holding Junior against my chest. "Of course a man would sit next to a window with a newborn baby!" she said, only half jokingly.
Since then, I have learned that the kinds of drafts one does indeed encounter near windows in winter are the subject of a global folk mythology that, at the extreme, equates cool breaths of air with demons and malevolent agents of the Evil Eye. A cool breeze to the neck can trigger mononucleosis; chilly droughts on the chest, bronchitis; an improperly swaddled infant, vitamin B-12 deficiency and improper brain formation.
But the nurse in the maternity ward had a point. Ferociously cold January weather with below-zero wind chills is an inhospitable environment from which a newborn must be sheltered. My goal as a new father, moving about snow-bound and often glacially cold neighborhoods, was to provide a cocoon of warmth and protection, an environment so stable and secure that only the changing shade of light inside Junior's stroller, or the muffled sound of Daddy's profanations from deep within the hood of his snorkel jacket, might indicate that we had passed into and out of a rampaging storm of sleet.
Junior's Cocoon and Gear
(Begin Excursus)
I should state here that the only excuse for "being cold" is "being stupid." Survival, and even enjoyment and triumph in winter weather is fundamentally a question not of the weather itself, but of the gear used to render the weather irrelevant. In the early 21st century, even the cheapest winter clothing is very warm, and at the higher end, quite stylish. Providing the cocoon necessary to keep baby warm is a technique of winter parenting that extends to the parent as well. Yet, while Junior is toasty and warm and romping on the snowdrift above the buried and abandoned Yellow Cab, yon 20-something office drone goes hat-less for fear of matting his gelled hair -- though he may be wearing one of these, the bikini of men's winter head ware:
Male Ear Bikini
As I say, said office drone may be clenching his red and bared fists as he leans into the wind making its way from the Arctic Circle and down the middle of LaSalle Street. In his free time, this same fellow and his friends can be seen hailing the same Yellow Cabs on Clark Street, wearing little more than imported Polish Fonzi jackets and blue jeans that have the property of transforming from soft denim to chafing sheet metal at around 32 degrees. These hardy fools -- and I know, because I was one -- lack the most basic wisdom of any cartoon character from South Park: that you must insulate every inch of your body in appropriate gear, and get used to spending most of your time that way.
(End Excursus)
As much as I enjoy the seasons, I will not deny the grueling exertion demanded by the wet, sloppy snowstorms of late February and early March. The snow dropped in these gales, unlike the powder that falls at colder temperatures, blows horizontally into your car and soaks everything it touches. Pushing a stroller through the pools of slushy ice (the scientific term: "frazil ice") that fill all the inconspicuous depressions in streets and sidewalks, sometimes even entire intersections, across which the cocoon must be not pushed but lifted, can be exhausting and wet enough to compromise the most weatherproof boots. Junior, in his cocoon, is oblivious to these dramas, and once home the parent wisely chooses to remain there. Junior is still napping heartily at this early stage, meaning that, as he snores through the winter blast, it is possible to read much great literature.
As Junior enters the toddler stage and becomes correspondingly more mobile, I begin to entertain hopes, as all upper Midwestern fathers do, that he might come to enjoy what winter has to offer. The prospect presents twin advantages: of being able to share the animal and aesthetic pleasures of bracing air under brilliant skies, snowball fights, the transcendent beauty of snow-covered landscapes, and the mysterious silence of a snow storm in process, as well as being able to kill bad cases of cabin fever by simply getting out of the house.
It is an understandably slow and awkward process, so shortly out of the womb, his Edenic nakedness so recently covered, for Junior to encumber himelf with boots, a hat, mittens clipped to a huge poofy jacket or even bulkier snowsuit, all over at least two and probably three layers of clothing and sometimes topped off with ski goggles. Each item is resisted. And so we negotiate, as Junior's second and third winter seasons wear on, each of these items, occasionally assisted by Junior's own animal intelligence alerting him that HEY! it really is better to wear your gloves when your fingers get cold!
But alas, even at the height of winter #3, it is all still too foreign, too messy. Our first sled ride, more dad's idea than Junior's, ends with a debacle: a child spilled on the curb, snow going up the nose, and tears coming from the eyes. "I don't like snow" is the motto of this period, and Dad resigns himself to a routine of indoor activities along with all the other parents: soccer class, various bookstores, caffeinated museum trips, play-dates, and the local super-heated tot-lot in the company of all the nannies. The hearty naps continue as before, and still more great literature is read.
Junior and Fellow Snow Enthusiast
It is in the current, fourth winter that the breakthrough occurs, and Junior, to the great joy of his father, discovers his own joy of snow. In December and January, he begins to kick at the snow with his boots, to make patterns with his tracks. He watches with keener curiosity as the more adventurous child of our friend climbs a pile of snow thrown off the street by city plows and citizen shovelers, layered with last fall's matted leaves and gravel and laced with streaks of blue Slurpy-colored snow melt, and sticks his head into the snow to better dig at it with his tongue. Not long after that, he tells Daddy, "I want you to teach me how to ski," and Daddy, with a borrowed pair of Junior-sized Nordic skis, complies.
I began by completely shielding Junior from winter; now it is his playground. I feel fortunate that I have the energy to lift him to the top of the six foot snowdrift that has buried the Yellow Cab, to shove his sled over the edge; a passing woman, looking for her own car buried in a drift still further on, tells me it is Junior who is fortunate to have a father who will go play in the snow with him. She flatters me. It is no work at all. We all know that what you once loved as a child, you can never fully turn away from.
[A version of this post is also available on the Outdoor Baby Network.]
Since then, I have learned that the kinds of drafts one does indeed encounter near windows in winter are the subject of a global folk mythology that, at the extreme, equates cool breaths of air with demons and malevolent agents of the Evil Eye. A cool breeze to the neck can trigger mononucleosis; chilly droughts on the chest, bronchitis; an improperly swaddled infant, vitamin B-12 deficiency and improper brain formation.
But the nurse in the maternity ward had a point. Ferociously cold January weather with below-zero wind chills is an inhospitable environment from which a newborn must be sheltered. My goal as a new father, moving about snow-bound and often glacially cold neighborhoods, was to provide a cocoon of warmth and protection, an environment so stable and secure that only the changing shade of light inside Junior's stroller, or the muffled sound of Daddy's profanations from deep within the hood of his snorkel jacket, might indicate that we had passed into and out of a rampaging storm of sleet.
Junior's Cocoon and GearI should state here that the only excuse for "being cold" is "being stupid." Survival, and even enjoyment and triumph in winter weather is fundamentally a question not of the weather itself, but of the gear used to render the weather irrelevant. In the early 21st century, even the cheapest winter clothing is very warm, and at the higher end, quite stylish. Providing the cocoon necessary to keep baby warm is a technique of winter parenting that extends to the parent as well. Yet, while Junior is toasty and warm and romping on the snowdrift above the buried and abandoned Yellow Cab, yon 20-something office drone goes hat-less for fear of matting his gelled hair -- though he may be wearing one of these, the bikini of men's winter head ware:
Male Ear Bikini
As I say, said office drone may be clenching his red and bared fists as he leans into the wind making its way from the Arctic Circle and down the middle of LaSalle Street. In his free time, this same fellow and his friends can be seen hailing the same Yellow Cabs on Clark Street, wearing little more than imported Polish Fonzi jackets and blue jeans that have the property of transforming from soft denim to chafing sheet metal at around 32 degrees. These hardy fools -- and I know, because I was one -- lack the most basic wisdom of any cartoon character from South Park: that you must insulate every inch of your body in appropriate gear, and get used to spending most of your time that way.
