Discipline. I don’t put up with whining. It bothers me. I’m shorter tempered and my wife is longer tempered. I do a significant amount of paddling. I grew up with being paddled. When I got paddled I knew damn good and well that I deserved it. I don’t whip them. One good pop on their bottom and I send them down to their room. I’ve scared them. I’ve never punched them. And I’ll spank them in front of people as well as not in front of them.
To him, being a disciplinarian was being a father. As a result, his children gravitated to their mother. In a strangely matter-of-fact way, she remarked that she didn’t “feel comfortable” leaving the children with her husband for long periods. “If I go out to the hairdresser’s on Saturday, I might come back and find he didn’t fix them lunch; I don’t leave them with him too much.” Developing a “longer temper” didn’t feel to him like part of a father’s job.
When I asked uninvolved fathers to define a “good mother” and “good father,” they gave elaborate and detailed answers for “good mother,” and short, hazy answers for “good father,” sometimes with a specific mission attached to it, like teaching a child about cars, soccer, baseball.
I asked one man, “What’s a good mother?” and he answered: “A good mother is patient. That’s the first thing. Someone who is warm, caring, who can see what the child needs, physically, who stimulates the child intellectually, and helps the child meet his emotional challenges.” “What is a good father?” I asked. “A good father is a man who spends time with his children.” Another man said simply, “A good father is around.”
It is not that such men have an elaborate idea of fatherhood and don’t live up to it. Their idea of fatherhood is embryonic to begin with. They often limit that idea by comparing themselves only to their own fathers, and not, as more involved men did, to their mothers, sisters, or other fathers. As a Salvadoran delivery man put it, “I give my children everything my father gave me.” Michael Sherman gave his twins what his mother gave him.
CURTAILING THE IDEA OF WHAT A CHILD NEEDS
Men who are greatly involved with their children react against two cultural ideas: one idea removes the actual care of children from the definition of manhood, and one curtails the notion of how much care a child needs. As to the first idea, involved fathers’ biggest struggle was against the doubts they felt about not “giving everything to getting ahead” in their jobs. But even when they conquered this fear, another idea often stood in the way—the idea that their child is “already grown up,” “advanced,” and doesn’t need much from him.
Just as the archetype of the supermom—the woman who can do it all—minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the “superkid” minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older. Often uninvolved parents remarked with pride that their small children were “self-sufficient” or “very independent.”
I asked the fifth-grade teacher in a private school how she thought her students from two-job families were doing. She began by saying that they did as well as the few children she had whose mothers stayed home. But having said that, her talk ran to the problems: “The good side of kids being on their own so much is that it makes them independent really early. But I think they pay a price. I can see them sealing off their feelings, as if they’re saying. ‘That’s the last time I’ll be vulnerable.’ I can see it in their faces, especially the sixth-grade boys.”
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as women were increasingly excluded from the workplace, the cultural notion of what a child “needs” at home grew to expand the woman’s role at home. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note in For Her Own Good, doctors and ministers argued strongly that a woman’s place was at home. The child needed her there. As the economic winds reversed, so did the idea of a woman’s proper place—and a child’s real needs. Nowadays, a child is increasingly imagined to need time with other children, to need “independence-training,” not to need “quantity time” with a parent but only a small amount of “quality time.” As one working father remarked: “Children need time to play with other children their age. It’s stimulating for them. Nelson has enjoyed it, I think, from when he was six months.”
If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are a cultural football in an economic and marital game.
An Orwellian “superkid” language has emerged to consolidate this sense of normality. In a September 1985 New York Times article entitled “New Programs Come to Aid of Latch-Key Children,” Janet Edder quotes a child-care professional as follows: “Like other child-care professionals, Mrs. Seligson prefers to use the phrase ‘Children in Self-Care’ rather than ‘Latch-Key Children,’ a term coined during the depression when many children who went home alone wore a key around their necks.” “Children in Self-Care” suggests that children are being cared for, by themselves. Unlike the term “Latch-Key Children,” which suggests a child who is sad and deprived, the term “Children in Self-Care” suggests a happy superkid.
Another article, in the August 1984 Changing Times, entitled “When You Can’t Be Home, Teach Your Child What to Do,” suggests that working parents do home-safety checkups so that a pipe won’t burst, a circuit breaker won’t blow, or electrical fire start. Parents should advise children to keep house keys out of sight and to conceal from callers the fact that they’re alone at home. It tells about “warm lines”—a telephone number a child can call for advice or simple comfort when he or she is alone. Earlier in the century, advice of this sort was offered to destitute widows or working wives of disabled or unemployed men while the middle class shook its head in sympathy. Now the middle class has “children in self-care” too.
