As Jeremy Adam Smith tended to his newborn son, it dawned on him that leisure time was now a distant concept, down to the books on his nightstand.
“When I was taking care of my son it was a shock for me that I couldn’t read. It was like a bomb going off in my head all the time,” said Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, which surveys a new cohort of “nurturing” fathers. “People ask parents, ‘what do you do all day?’ The answer is that you’re paying attention constantly, which is exhausting.”
Across bestseller lists and in fitful magazine opuses, leisure-deprived working moms dominate the work-life-balance discussion. But what about dads?
Involved fathers are increasingly getting caught between “the pincers of home and work,” Smith wrote in his recent gauntlet, How to Be a Happy Working Dad, published for the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, an organization that studies well-being. Here, Smith argued that the men are straining under the dual expectations of the modern, nurturing father and the traditional “provider” figure who puts in overtime. Add to that the tether of technology, with work e-mail bleeding into the dinner hour, and it’s little surprise that 46 per cent of modern dads lament they aren’t spending enough time with their brood, according to 2012 findings from the Pew Research Center. It’s a dynamic that’s leaving men fried, but not earning them much sympathy so far.
“Though moms have struggled on both fronts for decades, the juggle is new and shocking to men,” wrote Smith. “We as a culture haven’t given a lot of thought to the happiness of working fathers …When it comes to work-life fit, this is the message we hear as men: Suck it up.”
Brigid Schulte, author of the new bookOverwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, pored over time-use research and found that new fathers aren’t giving up long hours at the office. This is creating “the very same time insanity for fathers that working mothers began experiencing in the 1970s,” when more women began navigating full-time work and home life.
“Men are trying to do now what women had to do 30 years ago: Try to do good, meaningful work and be full partners at home doing child care and housework,” Schulte said in an interview from Alexandria, Va.
A Health Canada report, Work-Life Conflict in Canada in the New Millennium, found that both men and women felt that time for leisure had declined by 40 per cent from previous decades. A 2009 report from the Families and Work Institute coined the concept of a “new male mystique” among involved dads who are still gunning for the mantle of primary breadwinner for their families – “the pressure to ‘do it all in order to have it all,’” wrote study author Ellen Galinsky.
Ottawa government analyst Chris Read admits he feels overwhelmed once a week. The 35-year-old clocks in 40 hours a week at the office, pulling in more hours at home as a communities manager for several social-media sites. His two kids are highly involved in ballet, karate, soccer, swimming and skating.
“Any free time that I have now involves the kids,” says Read. “I used to be in a band and I don’t do that any more. I don’t play sports any more. I definitely don’t resent anybody for that stuff but you think about it sometimes.”
Read says dads are reluctant to talk about being frazzled for fear of being labelled “whiny.” He says, “For me to sit with my father-in-law and go, ‘Man, I’m really struggling here,’ that is hard for me. Because these guys are working hard too.” When Read reaches his limit, he turns to a Facebook group that numbers 800 daddy bloggers. Online, these fathers discuss layoffs, parental leave and their new-found time crunch.
“When I’m working 60 hours and wanting to spend time with my family as well, where does my hobby fit in? Usually it doesn’t,” says Read.
Of course, highly hands-on fathers who also work full-time remain a relatively new cohort. A study of 4,000 executives published in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review found that male executives did not regret being absent from the home; they viewed sparse time with their children as an acceptable trade-off for providing financially for the family. On the leisure front, a study published in the journal Social Forces found that fathers’ off-time remained significantly less “contaminated” by child care or house cleaning than that of women’s. Schulte reports men still tend to enjoy longer, unbroken stretches of time at work and at play, while women’s leisure time is more “episodic.”
Still, for fathers who do want to be equal partners in parenting while retaining their breadwinner status, workplace flexibility remains elusive. “We expect men to work the way that they’ve always worked and penalize them if they do it any differently. Work hasn’t let up for them at all but they’re doing more at home. They are losing leisure, sleep, personal care and starting to feel really stressed,” says Schulte.