(End Excursus)
As much as I enjoy the seasons, I will not deny the grueling exertion demanded by the wet, sloppy snowstorms of late February and early March. The snow dropped in these gales, unlike the powder that falls at colder temperatures, blows horizontally into your car and soaks everything it touches. Pushing a stroller through the pools of slushy ice (the scientific term: "frazil ice") that fill all the inconspicuous depressions in streets and sidewalks, sometimes even entire intersections, across which the cocoon must be not pushed but lifted, can be exhausting and wet enough to compromise the most weatherproof boots. Junior, in his cocoon, is oblivious to these dramas, and once home the parent wisely chooses to remain there. Junior is still napping heartily at this early stage, meaning that, as he snores through the winter blast, it is possible to read much great literature.
As Junior enters the toddler stage and becomes correspondingly more mobile, I begin to entertain hopes, as all upper Midwestern fathers do, that he might come to enjoy what winter has to offer. The prospect presents twin advantages: of being able to share the animal and aesthetic pleasures of bracing air under brilliant skies, snowball fights, the transcendent beauty of snow-covered landscapes, and the mysterious silence of a snow storm in process, as well as being able to kill bad cases of cabin fever by simply getting out of the house.
It is an understandably slow and awkward process, so shortly out of the womb, his Edenic nakedness so recently covered, for Junior to encumber himelf with boots, a hat, mittens clipped to a huge poofy jacket or even bulkier snowsuit, all over at least two and probably three layers of clothing and sometimes topped off with ski goggles. Each item is resisted. And so we negotiate, as Junior's second and third winter seasons wear on, each of these items, occasionally assisted by Junior's own animal intelligence alerting him that HEY! it really is better to wear your gloves when your fingers get cold!
But alas, even at the height of winter #3, it is all still too foreign, too messy. Our first sled ride, more dad's idea than Junior's, ends with a debacle: a child spilled on the curb, snow going up the nose, and tears coming from the eyes. "I don't like snow" is the motto of this period, and Dad resigns himself to a routine of indoor activities along with all the other parents: soccer class, various bookstores, caffeinated museum trips, play-dates, and the local super-heated tot-lot in the company of all the nannies. The hearty naps continue as before, and still more great literature is read.
Junior and Fellow Snow EnthusiastIt is in the current, fourth winter that the breakthrough occurs, and Junior, to the great joy of his father, discovers his own joy of snow. In December and January, he begins to kick at the snow with his boots, to make patterns with his tracks. He watches with keener curiosity as the more adventurous child of our friend climbs a pile of snow thrown off the street by city plows and citizen shovelers, layered with last fall's matted leaves and gravel and laced with streaks of blue Slurpy-colored snow melt, and sticks his head into the snow to better dig at it with his tongue. Not long after that, he tells Daddy, "I want you to teach me how to ski," and Daddy, with a borrowed pair of Junior-sized Nordic skis, complies.
I began by completely shielding Junior from winter; now it is his playground. I feel fortunate that I have the energy to lift him to the top of the six foot snowdrift that has buried the Yellow Cab, to shove his sled over the edge; a passing woman, looking for her own car buried in a drift still further on, tells me it is Junior who is fortunate to have a father who will go play in the snow with him. She flatters me. It is no work at all. We all know that what you once loved as a child, you can never fully turn away from.
[A version of this post is also available on the Outdoor Baby Network.]
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Why Working Parents Hate Life
Having read a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about Jennifer Senior's July 4th article, "All Joy and No Fun, Why parents hate parenting" in New York magazine, I finally had to break down and read the damn thing. I realize I'm a day late and a dollar short with my contribution to this conversation, but I've been pretty busy with the allegedly heinous drudgery of child care.
In her article, Senior examines a number of studies concerning the effects of parenting on the happiness of adults. As you might expect from the title of the piece, the implications are overwhelmingly negative (unless you happen to live in Denmark or other countries with progressive parental work-leave policies). Despite the findings, which include lower reported rates of happiness in virtually every aspect of life among parents as compared to non-parents, and "child care" ranking near the bottom in a survey about the enjoyability of tasks and activities; and despite the provocative title of the piece and hazy photos of quietly desperate-looking parents on its pages, the article ends on a note that is, if not upbeat, at least hopeful. Senior does not dispute the findings that suggest that parenting makes us unhappy, but she questions what we mean by "happiness," and invokes psychologist Tom Gilovich, who asks whether our "minute-to-minute happiness" is more important than our "retroactive evaluations" of our lives.
Of course I can only speak from my own limited experience as a parent, but I have a few quibbles with the bleaker implications of this research and the way it is framed by articles like Senior's.
First of all, the subjects of the research and the characters in Senior's anecdotes are by and large harried parents who work full-time jobs and only deal with their kids when they are already exhausted. I realize that I am in the minority insofar as I have the luxury of being able to stay home with my kids. Yesterday on the NPR program Tell Me More, where Senior was among the guests and the discussion revolved around dads' reactions to her article, Rice Daddies and Daddy Dialectic contributor Jason Sperber (daddy in a strange land) explained in a concise and moving way why parenting makes him happy. Like me, Jason is a stay-at-home dad with no regrets about having kids and no major resentment toward the day-to-day chores of child care.
I'm not aware of any studies about how having children affects the happiness of those of us who don't have the added stress of trying to bring home the bacon, but I suspect that we would be significantly less unhappy than working parents. My argument, then, is that the existing research does not really measure frustration with parenting, but rather frustration with trying to fulfill the responsibilities and expectations of both work and family. This is not a huge revelation, and in fact both Senior and the authors of the studies she cites acknowledge that this is the case. However, by framing their work in terms of "grueling life with kids vs. freewheeling childless adulthood," they cast parents as victims of their own decision to have children rather than critique a socio-economic model that makes it almost impossible for most parents to both provide for their children and enjoy them. Maybe the conversation shouldn't focus on parenting as problematic, but instead should be framed as "why working parents hate life."
Of course, I could be way off base in suspecting that the work side of the equation is at least as soul-sucking as the parenting side, because I'm not a huge fan of being employed. I have had jobs that I enjoyed, but I have never had one that I would trade for staying home with my kids, and I think that the majority of people I know would rather take care of their kids than go to the office. I want to see the study that asks people if they would quit their jobs and be full-time parents if they could afford to do so. Or at least reduce the hours they work by half and spend those hours with the family.
Senior's article and her comments on NPR emphasize that much of this unhappiness epidemic is caused by a feeling of lost independence on the part of parents, especially those who (like my wife and me) started families later in life, after having lived unencumbered for so many years. This made me wonder what these unhappy parents were doing that was so awesome before the kids came along and ruined everything. My wife and I had been together for twenty years before our twin girls were born a year ago, and we had many adventures in the pre-kid era. But it's not like as soon as the kids were born, everything got boring. Quite the contrary. Raising children has been exciting, scary, and hilarious so far. Sometimes I miss traveling, but if my parents are a valid example, traveling with kids is neither impossible nor necessarily painful. The other stuff--movies, parties, restaurants--bah! Who needs it.
I'm not sure why I feel compelled to bicker about the implications of this research, which seem to be bolstered every time a new study comes out (except in Denmark). Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I will be able to avoid the crushing stress and disappointment that most parents apparently experience. Or maybe I don't want people who read about sociological research to be discouraged from producing classmates for my kids. But part of me feels like the people who report being unhappy as parents probably would have been equally unhappy had they decided not to have children. And the happy, childless subjects had much more exciting and fulfilling lives than the rest of us schmucks could ever have hoped for with or without kids, and had the foresight to know that parenting was not for them. The other study I want someone to conduct is a comparison between parents and these childless gadabouts of their "retroactive evaluations" of their lives once the children have grown up. I hope that it would show no significant difference.
Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I post cute pictures of babies.