The parents I talked to had younger children, none of whom were in “self-care.” The children I visited seemed a fairly jolly and resilient lot. But the parents I spoke to did not feel much supported in their parenthood; like Ann Myerson, many parents in the business world felt obliged to hide concerns that related to children. Female clerical workers were discouraged from making calls home. Many men feared that their doing anything for family reasons—moving to another city, missing the office party, passing up a promotion—would be taken as a sign they lacked ambition or manliness. As for John Livingston’s coworkers, the rule was: don’t go home until your wife calls.
For all the talk about the importance of children, the cultural climate has become subtly less hospitable to parents who put children first. This is not because parents love children less, but because a job culture has expanded at the expense of a family culture.
As motherhood as a “private enterprise” declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.
MY WIFE IS DOING IT
Every afternoon Art Winfield knew Adam was waiting for him at day care. Michael Sherman knew that around 6 a. m. one of his twins would call out “Daddy.” John Livingston knew that Cary relied on him to get around her mother’s discipline. Such men were close enough to their children to know what they were and weren’t getting from their mothers.
Uninvolved fathers were not. They imagined that their wives did more with the children than they did. For example, one thirty-two-year-old grocery clerk praised his wife for helping their daughter with reading on the weekends—something his wife complained he didn’t make time for. But when I interviewed her, I discovered that her weekends were taken up with housework, church, and visiting relatives.
Sometimes I had the feeling that fathers were passing the child-care buck to their wives while the wives passed it to the baby-sitter. Each person passing the role on wanted to feel good about it, and tended to deny the proble
ms. Just as fathers often praised their wives as “wonderful mothers,” so mothers often praised their baby-sitters as “wonderful.” Even women who complain about day care commonly end up describing the day-care worker as “great.” So important to parents was the care of their child that they almost had to believe that “everything at day care was fine.” Not only was the role of caretaker transferred from parent to baby-sitter, but sometimes also the illusion that the child was “in good hands.”
The reasons men gave for why their wives were wonderful—e.g., that they were patient—were often reasons women gave for why the baby-sitters were wonderful. Just as uninvolved fathers often said that they wouldn’t want to trade places with their wives, so wives often said they wouldn’t want to trade places with their day-care worker.
As one businesswoman and mother of a three-year-old boy commented: “Our baby-sitter is just fantastic. She’s with the kids from seven o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night. And some kids stay later. I don’t know how she does it. I couldn’t.” Another working mother commented: “I couldn’t be as patient as Elizabeth [the day-care worker] is. I love my child, but I’m not a baby person.”
The day-care worker herself was often in a difficult spot. She depended economically on the parents, so she didn’t want to say anything so offensive it might lead them to withdraw the child from her care. And parents didn’t have time to listen. As Katharine Wilson, a day-care worker for fifteen years, remarked:
One out of five parents just drop their children off and run. Another three will come in and briefly talk with you. Then the last person will come in and talk to you quite a bit. Not too many call during the day. They trust we know what we’re doing.
Some day-care centers even established a policy of check-in sheets that required parents to come inside the day-care center and sign their child in each morning, thus preventing the hurried few who might otherwise leave their children off at the sidewalk.
Pickup time was often hectic, and not a good time to talk. As one day-care worker observed:
It’s a hell of a life the parents lead. Every time I see them they’re in a rush. It’s rush in the morning and rush in the evening. They barely ask me what Danny had for lunch or how he seemed. I think they might feel bad when they see him around four o’clock in the afternoon. He gets kind of restless then. He’s waiting. He sees the parents of the other children come and each time the doorbell rings he hopes it’s his parents. But, see, they come in the last—six-thirty.
Sometimes a day-care worker becomes worried about a child. As Alicia Fernandez confided:
I’ve had Emily for a year and a half now. She’s never been real open with me and I don’t think she is with her mother either. I think, in a way, Emily was hurt that her former sitter had to give her up. It was a hard adjustment coming in to me and in fact I don’t think she has adjusted. One day she took the money out of my wallet—the money her mother had given me—and tore it up. I was so shocked. It was my pay. I slapped her across the knees. She didn’t cry. I felt bad I’d done that, but even worse that she didn’t cry. I thought, hey, something’s wrong.
Had she mentioned this to Emily’s mother and father? I asked. She replied quickly and quietly: “Oh no. It’s hard to talk about that. We just don’t get around to it. In a way, I feel badly about it but on the other hand if I told her mother, she might take Emily away.”
The day-care worker, who could best judge how Emily’s day had gone, felt afraid to confide her concerns to Emily’s parents, who badly needed to hear them. Other day-care workers also kept their opinions to themselves. As one noted: “You can feel sorry for them. I have Tim for nine hours. I have Jessica for ten and a half—now Jessie’s mother is a single mother. Like I say, at the end of the day they cry.” “Do you talk to their parents about the crying?” I asked.