“In a lot of companies, guys will get that guilt. If you’re not doing overtime, you’ll be passed by the guy who is because he doesn’t have family obligations,” says Michael Cusden, a Halifax marketing manager.
Cusden, 39, says he got raised eyebrows for taking a six-month parental leave. “I drew my line in the sand,” said Cusden, who now makes it clear that his weeknights are reserved for family. Even so, his leisure time has dried up to a couple of hours on the weekend and he often combines his own errands with playground trips. Being overwhelmed, he says, is “not a mom thing any more. It’s a parent thing.”
In North America, parents’ leisure time has indeed been largely replaced by overscheduled kids and commutes to extracurricular activities, a dynamic that author Jennifer Senior charted in her recent book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Schulte quotes one researcher who sums up this style of parenting as an exhausting “everydayathon.”
Still, Schulte sees promise in the dual-parent time crunch: As working fathers experience more of the burden of child-rearing and both sexes reach a breaking point, we may be more poised than ever to foment institutional change.
“If you look at what’s going to finally shake things up, fathers being more stressed is actually a hopeful sign,” she says. “Once you get men and women saying we need to redesign work, rethink our relationships and recapture leisure time, then you have a movement.”
Dr Kelly Flanagan's letter to his daughter on the importance of picking a man who truly loves her has received plenty of online love. Picture: Thinkstock
WHEN daddy blogger and clinical psychologist Kelly Flanagan posted a letter to his young daughter about picking Mr Right, he was bowled over by the public response.
The site and its Facebook page were set up to "have a conversation about what it means to be a good man".
"I dedicated this post to my daughter ... but I also wrote it for my wife, who has courageously held on to her sense of worth and has always held me accountable to being that kind of 'boy'," Dr Flanagan said.
"I wrote it for every grown woman I have met inside and outside of my therapy office — the women who have never known this voice of a Daddy.
"And I wrote it for the generation of boys-becoming-men who need to be reminded of what is really important — my little girl finding a loving, lifelong companion is dependent upon at least one of you figuring this out."
Below is Dr Flanagan's letter in full. Share your thoughts by scrolling down to the comments box.
Dear Cutie-Pie,
Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was 'How to keep him interested'.
It startled me. I scanned several of the countless articles about how to be sexy and sexual, when to bring him a beer versus a sandwich, and the ways to make him feel smart and superior.
And I got angry.
Little One, it is not, has never been, and never will be your job to 'keep him interested'.
Little One, your only task is to know deeply in your soul — in that unshakeable place that isn’t rattled by rejection and loss and ego — that you are worthy of interest. (If you can remember that everyone else is worthy of interest also, the battle of your life will be mostly won. But that is a letter for another day.)
If you can trust your worth in this way, you will be attractive in the most important sense of the word: you will attract a boy who is both capable of interest and who wants to spend his one life investing all of his interest in you.
Little One, I want to tell you about the boy who doesn’t need to be kept interested, because he knows you are interesting:
I don’t care if he puts his elbows on the dinner table — as long as he puts his eyes on the way your nose scrunches when you smile. And then can’t stop looking.
I don’t care if he can’t play a bit of golf with me — as long as he can play with the children you give him and revel in all the glorious and frustrating ways they are just like you.
I don’t care if he doesn’t follow his wallet — as long as he follows his heart and it always leads him back to you.
I don’t care if he is strong — as long as he gives you the space to exercise the strength that is in your heart.
I couldn’t care less how he votes — as long as he wakes up every morning and daily elects you to a place of honor in your home and a place of reverence in his heart.
I don’t care about the color of his skin — as long as he paints the canvas of your lives with brushstrokes of patience, and sacrifice, and vulnerability, and tenderness.
I don’t care if he was raised in this religion or that religion or no religion — as long as he was raised to value the sacred and to know every moment of life, and every moment of life with you, is deeply sacred.
In the end, Little One, if you stumble across a man like that and he and I have nothing else in common, we will have the most important thing in common:
You.
Because in the end, Little One, the only thing you should have to do to 'keep him interested' is to be you.