In her article, Senior examines a number of studies concerning the effects of parenting on the happiness of adults. As you might expect from the title of the piece, the implications are overwhelmingly negative (unless you happen to live in Denmark or other countries with progressive parental work-leave policies). Despite the findings, which include lower reported rates of happiness in virtually every aspect of life among parents as compared to non-parents, and "child care" ranking near the bottom in a survey about the enjoyability of tasks and activities; and despite the provocative title of the piece and hazy photos of quietly desperate-looking parents on its pages, the article ends on a note that is, if not upbeat, at least hopeful. Senior does not dispute the findings that suggest that parenting makes us unhappy, but she questions what we mean by "happiness," and invokes psychologist Tom Gilovich, who asks whether our "minute-to-minute happiness" is more important than our "retroactive evaluations" of our lives.
Photo by Jessica Todd Harper for New York
Of course I can only speak from my own limited experience as a parent, but I have a few quibbles with the bleaker implications of this research and the way it is framed by articles like Senior's.
First of all, the subjects of the research and the characters in Senior's anecdotes are by and large harried parents who work full-time jobs and only deal with their kids when they are already exhausted. I realize that I am in the minority insofar as I have the luxury of being able to stay home with my kids. Yesterday on the NPR program Tell Me More, where Senior was among the guests and the discussion revolved around dads' reactions to her article, Rice Daddies and Daddy Dialectic contributor Jason Sperber (daddy in a strange land) explained in a concise and moving way why parenting makes him happy. Like me, Jason is a stay-at-home dad with no regrets about having kids and no major resentment toward the day-to-day chores of child care.
I'm not aware of any studies about how having children affects the happiness of those of us who don't have the added stress of trying to bring home the bacon, but I suspect that we would be significantly less unhappy than working parents. My argument, then, is that the existing research does not really measure frustration with parenting, but rather frustration with trying to fulfill the responsibilities and expectations of both work and family. This is not a huge revelation, and in fact both Senior and the authors of the studies she cites acknowledge that this is the case. However, by framing their work in terms of "grueling life with kids vs. freewheeling childless adulthood," they cast parents as victims of their own decision to have children rather than critique a socio-economic model that makes it almost impossible for most parents to both provide for their children and enjoy them. Maybe the conversation shouldn't focus on parenting as problematic, but instead should be framed as "why working parents hate life."
Of course, I could be way off base in suspecting that the work side of the equation is at least as soul-sucking as the parenting side, because I'm not a huge fan of being employed. I have had jobs that I enjoyed, but I have never had one that I would trade for staying home with my kids, and I think that the majority of people I know would rather take care of their kids than go to the office. I want to see the study that asks people if they would quit their jobs and be full-time parents if they could afford to do so. Or at least reduce the hours they work by half and spend those hours with the family.
Senior's article and her comments on NPR emphasize that much of this unhappiness epidemic is caused by a feeling of lost independence on the part of parents, especially those who (like my wife and me) started families later in life, after having lived unencumbered for so many years. This made me wonder what these unhappy parents were doing that was so awesome before the kids came along and ruined everything. My wife and I had been together for twenty years before our twin girls were born a year ago, and we had many adventures in the pre-kid era. But it's not like as soon as the kids were born, everything got boring. Quite the contrary. Raising children has been exciting, scary, and hilarious so far. Sometimes I miss traveling, but if my parents are a valid example, traveling with kids is neither impossible nor necessarily painful. The other stuff--movies, parties, restaurants--bah! Who needs it.
I'm not sure why I feel compelled to bicker about the implications of this research, which seem to be bolstered every time a new study comes out (except in Denmark). Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I will be able to avoid the crushing stress and disappointment that most parents apparently experience. Or maybe I don't want people who read about sociological research to be discouraged from producing classmates for my kids. But part of me feels like the people who report being unhappy as parents probably would have been equally unhappy had they decided not to have children. And the happy, childless subjects had much more exciting and fulfilling lives than the rest of us schmucks could ever have hoped for with or without kids, and had the foresight to know that parenting was not for them. The other study I want someone to conduct is a comparison between parents and these childless gadabouts of their "retroactive evaluations" of their lives once the children have grown up. I hope that it would show no significant difference.
Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I post cute pictures of babies.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Who changes the diapers in your house?
In The Daddy Shift, Jeremy Adam Smith explores the ways in which perceptions of parental roles and responsibilities are changing and argues that gender is becoming less of a factor in the fundamental decisions families make about raising children. The broad scope of Smith's project is alluded to in the book's subtitle, How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.
Many aspects of Smith's argument resonate with me as a novice stay-at-home dad, and one thread in particular corroborates a hunch I had based on the logistics of my own household. Smith cites research that suggests an increasingly equitable division of "unpaid family work" within American families; however, he cautions that this doesn't signify an inexorable move toward an egalitarian utopia.
Although he characterizes the trend of men taking on more family work as "tenuous," Smith's profiles of non-traditional families serve as models for a much more balanced distribution of household labor than in the "traditional," male breadwinner/female caregiver home. (Although the single-income household is a rarity these days, the legacy of the "traditional" family often manifests in women doing the bulk of the housework and caregiving even when they work outside the home.) He suggests that in "reverse-traditional" (i.e., caregiver dad and breadwinner mom) and same-sex parent families, there tends to be less specialization, so that the breadwinner is likely to participate more in caregiving, and the caregiver may dabble in breadwinning--thus the workload is shared more equitably.
This pattern became obvious to me when my wife returned to work after spending the first four months of our twin girls' lives at home with them. At that point I became the primary caregiver (who occasionally gets paid to build something or teach a class); but contrary to what the term "reverse-traditional" may imply, my wife didn't suddenly transform into a disengaged patriarch.
I often receive more credit than I am due--and rarely try to deflect it--for the amount of work people assume is involved in taking care of two toddlers. And it would be a lot of work for just one person. But when my wife, a family practice doctor at a non-profit community clinic, comes home from work, she wants to spend every minute that she can with the babies. There's no time for reclining with a pipe and the evening edition of the Mayfield Press for her--it's all about feeding, bathing, reading to, and playing with the kids. But people tend to expect that from a mom, regardless of how much work she does or money she makes outside the home.
I know breadwinning fathers who likewise come home from work and immediately engage in as much caregiving as they can in the few hours before bedtime. But I also know fathers who try to squeeze in as much time away from their families as possible. This is unfathomable to me for a number of reasons (but who knows--maybe I'll develop an interest in golf and multi-day fishing trips in the next couple of years).
As much as I am philosophically down with the notion that work is work, and certain things need to be done to keep a family as healthy and happy as possible, and it's all equally important, I have to admit that there are times when I feel like the archetypal frustrated housewife. When I'm just finishing cleaning up the mess from lunch in time to start making dinner, for instance, it's hard for me not to dwell on the Sisyphean nature of my labors.
But there are two things that assuage my frustration. First, I have worked for decades outside of the home as a carpenter, contractor, and more recently as a teacher; and I know that any job can at times be tedious and seem endless and thankless. When I grouse about rinsing out diapers (we use cloth as penance for the environmental havoc wreaked by raising kids) or washing bottles, I only have to remind myself that my wife could very well be gritting her teeth while doing her tenth pelvic exam before lunchtime instead of playing with her babies. Would I rather be building a deck than scraping poop? Probably. But on the other hand, I would rather feed a baby than grade a stack of essays.
Secondly, I receive plenty of recognition for my housework. Not only from my wife, who notices my domestic achievements (and if she doesn't, I point them out), but also from acquaintances and strangers. Unlike many of the caregiver fathers profiled in The Daddy Shift, I have not heard any withering comments or noticed any sideways glances about my domesticity (of course, this could be due to my self-preserving oblivion). Instead, I am lauded almost universally for my willingness to face not only the supposedly daunting task of raising twins, but also the censure (yet to be felt) of our sexist culture.
