by Jancee Dunn
Still, the culture has begun to shift. Sociologist Michael Kimmel says that younger men are now realizing that policies that achieve a work-family balance—flexible work time, on-site childcare, and maternity and paternity leave—aren’t women’s issues, but parents’ issues.
“Actually,” Kimmel says, “it’s not about parental leave—it’s about family leave. For those in the sandwich generation, it will be about leaving work early on Friday afternoon to coach your daughter’s soccer game and take your eighty-six-year-old mom to the doctor. This is a demographic thing—we’re marrying later, we’re having children later, and our parents are living a lot longer.” While women have traditionally borne the brunt of caring for both the elderly and children, “increasingly, men are going to be called on to do this sort of stuff, so we need these reforms,” says Kimmel. “While I don’t think we’re going to become Norway anytime soon, I do think that men as well as women are going to be insisting on it.”
Some firms have already listened to their younger workers. Tech companies, unsurprisingly, lead the pack with progressive work-life policies. Facebook offers full-time employees four months of paid parental leave, Twitter grants twenty weeks, and Netflix provides fully paid leave for up to one year.
But for the majority of parents, paid parental leave is not even remotely within reach. The Family Medical Leave Act allows employees to take twelve weeks of parental leave, but it’s available only to workers in medium and large companies—and it’s unpaid. “It should be a national embarrassment that there are only four countries that offer no paid parental leave to anyone,” says Kimmel. “And they are Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea—and the United States.”
Most men are forced to cobble together their own paternal leave using vacation time and personal days—that is, if they take it at all. The Boston College Center for Work and Family surveyed nearly one thousand fathers in large companies and found that about three-quarters of them took off a week or less when their baby was born; 16 percent took no time off whatsoever.
Survey after survey shows that men want to spend more time with their kids. But even among those who can take parental leave, many hesitate to do so for fear of damaging their careers, and because of lingering social stigma. However, as more high-profile men take parental leave and show that it’s a priority, the more socially acceptable it will likely become. Facebook CEO (and millennial role model) Mark Zuckerberg took off two months to care for his newborn daughter, posting photos of himself changing her diapers for his 56 million Facebook followers.
Kimmel says that Zuckerberg’s actions made a huge impact. “In corporations, impulses come from the top, so it really does matter when you have your CEO saying, ‘This is important to me, and I want my employees to be able to do what I’ve done, because it’s awesome.’” When companies provide benefits such as paternal leave, he adds, it’s a win-win. “There is in fact greater productivity, higher job satisfaction, lower labor turnover. So it’s actually cost effective.”
Along with industry titans, professional sports figures hold similar sway. Golfer Hunter Mahan left the PGA tournament he was leading to rush to a Dallas hospital when his pregnant wife went into labor a month early. Mahan, making a very public choice, forfeited his chance to win a million dollars to attend the birth of his daughter. Chicago White Sox baseball player Adam LaRoche walked away from a contract that would have paid him $13 million because his manager told him that he could no longer bring his son to daily pregame practice. LaRoche, who promptly retired, issued a statement saying, “Of one thing I am certain—we will regret not spending time with our kids, not the other way around.” LaRoche was applauded by his fellow pro athletes, one of whom used the Twitter hashtag #FamilyFirst.
Men are gradually being portrayed differently in ads, too, as the stereotype of the clueless or remote dad looks increasingly dated. A print ad for wealth management firm UBS shows a handsome entrepreneur lost in thought in his skyscraper office. Am I a good father? reads the copy. Do I spend too much time at work? Can I have it all? In my dad’s day, the man in the ad would be brooding about the time he’s missing on the golf course. (Although it should be noted that while UBS grants women a generous six months of fully paid maternity leave, men receive just two weeks.) A spot for Kohler generators that ran on ESPNU during a college football game featured a family dancing in the living room to some music before the power goes out. Dad, significantly, is vacuuming.
As Mad Men’s Don Draper used to say, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” That was the case in 2015, when a group of fathers campaigned to change the unfairly monikered Amazon Mom program, which offered parenting products such as wipes, to Amazon Family. Nine months after the protests started, the company quietly altered the name.
Laundry detergent companies are now studying the emergent and increasingly important male consumer. Not long ago, Procter & Gamble, for the first time ever, stopped referring to the average Tide consumer as “she” in its internal discussions. Whirlpool, meanwhile, has added a cycle in its washers to keep colors from blending, because they’ve found that men are doing more laundry these days—but aren’t keen on sorting it.
Most encouraging is an ad for Ariel India, a Procter & Gamble laundry detergent brand. When it ran in 2016, Facebook COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most powerful videos she had ever seen. It begins as an older man who is visiting his grown daughter apprehensively watches her return from work and simultaneously make dinner, shove clothes into the washer, and tend to her husband. We hear his voice-over:
My little baby girl, you’re all grown up now. You used to play house, and now you manage your own house. And your office. I am so proud. And I am so sorry. Sorry that you have to do this all alone. Sorry that I never stopped you while you were playing house. I never told you that it’s not your job alone, but your husband’s too. (The camera cuts to her husband, who is relaxing in front of the television.) But how could I say it when I never helped your mom, either? And what you saw, you learned.… But it’s not too late. I will make a conscious effort to help your mom with the household chores. I may not become king of the kitchen, but at least I can help out with the laundry. (A shot of him unpacking his suitcase and taking the clothes to the washer while his wife watches, astonished.) All these years I’ve been wrong. It’s time to set things right.