They don’t ask, and I don’t bring it up. Don’t get me wrong. These children are adaptable. They’re pliant. As long as there’s a sense of love here and as long as you feed them, they know I’m the one who satisfies their needs. That’s all I am to them. The children love me and some little children, like Nelson, don’t want to go home. He’s three now but I’ve had him since he was seven months old; Stephanie’s three and I’ve had her since she was six weeks. But I do feel sorry for the children, I do. Because I know there are days when they probably don’t feel like coming here, especially Mondays.
When day-care workers feel sorry for the children they care for something is wrong. This woman, a thirty-year-old black mother of three, was gentle and kindly, a lovely person to care for children. What seemed wrong to me was the overly long hours, the blocked channels of communication, and the fathers who imagined their wives were “handling it all.”
A FATHER’S INFLUENCE
In a time of stalled revolution—when women have gone to work, but the workplace, the culture, and the men have not adjusted themselves to this new reality—children can be the victims. Most working mothers are already doing all they can. It is men who can do more.
Fathers can make a difference that shows in the child. I didn’t administer tests to the children in the homes I visited nor gather systematic information on child development. I did ask the babysitters and day-care workers for their general impressions of differences between the children of single parents, two-job families in which the father was uninvolved, and two-job families in which the father was actively involved. All of them said that the children of fathers who were actively involved seemed to them “more secure” and “less anxious.” Their lives were less rushed. On Monday, they had more to report about Sunday’s events: “Guess what I did with my dad….”
But curiously little attention has been paid to the effect of fathers on children. Current research focuses almost exclusively on the influence of mothers. A panel of distinguished social scientists chosen by the National Academy of Sciences to review the previous research on children of working mothers concluded in 1982 that a mother’s employment has no consistent ill effects on a child’s school achievement, IQ, or social and emotional development.6 Other summary reviews offer similar but more complex findings. For example, in charting fifty years of research on children of working mothers, Lois Hoffman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, concluded that most girls of all social classes and boys from working-class families, whose mothers worked, were more self-confident and earned better grades than children whose mothers were housewives. But she also found that compared to the sons of housewives, middle-class boys raised by working mothers were less confident and did less well in school. But what about the influence of the fathers? Research documents a fact one might intuitively suspect: the more involved the father, the better off the child. Professor Norma Radin and her coresearchers at the University of Michigan conducted a number of studies that show that, all else being equal, the children of highly involved fathers are better adjusted socially and emotionally than children of noninvolved fathers and score higher on academic tests. In Dr. Radin’s research, “highly involved” fathers are those who score in the top third on an index composed of questions concerning responsibility for physical care (e.g., feeding the children), responsibility for socializing the child (e.g., setting limits), power in decision making regarding the child, availability to the child, and an overall estimate of his involvement in raising his preschooler. In one study of fifty-nine middle-class families with children between the ages of three and six, Dr. Radin found that highly involved fathers had sons who were better adjusted and more socially competent, more likely to perceive themselves as masters of their fate, and had a higher mental age on verbal intelligence tests.7 A 1985 study by Abraham Sagi found Israeli children of highly involved fathers showed more empathy than other children.
A 1985 study by Carolyn and Phil Cowan, two psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that three-and-a-half-year-old children of involved fathers achieved higher scores on certain playroom tasks (classifying objects, putting
things in a series, role-taking tasks) than other children. When fathers worked longer hours outside the home, the Cowans found in their observation sessions, the three-and-a-half-year-olds showed more anxiety. The daughters of long-hours men were, in addition, less warm and less task oriented at playroom tasks, although they had fewer behavior problems. When fathers worked long hours, mothers tended to compensate by establishing warm relations with their sons. But when mothers worked long hours, husbands did not “compensate” with their daughters. In spite of this, the girls did well in playroom tasks. When fathers or mothers worked more outside the home, the parent established a closer bond with the boy.8
The results of active fatherhood also seem to last. In one study, two psychologists asked male undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to respond to such statements as “My father understood my problems and worries and helped with them, hugged or kissed me goodnight when I was small, was able to make me feel better when I was upset, gave me a lot of care and attention.” They were also asked to describe his availability (“away from home for days at a time, … out in the evening at least two nights a week, … home afternoons when children came home from school,” and so on). Young men who ranked their fathers as highly—or even moderately—nurturant and available were far more likely to describe themselves as “trusting, friendly, loyal, and dependable, industrious and honest.”9
The effects of a man’s care for his children are likely to show up again and again through time—in the child as a child, in the child as an adult, and probably also in the child’s own approach to fatherhood, and in generations of fathers to come. An exceptionally warmhearted man, like the stepfather of Art Winfield, could light a future way. In the last forty years, many women have made a historic shift into the economy. Now it is time for a generation of men to make a second shift—into work at home.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 25