The only sexism I have encountered in discussions about my stay-at-home status is of the condescending, mildly misandristic variety; e.g., "Oh my God--you watch them every day? I can't even leave my kids home with their dad for the weekend!" These comments usually make me seem heroic, and may reflect more on the speaker's perception of her schlub of a husband than on men in general, so I let them slide.
Although I'm usually perfectly happy to be compared favorably to other men, a couple things irk me about the attention I get for being a competent (as far as they know) parent. The first troubling aspect is that it's still sometimes considered noteworthy that a man can take care of children and "keep house." The other side of that coin is that women don't get enough credit when they do the same, since to do so is considered a function of their chromosomes. The bar is set much lower for fathers, which is unfair to all parents.
My wife is reading this over my shoulder and thinks that the fact that men are perfectly capable of, and responsible for, doing every bit as much "unpaid family work" as women is a no-brainer, hardly worth discussing. It's true that among the progressive types we usually hang around with, it goes without saying. But in my conversations with moms at the dog park, members of my Asian mommies group (yeah--I'm the white guy with the double stroller), and even my stay-at-home dads group (members of whom often encounter incredulity at the idea that they can be trusted with kids), the assumption that men can't or won't contribute as much as women to the glamorless aspects of family life is a common theme. Also, on the mommyblogs I lurk around on, casual kvetching about shiftless husbands surfaces regularly, especially in reader comments.
In The Daddy Shift, in other print and electronic media, and in his appearances on TV and radio, Jeremy Adam Smith has been an advocate and spokesperson for stay-at-home dads. But he also stresses that gender equity in the home is not a done deal, exhorting us--especially caregiving fathers--to share our stories so that we can contribute to the evolution of the American Family toward this end.
What do you think? Is the idea and/or practice of gender equity within the family so mainstream that we don't even need to talk about it anymore? Or is someone doing more than their fair share of dishes?
Many aspects of Smith's argument resonate with me as a novice stay-at-home dad, and one thread in particular corroborates a hunch I had based on the logistics of my own household. Smith cites research that suggests an increasingly equitable division of "unpaid family work" within American families; however, he cautions that this doesn't signify an inexorable move toward an egalitarian utopia.
Although he characterizes the trend of men taking on more family work as "tenuous," Smith's profiles of non-traditional families serve as models for a much more balanced distribution of household labor than in the "traditional," male breadwinner/female caregiver home. (Although the single-income household is a rarity these days, the legacy of the "traditional" family often manifests in women doing the bulk of the housework and caregiving even when they work outside the home.) He suggests that in "reverse-traditional" (i.e., caregiver dad and breadwinner mom) and same-sex parent families, there tends to be less specialization, so that the breadwinner is likely to participate more in caregiving, and the caregiver may dabble in breadwinning--thus the workload is shared more equitably.
This pattern became obvious to me when my wife returned to work after spending the first four months of our twin girls' lives at home with them. At that point I became the primary caregiver (who occasionally gets paid to build something or teach a class); but contrary to what the term "reverse-traditional" may imply, my wife didn't suddenly transform into a disengaged patriarch.
I often receive more credit than I am due--and rarely try to deflect it--for the amount of work people assume is involved in taking care of two toddlers. And it would be a lot of work for just one person. But when my wife, a family practice doctor at a non-profit community clinic, comes home from work, she wants to spend every minute that she can with the babies. There's no time for reclining with a pipe and the evening edition of the Mayfield Press for her--it's all about feeding, bathing, reading to, and playing with the kids. But people tend to expect that from a mom, regardless of how much work she does or money she makes outside the home.
I know breadwinning fathers who likewise come home from work and immediately engage in as much caregiving as they can in the few hours before bedtime. But I also know fathers who try to squeeze in as much time away from their families as possible. This is unfathomable to me for a number of reasons (but who knows--maybe I'll develop an interest in golf and multi-day fishing trips in the next couple of years).
As much as I am philosophically down with the notion that work is work, and certain things need to be done to keep a family as healthy and happy as possible, and it's all equally important, I have to admit that there are times when I feel like the archetypal frustrated housewife. When I'm just finishing cleaning up the mess from lunch in time to start making dinner, for instance, it's hard for me not to dwell on the Sisyphean nature of my labors.
But there are two things that assuage my frustration. First, I have worked for decades outside of the home as a carpenter, contractor, and more recently as a teacher; and I know that any job can at times be tedious and seem endless and thankless. When I grouse about rinsing out diapers (we use cloth as penance for the environmental havoc wreaked by raising kids) or washing bottles, I only have to remind myself that my wife could very well be gritting her teeth while doing her tenth pelvic exam before lunchtime instead of playing with her babies. Would I rather be building a deck than scraping poop? Probably. But on the other hand, I would rather feed a baby than grade a stack of essays.
Secondly, I receive plenty of recognition for my housework. Not only from my wife, who notices my domestic achievements (and if she doesn't, I point them out), but also from acquaintances and strangers. Unlike many of the caregiver fathers profiled in The Daddy Shift, I have not heard any withering comments or noticed any sideways glances about my domesticity (of course, this could be due to my self-preserving oblivion). Instead, I am lauded almost universally for my willingness to face not only the supposedly daunting task of raising twins, but also the censure (yet to be felt) of our sexist culture.
The only sexism I have encountered in discussions about my stay-at-home status is of the condescending, mildly misandristic variety; e.g., "Oh my God--you watch them every day? I can't even leave my kids home with their dad for the weekend!" These comments usually make me seem heroic, and may reflect more on the speaker's perception of her schlub of a husband than on men in general, so I let them slide.
Although I'm usually perfectly happy to be compared favorably to other men, a couple things irk me about the attention I get for being a competent (as far as they know) parent. The first troubling aspect is that it's still sometimes considered noteworthy that a man can take care of children and "keep house." The other side of that coin is that women don't get enough credit when they do the same, since to do so is considered a function of their chromosomes. The bar is set much lower for fathers, which is unfair to all parents.
My wife is reading this over my shoulder and thinks that the fact that men are perfectly capable of, and responsible for, doing every bit as much "unpaid family work" as women is a no-brainer, hardly worth discussing. It's true that among the progressive types we usually hang around with, it goes without saying. But in my conversations with moms at the dog park, members of my Asian mommies group (yeah--I'm the white guy with the double stroller), and even my stay-at-home dads group (members of whom often encounter incredulity at the idea that they can be trusted with kids), the assumption that men can't or won't contribute as much as women to the glamorless aspects of family life is a common theme. Also, on the mommyblogs I lurk around on, casual kvetching about shiftless husbands surfaces regularly, especially in reader comments.
In The Daddy Shift, in other print and electronic media, and in his appearances on TV and radio, Jeremy Adam Smith has been an advocate and spokesperson for stay-at-home dads. But he also stresses that gender equity in the home is not a done deal, exhorting us--especially caregiving fathers--to share our stories so that we can contribute to the evolution of the American Family toward this end.
What do you think? Is the idea and/or practice of gender equity within the family so mainstream that we don't even need to talk about it anymore? Or is someone doing more than their fair share of dishes?
