Can I get an "Amen!"? This short article from
Esquire tries to help dispel the myth that men who are trying to be actively involved and caring parents are some kind of aberration.
By Stephen Marche on December 23, 2013
The recent government survey of American family life is mostly good news. American dads are heavily involved with the lives of their children in a variety of important ways. Among other things, most fathers read to their children several times a week, help out with homework, and eat meals with their kids. Given that new research shows just how powerful time spent with a father can be, particularly in the lives of boys, these are all signs of genuine and substantial hope. The only really bad news about the government survey is that it's news at all.
"Fathers who care" are the new "women who work." Haven't we all moved beyond this question by now?
We all know that fatherhood matters to men. When my own father died a year and a half ago, I discovered for myself just how much. The new survey shows that the symbolic power of fatherhood is increasing. Young men want to be fathers more than young women want to be mothers now. But the trends the new government survey identifies are pretty mild. The amount of father's attention to their children has "increased slightly" since 2002.
So when the AP writes that "the detached dad, turning up his nose at diapering and too busy to bathe, dress and play with his kids, is mostly a myth," I have to ask: Whose myth?
This idea of fathers coming home to retire to the den to build bottle shops and suck back old-fashioneds has not been viable for a generation at least. That may be how today's grandfathers remember their own grandfathers, but for everybody else, it's history.
We all know that the family as it currently stands comprises mothers who work and fathers who help with the children. That is the way the vast majority of families work. To remark on fathers who care is to imply that the norm is for fathers not to care. To remark on women who work is to imply that it's unusual. And this attitude of surprise has consequences.
American work life and American family life have arranged themselves so that women are punished for having children at the workplace and discussions of family leave are almost entirely discussions of maternity leave. Treating the current family as some weird outlier makes discussions of family policies separated from reality.
The latest Pew research shows that 40% of households with children under 18 have women as breadwinners. This comes as a surprise to exactly no one who is paying attention. The current model of the standard family, insofar as such a thing exists at all, involves both partners bringing in income, and both partners helping to care for the children. (Housework is a different matter.) This is not news anymore. It is simply established reality.
The most important and substantial trend in American family life is not that men and women are in separate spheres, but that they're struggling in both, that government and business policies around family-life balance in America are virtually non-existent, and that they haven't properly been thought through yet. "News" that treats the current lives as men and women as alternative reality doesn't help.
Let's stop being amazed that men and women are living the way they are. Let's start doing something to help them.
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