At this point when I view the ad, I can barely see the tagline (Why is laundry only a mother’s job?) because the tears are dribbling down my face.
These examples may warm the heart, but we still have a long way to go.
In an annual letter released by Melinda and Bill Gates, which outlines their philanthropic priorities for a teenage audience, Melinda Gates dedicates her section to the heavy load of unpaid work on the world’s women.
She writes that globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work—cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Men spend less than half that amount. “It’s not just about fairness,” she writes. “Assigning most unpaid work to women harms everyone: men, women, boys, and girls. The reason? Economists call it opportunity cost: the other things women could be doing if they didn’t spend so much time on mundane tasks.”
To narrow the unpaid labor gap, she goes on, “the world is making progress by doing three things economists call Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute: Recognize that unpaid work is still work. Reduce the amount of time and energy it takes. And Redistribute it more evenly between women and men.”
On a more micro level, she issues a call to change what we think of as normal—“not thinking it’s funny or weird when a man puts on an apron, picks up his kids from school, or leaves a cute note in his son’s lunchbox.” Gates told the New York Times that she did some Redistributing in her own home. When she was unhappy about making the lengthy commute to her daughter Jennifer’s preschool, her husband, then the chief executive of Microsoft, said he would drive Jennifer two days a we
ek. “Moms started going home and saying to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates can drive his daughter, you better darn well drive our daughter or son,’” she said. (Or, more likely, You better get your ass in the car.) If you’re going to get behavior to change, she goes on, you have to model it publicly.
Or as feminist author Caitlin Moran tells me, “A culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about who we can be—our possible futures. And when you still don’t see that anywhere in the culture—in TV shows, in films—then how would we even know how to do that? It’s still up to an individual woman to go, ‘I’ve just invented this idea of us being equal in a relationship!’ and then sell it to her partner, when she’s surrounded by a culture that does not support that decision, doesn’t show her how to do it, and doesn’t present it as the right thing to do. So that’s where culture is incredibly important.”
If women were running Hollywood, she adds, “and they were able to present their lives and their realities, and their dreams for what they think the future should be, we’d be able to sort this shit out pretty fucking quickly. If there was a film or TV show where there was an incredibly sexy actor that everybody fancied who was seen to be a fantastic parent—that would change things pretty quickly, too.”
That is one reason why I pushed to have Tom chaperone Sylvie’s class trip—and then, to volunteer for another one. Every time he does something in which he’s the only guy amidst a sea of moms, he proves to himself that he can do it, proves it to his daughter and the other kids, and also to the other moms, who might then go home and nudge their husbands to show up next time. In this way, he moves the needle forward just a little.
Until we have halfway decent policies that support parents and families, social change must begin in our homes and spread outward. As the saying goes, change doesn’t come from Washington, it comes to Washington.
A little over a year later, of course we still fight—but with sustained effort and self-control, we do it like grown-ups. Well, almost: I find I can’t quit my beloved sarcasm, which, in my view, adds a dash of creative spice to our interactions. (I must say I enjoy thinking of various toffs throughout history that I can call Tom if he’s acting entitled.) But, for the most part, we have gotten so used to resolving disputes in a relatively calm way that if we raise our voices, it sounds jarring and strange, like an unexpected disturbance in a library.
Tom, once a reluctant but resigned participant in this endeavor, now sees the wisdom of planning, negotiation, and transparency. “It’s better just to be up front about things and deal with them ahead of time,” he tells me one day before our mundane-but-necessary Saturday meeting, which we zhush up with some chocolate-studded bread from Balthazar Bakery, which I highly recommend. “There’s a preventive medicine aspect to a lot of this—it’s a lot easier to take a five-minute flu shot than lie in bed for a week,” he goes on, cutting himself a hefty slice. “Having things be unspoken is corrosive. There’s a long-term toll if you’re fighting over these little things; it bleeds into other things until you might begin to think you’re dissatisfied with the relationship, when it’s really these more surface issues.”
But in order to restore peace and harmony, we both had to be willing to get real, go to the hard places, and keep at it. (Despite research that it takes an average of sixty-six days for a habit to form, it took more like fourteen months for us to right the imbalance in our household.) A happy, functional family doesn’t happen by accident, but by concerted effort from the different members of the family to do the sometimes-difficult work of getting along with each other. Marriage is an institution with a lot of day-to-day business—and institutions function better when they’re running well.