Please visit me at Beta Dad, where I'm much less serious and tell stories about my mommy group, daddygroup, and post adorable pictures of my kids
Friday, November 20, 2009
Four Observations About the Bad Parent "Movement"
I got a call this morning from a journalist asking about the "bad parent" trend, wherein folks like Bad Mother author Ayelet Waldman are proudly revealing their most secret parental failures. That got me to thinking about this topic, and I thought I'd share some random observations:
1) Fathers are pretty much defined as "bad parents," as the term is being popularly used. When we talk about proud "bad parents," most of the time we're really talking about "bad mothers" who are rebelling against the idea that they must be perfect to be good. Ayelet isn't actually a "bad mother," at least as revealed by her book and in her husband's new book, Manhood for Amateurs; Bad Mother is a reaction against the unrealistic, cognitively dissonant standards to which mothers are held. Meanwhile, fathers are not held, and do not hold themselves, to the same standards. When fathers reveal their foibles and failures as parents, they do it, by and large, with a laugh. They are allowed to be human, which, I think, adds more to the pile of evidence that guys remain a privileged class in America and the world.
2) That said, I think the "bad mother" thing is also evidence of the degree to which the genders are measurably converging in attitudes and behaviors. Wide disparities remain; it's just that differences are smaller than they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. More women expect to have careers, and many do have them; more men expect to do more housework and childcare, and they are doing more at home. Fathers and mothers are both expected to play breadwinning and caregiving roles. That's a big change. When moms like Ayelet shake their fist at "good mother" standards, in many respects they're asking to be judged by a standard that's closer to the twenty-first-century "good father"--someone who is perhaps a slob and is perhaps not always the most empathic person in the world, who perhaps carves out space for a life apart from his family, but who is still a day-to-day presence in the lives of his children and fulfilling whatever role falls to him as parent.
3) That flexibility is key; in a time of profound gender role fragmentation, that's what both mothers and fathers have asked for--the ability to be themselves and to be judged by the circumstances of their lives--as opposed by the standards of fifty years ago or by the standards of people who imagine that their own private circumstances are universal. In a dense, connected, diverse world, tolerance and openness are necessities as well as virtues. And as I think Ayelet's work reveals, acceptance of one's own failures is a pathway to accepting other people's "failures," as we perceive them. Self-compassion leads to compassion for the people in our lives as well as a more generalized social compassion.
4) I won't personally be jumping on the "bad parent" bandwagon. I've rarely felt oppressed by the judgements of others about my fatherhood--but I have been confused about what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing as a father. For that reason, my book The Daddy Shift is not a bad parent book--it's about good fathers, and what ideals help them to be good. There are individually bad fathers, of course, just as there really are genuinely bad mothers, but fathers as a group are often judged as "bad parents" for not behaving like mothers. That's why we need a good father movement. Moms might indeed need a bad parent movement. But fathers need positive, aspirational images, and tools for negotiating roles that their fathers were never expected to adopt. And I think we need other people, particularly the women in our lives, to understand the kind of fathers we are trying to be.
Your thoughts?
1) Fathers are pretty much defined as "bad parents," as the term is being popularly used. When we talk about proud "bad parents," most of the time we're really talking about "bad mothers" who are rebelling against the idea that they must be perfect to be good. Ayelet isn't actually a "bad mother," at least as revealed by her book and in her husband's new book, Manhood for Amateurs; Bad Mother is a reaction against the unrealistic, cognitively dissonant standards to which mothers are held. Meanwhile, fathers are not held, and do not hold themselves, to the same standards. When fathers reveal their foibles and failures as parents, they do it, by and large, with a laugh. They are allowed to be human, which, I think, adds more to the pile of evidence that guys remain a privileged class in America and the world.
2) That said, I think the "bad mother" thing is also evidence of the degree to which the genders are measurably converging in attitudes and behaviors. Wide disparities remain; it's just that differences are smaller than they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. More women expect to have careers, and many do have them; more men expect to do more housework and childcare, and they are doing more at home. Fathers and mothers are both expected to play breadwinning and caregiving roles. That's a big change. When moms like Ayelet shake their fist at "good mother" standards, in many respects they're asking to be judged by a standard that's closer to the twenty-first-century "good father"--someone who is perhaps a slob and is perhaps not always the most empathic person in the world, who perhaps carves out space for a life apart from his family, but who is still a day-to-day presence in the lives of his children and fulfilling whatever role falls to him as parent.
3) That flexibility is key; in a time of profound gender role fragmentation, that's what both mothers and fathers have asked for--the ability to be themselves and to be judged by the circumstances of their lives--as opposed by the standards of fifty years ago or by the standards of people who imagine that their own private circumstances are universal. In a dense, connected, diverse world, tolerance and openness are necessities as well as virtues. And as I think Ayelet's work reveals, acceptance of one's own failures is a pathway to accepting other people's "failures," as we perceive them. Self-compassion leads to compassion for the people in our lives as well as a more generalized social compassion.
4) I won't personally be jumping on the "bad parent" bandwagon. I've rarely felt oppressed by the judgements of others about my fatherhood--but I have been confused about what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing as a father. For that reason, my book The Daddy Shift is not a bad parent book--it's about good fathers, and what ideals help them to be good. There are individually bad fathers, of course, just as there really are genuinely bad mothers, but fathers as a group are often judged as "bad parents" for not behaving like mothers. That's why we need a good father movement. Moms might indeed need a bad parent movement. But fathers need positive, aspirational images, and tools for negotiating roles that their fathers were never expected to adopt. And I think we need other people, particularly the women in our lives, to understand the kind of fathers we are trying to be.
Your thoughts?
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Does parenthood make men more conservative and women more liberal?
A new study says that parenthood pushes men and women in opposite political directions:
You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.
This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.
Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.
This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.
To which I say: Wow.
Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:
Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."
That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.
Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?
I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.
The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."
Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.
If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.
[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]
"Parenthood seems to heighten the political 'gender gap,' with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues," says Dr. Steven Greene, an associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of the study. Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies to evaluate the voting behavior of men and women who have children at home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study.
"Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home," Greene says, "which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the 'Security Mom' label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids." Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.
You can read the press release here and the whole thing here.
This is a strong study; they have a good data set, and like all good social scientists they control for variables like age and education. The results are consistent with other studies, and also easy to understand.
Response scales varied, but all ranged from a number indicating very liberal to one indicating very conservative. So, the "social welfare index" (which measured support for issues like government-sponsored, universal health care), the scale ranged from -1.37 (very liberal) to 2.07 (very conservative), based on responses to specific questions.
This is the area where the contrast between men and women was starkest. Women zoomed from -.01 childless to -.11 after having children in the social welfare index--which is statistically very significant. Meanwhile, men went from .04 childless to .14 after children. A ten point difference for both, but in opposite directions.
To which I say: Wow.
Why the difference? The researchers argue that it's women's experience with nurturing kids that pushes them a more liberal direction when it comes to weaving the social safety net. From the paper:
We argue that this long-standing liberal motherhood effect is grounded in the gendered experience of parenthood. The societal expectation as well as the reality that women play the primary role in nurturing their children and take primary responsibility for their health care, day care, and educational needs fosters an appreciation for well-funded, domestic government programs.
Moreover, with the vast majority of mothers working outside the home, mothers are required to rely on people or programs outside the nuclear family for at least part of their children’s care, which may also foster their appreciation for a supportive and generous social welfare state. The fact that the liberal effect of motherhood remains highly significant even in the regression model (Table 2) when potentially confounding variables are controlled, means that it is not simply Democratic or unmarried or poor mothers that are driving the liberal motherhood effect. Consistent with some feminist theories, there seems to be something about the experience of being a mother that leads to more liberal social welfare attitudes (Ruddick 1980, 1989; Sapiro 1983). It may be that the act of nurturing children fosters empathy and caring, thereby generating more liberal attitudes concerning the role of government in helping others.
Whereas fathers, they write, tend to "view an active social welfare state as an intrusion on their ability to provide for their families."
That sounds somewhat plausible to me--although it must be pointed out that throughout American history, many men have looked to government to support their roles as breadwinners, as with, for example, minimum wage laws. It might be more accurate to suggest that men's relatively privileged social position makes them more receptive to contemporary conservative messages, and more invested in the status quo.
Some folks, I think, will tend to see this as an essentialist argument: Women are more liberal and pacifistic because they're women, and men are just warlike jerks. But actually this research suggests politics are shaped more by social roles and day-to-day tasks than by biology. An obvious way to test this theory is to look at stay-at-home dads: Does taking care of kids push men in a more liberal direction?
I don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that have examined this question, but I explored it quite a bit in researching my book The Daddy Shift through interviews with families.
The result: It's certainly the case that many stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms feel that taking care of kids does make dads more liberal--according to these couples, they're just more conscious of the importance of access to the commons, things like playgrounds and health care. "The world would be a better place if more fathers...took care of children," said one Kansas City mom. "I think a man becomes more aware of other social issues."
Many of these couples, it must be said, were at least somewhat liberal to begin with, which makes sense--liberal values allow for the possibility of a gender-role reversal. However, there are many conservative stay-at-home dads; do their attitudes evolve? To get a firm answer to this question, you'd need to track couples' political trajectory over many years, from pregnancy to the teenage years, and control for many variables.
If the answer turns out to be yes, this suggests that men as a group should become more liberal as they spend more time with kids. And if we want to push our society in a more liberal direction, policies that encourage male caregiving--starting with paid paternity leave--are a good place to begin. If the answer is no, we'll need to look elsewhere for an explanation about why men and fathers tend to be more conservative than women and mothers.
[Originally posted to my Mothering magazine blog.]
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Paternity Leave: The Ultimate Family Vacation
And here's the result of my second collaboration with DadLabs:
I like the way this one turned out. It makes a strong 5-minute case for paternity leave, and the DadLab guys' descriptions of bonding with their kids during leave are really moving. If you think more guys should take leave when it's available and if you think more paternity leave should be available, then spread this segment around. We might change some minds.
I like the way this one turned out. It makes a strong 5-minute case for paternity leave, and the DadLab guys' descriptions of bonding with their kids during leave are really moving. If you think more guys should take leave when it's available and if you think more paternity leave should be available, then spread this segment around. We might change some minds.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Nick Clegg is right
It's a new media trend: Since 80 percent of people laid off in the recession have been guys, pundits and journalists are asking themselves if this will cause men to do more at home. More women as breadwinners and more men at home is "a thought to file under 'let's try to find a silver lining,' " writes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times. Slate's Emily Bazelon takes a dimmer view, imagining "a family with a husband rattling around the house, unemployed and unsettled about it, while his wife keeps working but brings home a paycheck that's less than half the income the two of them used to make together."
Over in the United Kingdom--which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here--Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work." He's been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.
Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.
During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.
And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.
Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s--and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom--which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad--was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.
But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.
In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids--whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.
A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children--and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house. No one gets paid for sniping at his or her spouse.
When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."
America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't--who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives--break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.
Over in the United Kingdom--which is experiencing the same kind of downturn as we are here--Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg triggered a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that men losing jobs should "re-invent" themselves as stay-at-home dads, and "that unemployment could have a 'liberating effect' on outdated views about what was men's work." He's been accused of emasculating British industrial workers.
Perhaps Clegg, a politician, might be criticized for having a politically tin ear, but he's absolutely correct: economic downturns can open up new possibilities for men, and this recession is likely to have a huge effect on gender relations.
During the Great Depression, unemployment would utterly destroy men, because their entire identities were based on their jobs and their ability to support families. At the same time, however, widespread unemployment had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing. According to a study by historian Ralph LaRossa and colleagues, more books and magazine articles in the Great Depression promoted the idea of the "New Father" than at any other time before or since. "Measuring virality and manliness in ways that were independent of whether one had a job [served] to counterbalance the emasculating effects of the Depression," writes LaRossa.
And as more men were tossed out of work, more women found jobs. The number of married women working outside the home almost tripled from 1900 to the middle of the Depression; women zoomed from being less than 3 percent of clerical workers at the end of the 19th century to being more than half in the Depression. Incomes rose accordingly.
Women's employment and incomes continued to grow throughout the 40s and, yes, even the 50s--and expanded straight through the 70s and 80s, when men's economic prospects started to dim. It's no accident that the hero of the 1982 film Mr. Mom--which marked the film debut of the stay-at-home dad--was a laid-off autoworker named Jack. Had Mr. Mom been made in the 1930s, it would have been a tear-jerking melodrama: Jack would have sunk into alcoholism and domestic violence while his wife endured the humiliation of employment.
But a lot had changed in America in the decades between the Great Depression and Mr. Mom. Ultimately, Jack masters househusbandry while his wife becomes a successful ad executive. When their identities as breadwinners are destroyed by economic instability, argues Mr. Mom, men must do exactly what Nick Clegg suggests, and reinvent themselves as caregivers. Moreover, the film suggests that men ought to support their wives' career aspirations, a startling departure from the past.
In the face of today's financial disasters, women are economically stronger than ever and men's identities are much more diverse. Since 1965, according to several empirical studies, men's time with children has tripled. Since 1995, it has doubled. So has the number of stay-at-home dads. Researchers are finding that even low-income and chronically unemployed men are finding meaning and satisfaction in taking care of kids--whereas in the past, they would consciously reject those roles. As motherhood has shifted to include careers, the definition of fatherhood has shifted from pure breadwinning to one that encompasses both breadwinning and caregiving.
A bad economy is bad for mothers, fathers, and children--and, indeed, everyone. None of us can wave a magic wand and bring our jobs and a healthy economy back; for many of us, life is about to become very hard. But the history of the American family teaches us that we can grow stronger in the places where we have been broken. The key, research reveals, is for mothers and fathers to cultivate loving relationships with each other, and to prize time with children. That can be hard to do when you don't know how you're going to pay the mortgage, and yet we are even worse off when we lose each other as well as the house. No one gets paid for sniping at his or her spouse.
When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (author of the remarkable memoir The Beautiful Struggle) was laid off from Time magazine in 2007, he became a stay-at-home dad. "You know, getting laid off is always a difficult thing, but it gave me back time with my son," Ta-Nehisi told me in an interview for my forthcoming book, The Daddy Shift. "That's absolutely huge. I guess not making much money would trouble me, if I felt I wasn't a very good father. If you are a man who thinks that what you bring to a relationship is economic power and that's it, then I guess that would trouble you."
America can learn from Ta-Nehisi. Couples that can support each other and focus on care survive recessions; couples that don't--who allow stress and despair to take over their family lives--break apart. I would argue that the role reversals American families are experiencing can be a source of strength, and an evolutionary adaptation to a global economy that is intrinsically unstable and technology-based. When the right values are in place, families can survive economic downturns intact, and sometimes even thrive.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Stand by your woman
Mothering reports on an important new study:
For more on the science of father involvement, see this July post.
The best chance of forming a long lasting relationship with an unmarried father and building the foundations for a stable family life are the critical months of pregnancy, says new research from the University of Maryland. Marriage itself is not a guarantee, the study adds.
"Unmarried dads are less likely to drift away if they are involved with their partner during this vital period when a family can begin to bond," says University of Maryland human development professor Natasha J. Cabrera, the principal investigator and a researcher at the school's Maryland Population Research Center.
The study, published in the December Journal of Marriage and Family, is the first to explain the importance of the prenatal period in the formation of non-traditional family patterns. The researchers analyzed data drawn from an ongoing project—The Fragile Families Child Wellbeing Study—which mostly involved unmarried couples, a total of 1,686 couples in all (www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu)
In their analysis, Cabrera and her colleague, Jay Fagan at Temple University, found that fathers involved during pregnancy were significantly more likely to remain involved in raising their child at three-years-old.