I am still the reluctant house manager, and likely always will be. I still must continually insist, quietly but firmly, that Tom do his share around the house. But the mental bandwidth I use to do this is nothing compared to the energy I used to devote to drudge work. Negotiation is an endless, tiring, often clinical but necessary process—one that we will clearly be doing into our dotage—but it’s much better than constantly feeling oppressed and angry. Our new harmony has been worth every stilted family meeting and therapist-scripted exchange. I now know the following:
He can’t read your mind. He’s not even close to reading your mind.
I can’t believe how many hours I squandered fuming, in the hopes that Tom would intuitively leap in and help me out. With hindsight, I see that my expectations probably increased because I spend so much time around moms who offer constant and unthinking support: when Sylvie recently ran toward me on the playground, crying with a bloody knee, one friend handed me a wad of tissues, another a bandage, a third a lollipop for Sylvie, all without a break in our conversation.
Tom, meanwhile, rarely seems to notice that I need a hand—so my resentment would inevitably build until I exploded. My first helpful step on the path to real change was to stop playing the victim. In the wonderfully concise words of Terry Real, “If you don’t like something, change it, leave it, or embrace it. If you neither change nor leave it, own it.”
Stop complaining and ask clearly for what you want.
Yelling didn’t work. Muttering under my breath didn’t work. Neither did my trademark dramatic speeches. Yet somehow it rarely occurred to me to simply tell Tom what I wanted, rather than complain to him and anyone else who would listen. As Real says, “I’m always amazed that in this age of personal empowerment, people still subscribe to the truly nutty idea that an effective strategy for getting what you want from your partner is to complain about it after the fact. This boxes him in and leaves him nowhere to go.” Tom’s behavior changed only when I learned to tell him, calmly and specifically, what I would like to have happen.
With a Herculean effort, I now strive to keep my requests to one sentence—or even just silently involve him in what I am doing. If I’m emptying the dishwasher, I hand him some bowls. (What is he going to do—throw them on the floor?) If I’m folding laundry, I push a pile his way. If I’m making dinner, I hand him a knife and some vegetables. This tactic works a lot better than brooding, or raging that “I’m doing everything around here,” an observation that swirls around with nowhere to land.
You don’t always have to eat the broken crackers.
One of the most difficult things I had to do was develop a little entitlement of my own, and get fully behind the idea that I need help around the house, as well as rest and leisure time. It was tough to shake the attendant guilt, and the sense that somehow I should be able to handle everything. It helped a lot to repeat the mantra supplied by therapist Ann Dunnewold: When I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the mother I want to be. By taking care of myself, I become a better caretaker.
If a fight is brewing, start with “I” statements.
I love the Gottmans’ method of using a “softened startup” during conflict—simply beginning a statement with “I” instead of “you” (“I feel like you’re not listening” rather than “You’re not listening”). Not only is this disarming, but taking a pause to focus on how I am feeling, rather than immediately resorting to criticism, lowers my blood pressure and makes me feel more in control.
So does drawing a few deep breaths as I diagnose the “soft emotions” behind my anger. Usually, I feel betrayed—what happened to the evolved guy I married? It was as if parenthood revealed his inner man in the gray flannel suit. And my pride is often hurt, too: Does Tom believe in his heart of hearts that those in possession of a uterus are more suited to menial work? With even more digging, I have to admit that sometimes I am simply jealous that he feels no guilt whatsoever about taking time to relax.
Kids can see you fight if you do it fairly.
Conflict, I repeat, is not bad for children. What is bad is persistent, low-level tension that erupts into full-fledged battles in a manner that baffles them, and that never get resolved. Fighting fairly is not only good for a child to see, it’s a useful skill for the whole family to have whe
n a kid reaches the ornery teen years. One of the most compelling cases for having your child see you hash things out without rancor was revealed by psychologists at the University of West Virginia. They asked 157 thirteen-year-olds to describe the biggest disagreements they had with their parents, and videotaped their answers. Then the tape was played back to each teen with a parent in the room.
As the two watched the teenager describe the dispute—typically, an issue involving chores, grades, friends, sibling spats, or money—the psychologists observed the parent’s reaction. Some parents rolled their eyes. Some laughed. But others jumped in and worked through the dispute with their teen in a healthy way—no yelling, each side listening to the other. As it turns out, those teenagers who were able to confidently disagree with their parents dealt with their friends in the same manner. In a follow-up study when the kids were fifteen and sixteen, those same kids were 40 percent more likely to stand up to peer pressure when offered alcohol or drugs. The kids who shied away from conflict with their folks, meanwhile, were more susceptible to peer pressure.
All teenagers quarrel with their parents—but again, it’s the way in which you argue that makes a critical difference. When kids learn to calmly but persuasively stand up for themselves, the study author says, they build a lifelong skill that will help them deal with obstreperous coworkers, friends, and partners.
Push through his pushback.
When I announced to Tom that the party was over, he was sensibly reluctant to give up his single-guy-within-a-family lifestyle. Why would he want to forgo long, carefree bike rides and three homemade meals a day? In effect, I was asking him to hand over his leisure hours to me.