"The unmarried father is much more likely either to maintain or move into a more committed relationship if he's involved before the birth, and that's the critical difference," Cabrera says. "As you might expect, research has consistently shown that creating a stable home life predicts whether a father will be an active participant in raising the child, but what we've learned here is that the prenatal months are when that kind of family structure is most likely to coalesce."
The study found that marital status is not a critical predictor of a father's involvement. "It is the decision that couples make to strengthen commitment and move in together that is important, rather than marital status per se," Cabrera said. "You don't need much imagination to see that a live-in dad is likely to be more involved in child care and family life. It's the personal investment in the child's and the mother's future that counts the most, not the paperwork."
For more on the science of father involvement, see this July post.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
10 questions on profeminist fatherhood
Yesterday I posted a list of questions about feminism and fatherhood that were adapted from "10 questions on feminist motherhood," posed by Australian feminist mommy blogger Blue Milk. I promised that I would try to answer them. Here it goes:
1. How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become profeminist? Was it before or after you became a father?
In short, the personal is political!
During college, I also read my way through the feminist canon, starting with The Second Sex
Every once in a while, a female co-worker would even go out of her way to tell me how refreshingly non-sexist I was—“When Jeremy talks to me, he never looks at my breasts,” said one person, whose breasts I did, in fact, secretly glance at once or twice.
Think about the implications: If a guy like me—who has every good intention and a history of profeminist activism, and who even served a stint as a stay-at-home dad—is failing at the task for forging a perfectly egalitarian family, then what does that tell us about the prospects of wider social change?
Am I judging them? Sure, a bit—the fathers, anyway—but mainly as a warning to myself and others. They’re workaholics in the service of social change, as I once was, and I suspect that they will regret the things they missed just as much as their corporate counterparts.
On the flip side, the dark one, you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner. In those scary moments, when our worst emotions take over and drive our ideals and aspirations over a cliff, it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission.
Pledging allegiance to feminist ideals doesn’t make you a good person or a good parent or a good partner, but it might remind you of the power you have—we always have power, if only over ourselves—and the need to restrain that power or share it with other people. It can also remind fathers of something that I think is crucial: There are alternatives; you do have choices, and your choices matter. You don’t have to be the man your father was; you don't have to be the idiots we see on TV; you can be a new kind of man, and you can help your sons become that kind of man.
For instance, he likes to wear dresses to birthday parties, and we let him. The other parents, even here in
I can’t right now. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
You know, I have no idea how my wife feels about this and I don’t care to speculate in public. It has shaped our relationship in positive ways that I don’t think we always appreciate. Taking the long view, feminism has made it possible for our relationship to have more freedom and flexibility than couples in previous eras could have. In the short run, it has driven me to try to be as involved as possible in care and housework. I can describe my intentions; it’s not for me to say how successful I’ve been in meeting my own standards.
This is the great thing that feminism has given fathers: Its success has triggered culture-wide dialogs among men about what a good father should be and do. Feminists themselves are not always comfortable with these arguments, and certainly there has been much to criticize.
But, as an old Bolshevik once said, revolutions don’t happen in velvet boxes. They’re messy, contradictory, sometimes downright revolting—but usually also thrilling and necessary. Women have been rising for over a century, and only recently have men started to really change in response. From that perspective, it’s an exciting time.
This leads me to another thing (returning to the topic of the second question) that has surprised me about fatherhood and feminism: In a perverse way, fatherhood has strengthened my commitment to feminism. By revealing the limits of my good intentions and scope of action, fatherhood has pushed me to seek new answers to feminist questions I thought I had answered in my early twenties, on both personal and political levels.
Fatherhood has also reminded me, in a visceral way, of the inequalities that persist between men and women, and, in particular, the burdens carried by mothers. Those burdens and inequalities shape and poison our most intimate relationships whether we want them to or not.
Here again, feminism is useful for fathers and mothers: It gives us perspective, or it should.
It’s easy to be overcome by day-to-day difficulties and despair of the possibility of changing the balance of power between men and women. But if we lift our eyes and look at the sweep of the past through feminism’s eyes, we can see that the balance of power has changed, on this and many other fronts. History doesn’t stop just because we personally feel stuck. If we look at the lives of the people who came before us, we see that our actions in the present do matter, both our individual choices and the act of speaking out in public.
But I still feel like we as fathers need to speak out, even if it’s just to friends or through blogs with a few hundred readers. The alternative is silence—but worse than that, meaninglessness. If I’m going to fail, the failure has to mean something. It has to be recorded (if only for myself), examined, put to use, leveraged, transmuted. Feminism gives us a way to do that, to transform our private pains into social change.
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Astonishing Science of Father Involvement
My esteemed colleague at the Greater Good Science Center, executive director Christine Carter, posted two very nice summaries of research into fatherhood over at her "happy kids" parenting blog, Half-Full.The first asks: Are Dads as Essential as Moms? The answer is, Of course!
* Research shows that the love and care of fathers is equally important for the health and well-being of children as mother-love. Really.
* Children are WAY better off when their relationship with their father is sensitive, secure, and supportive as well as close, nurturing, and warm.
* One of the biggest problems with divorce is that when a father moves out, the father-child relationship frequently falters. If he stays in the game, his kids will cope far better with the divorce.
The second asks the question: How can we get dads to be more involved? Christine's answer: a mother's support, a good co-parenting relationship, and reasonable work hours.
Most of this will not be surprising to Daddy Dialectic readers. (Some, I know, will take issue with Christine's mom-centric way of framing father involvement; feel free to zip over there and leave a comment.)
Research has revealed lots of other factors that drive father involvement: a father's relationships with his own parents (did he have an involved father?) and in-laws (are they supportive of him?); timing of entry into the parental role (what pressures is he facing, especially at work?); and informal support systems such as playgroups and friendships (do other dads, as well as moms, put social pressure on him to be involved, through example or comments?); and the sex of the child. Fathers tend to be more involved with boys, which suggests to me that families with girls might try to amplify the other variables in play--for example, by setting aside special daddy-daughter time.
There's another factor that I don't think gets mentioned often enough: early involvement with infant care. When a child is born, testosterone falls dramatically in men. In fact, studies by biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards and others show that pregnancy, childbirth, and fatherhood trigger a range of little hormonal shifts in the male body—but only if the father is in contact with the baby and the baby’s mother, a crucial point.
New fathers don’t just lose testosterone, they also gain prolactin, the hormone associated with lactation, as well as cortisol, the stress hormone that also spikes in mothers after childbirth and helps them pay attention to the baby’s needs.
In many, many ways, male and female bodies converge as the two become parents; for some men, the process is so intense that they will end up involuntarily mimicking signs of childbirth, a phenomenon called couvade. The convergence starts to end for the male only if he is separated from his family.
Interestingly, the hormonal shifts don’t diminish with second children; instead, they increase. Our bodies learn fatherhood, and fatherhood appears to be very much like learning to ride a bike.
It’s not just our hormones that change, but the very structure of our brains.
To understand the impact of fatherhood on the brain, a team of Princeton University researchers compared the brains of daddy marmoset monkeys (pictured at your left!) to their childfree fellows. Why marmosets? Because their males are the stay-at-home dads of the animal kingdom, who carry babies 70 percent of the time and give them to mothers only for nursing.The researchers discovered that the fathers developed better neural connections in the prefrontal cortex—which is thicker in females. In other words, marmoset dads’ brains become more like females’, and it makes them smarter. The same group of researchers found that fatherhood generates new cells and connections in the hippocampus in mice, the emotion-processing center that is also somewhat bigger in the average human female.
You can’t apply this directly to humans, of course: marmosets are a different kind of primate and mice have tails and whiskers. And yet given the state of our knowledge, I think it's hard to argue with the notion that early paternal involvement will positively affect later involvement--not guarantee it, mind you, but infant care will certainly help. Babies and fathers imprint on each other, biologically and emotionally, just as babies do with moms. It forms a bond that can last a lifetime, if cultivated.
Many recent studies also show that such early father involvement is very good for children: For example, a report published in 2007 by the Equal Opportunities Commission in the United Kingdom, based on research tracking 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001, found emotional and behavioral 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.”
This research might help couples to make good personal decisions, but there is a political dimension as well: Only a very tiny number of American companies offer paternity leave.
Public and workplace policy is the final, and possibly biggest, factor that predicts paternal involvement--one that never gets mentioned in this context. Men are not all the same all over the globe: Their involvement differs from country to country.
The main things that seem to drive the difference? According to studies by Jennifer Hook and others, the first is the national level of women's employment: the more mothers employed and the more money they make, the more housework and childcare fathers do. The second factor driving national father involvement is the amount of paternal leave available. There is, in fact, a chicken-and-egg relationship between the two.
In 1974, for example, Sweden introduced paternity leave to the world, which catalyzed long-term changes in Swedish patterns of work and care.
In Sweden today, fathers are entitled to 10 days of paid leave after a child is born. Eighty percent of them take it, often combining it with vacation time. Parents get a total of 480 days off after they have a child, with 60 days reserved for mothers and 60 for fathers. The rest can be divided according to the wishes of the parents. Three hundred and ninety of those days are paid at 80 percent of the parents’ incomes, with the remaining 90 days paid at a set rate. In 2006, 20 percent of fathers took their share of extended leave.
That might not seem like a lot, but it compares very favorably to the minuscule number of American fathers who take advantage of the pathetic amount of leave available to them. And after Swedish parents go back to work, high-quality daycare is available to all parents, regardless of ability to pay.
The reforms had a sweeping impact on the culture of fatherhood in Sweden. When Swedish researcher Anna-Lena Almqvist interviewed 20 French and 35 Swedish couples in an effort to understand why fathers did or did not take advantage of parental leave and how that related to their self-images as men, she found that Swedish fathers expressed a more “child-oriented masculinity,” and actively negotiated with wives for more time with children.
“By international standards, Swedish fathers take on a good deal of the day-to-day care of their children,” writes Swedish feminist Karin Alfredsson. “Mothers still stay home longer with newborn children, but the responsibility for caring for sick children—while receiving benefits from the state—is more evenly divided between mothers and fathers. It is almost as common for fathers as it is for mothers to pick up and leave the children at pre-school and school.”
This pattern holds in other countries with similar policies.
The upshot: We know from the Northern European (and Canadian) experience that men will take more advantage of parental leave if policy, workplaces, and culture support them. In America--unlike in Sweden and elsewhere--the culture is changing in advance of workplaces and public policy, and a new generation of fathers is more willing to take advantage of leave and rebel against their workplace cultures, even at the expense of their careers.
When the American University Program on Work-Life Law studied 67 trade union arbitrations in which workers claimed to have been punished for meeting family responsibilities, they discovered that two-thirds of the cases involved men taking care of children, elders, or sick spouses.
USA Today reports in 2007 that more and more men are fighting for the right to take care of their children:
For years, women who say their employers have discriminated against them because of their care-giving roles have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC has not released precise figures, but it reports that it now is seeing a shift: filings by fathers. For example, the EEOC says, some employers have wrongly denied male employees’ requests for leave for child care purposes while granting similar requests to female employees.
As a result, more and more companies, large and small, are offering family-leave benefits to men. “A few years ago, I would have told you that paternity leave wasn’t that beneficial in terms of recruiting and retaining,” Burke Stinson, a spokesperson for AT&T, tells HR magazine. “But today, I would say these 20-something men are far less burdened by the macho stereotypes and the stereotypes about the incompetent dad than their predecessors. They are more plugged in to the enrichment of their children and more comfortable taking time off to be fathers.”
It’s an observation echoed by Howard Schultz, Chairman of the Starbucks corporation, in 2007: “Men are willing to talk about these things in ways that were inconceivable less than ten years ago.”
Men are evolving, but society, business, and government still drag their collective feet. This breeds unhappiness as well as lawsuits--but perhaps one day we will have the policies that will help us to be the fathers we need and want to be.
[This entry was originally posted to the Greater Good blog, though it is drawn from a chapter from my book, now scheduled for release around Father's Day 2009.]
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
On the Love of Small Things
In the same year that Isaac Newton invented his own version of the differential calculus (1665), Robert Hooke published a a book illustrated with engravings of Very Small Things, including most famously the eye of a fly. The domain of the calculus was an abstract corroboration of the infinitely large and infinitely small worlds being disclosed by seventeenth century optics -- the telescope and the microscope.
Hooke wrote of the latter in his Micrographia:
...by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding ... By this the Earth it self, which lyes so near us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter ... we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.
When Hooke and his colleagues at the English Royal Society beheld the symmetries, the regularities, and the fine and often beautiful forms of things invisible to the naked eye, it seemed clear that the structure of reality itself bore witness to the work of a divine creator, one who had left its hidden signature in plain sight, in the form of Very Small Things.
Questions of theology and immanence aside, there is a well established precedent from within modern science, long a most masculine pursuit, for the value and meaningfulness of the small. The later discoveries of the biological cell and the atomic particle may not have carried the same theological charge, but they continued nonetheless to expand the world of the Very Small as a realm for heroic action, and humbling contemplation.
These are some of the thoughts that occurred to me when Spot was himself Very Small. He is still small, in a way that is cute and adorable in a domesticated sense, but also in a way that is mind-boggling and edifying and escapes our ability to contain it within the modern culture of cuteness. We feed him and shelter him and keep him out of harm's way, and in the meantime a process well beyond anyone's control, asking no permission and seeking its own ends, adapts and learns and organizes itself into the form of our son.
Small is beautiful, in other words. But smallness is actually very big when you think about it, and the riddle of smallness, in the switching and clicking of DNA, is the most basic wisdom and knowledge of life itself.
For all these reasons, it is strange to me why some men should feel threatened by or uncomfortable with infants. The exoticism, foreignness, and pure neediness of the infant is often threatening to a man with a conventional understanding of manhood. After all, the world of the infant is the domain par excellence of the woman, the feminine, the domain where mothers are most assured.
Well-intentioned men have no compunction about passing off the care of infants to others. I've seen this over and over again among my friends and family. They prefer -- as both my own father and brother-in-law have admitted -- to wait until the infant has become a small person, perhaps a boy or a girl -- a miniature rather than an alien -- one with language who has likes and dislikes that can be engaged with on some level of familiarity. A creature who can reflect back something of themselves, requiring little work of translation.
The infant, rather than being a small simulacrum, is instead weak, vulnerable, and undeveloped, and can mirror these same qualities of weakness back to a man who fears them. "Men usually don't like babies when they're so small," several women assured me when Spot was 5 months old and still strapped to my chest. When the masculine ideal is independence and control, the infant makes demands which must be obeyed. There is no mistaking the resulting Master-Servant relation of the caretaker to the infant's needs. And the infant relies on a form of communication based on the body and undiluted emotion, a language that requires the work of translation.
All these things have made me uncomfortable at one point or another over the last 18 months. As Spot becomes more of a little boy and less of an infant, the issue becomes less acute, but the act of caring for small things is still an unsettled zone within the unsettled male identity. It doesn't have to be. I've drawn one example from the history of Western science to suggest that there are many ways to think about smallness that are not diminishing.
I'm sure there are many others. Somewhere between the roles of the craftsman, the tinkerer, and the shepherd, I'd like to think, are exemplars of the good that can come from long and close attention to Very Small Things.
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