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Not Your Dad's Fatherhood

Changing diapers, doing laundry, helping with homework, brushing hair, kissing boo-boos, cooking – oh, and also shattering workplace stereotypes – it’s all in a day’s work.

Not just you, mothers. It’s dad’s turn. And as Father’s Day rolls around, now may be the time to celebrate the fathers in our lives in a new way.

COMPETENT CAREGIVER

A parenting revolution is happening all around us. Just witness a Dove Men+Care Super Bowl 2015 ad, which showed fathers offering hugs, kisses, tickles and unabashed general loving support to children from the newborn to father-of-the-bride stage, a part of the brand’s Care Makes a Man Stronger campaign and one of several ads featuring a new kind of father as competent caregiver, not the inept bumbler often seen in advertising.

But the change isn’t happening only in media and advertising. New calls for workplace paternity leave and a jump in the number of stay-at-home fathers have bolstered research that indicates American dads are increasingly turning from stereotypical 20th-century models of fatherhood that left most of the parenting duties (and many of the rewards) to moms.

High-profile male executives are speaking out about the pressures of the round-the-clock work cycle and its impact on fatherhood and family life. Max Schireson, the former chief executive of database software company MongoDB, wrote a much-discussed blog post on his website last summer explaining his reasons for stepping down for the good of his family and noting that, unlike female executives, he had never been asked “… how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.” And although a recent Yahoo headline, “27 Reasons Dad Shouldn’t Be Alone W/Their Kids,” proves there’s still more work to be done to refashion the image of the American father, there’s good reason to believe many men are welcoming the shifting tide.

UNLEARNING OLD, EMBRACING NEW

At a conference earlier this year at New York City’s 92nd Street Y titled Why Fathers Matter, sponsored by Dove Men+Care, men, couples and some women gathered to hear experts’ thoughts on fatherhood, parenting roles and gender expectations; share their parenting stories; and learn strategies for integrating work and home life. Sally Tannen, director of 92Y’s Parenting Center, says the conference is part of the Y’s ongoing mission to spotlight fatherhood and its evolution. “Fathers have always been an important part of this community,” she says. “This is the first of what will be an annual conference. In between, there are a lot of things planned, maybe a support group. I have a team of dads who will help me come up with things that are interesting and fun.”

In his keynote address, Moving Past Your Own Father, Michael Thompson, Ph.D., a renowned psychologist, author and speaker, urged men to explore the lessons they took from their fatherhood role models, noting that the men and boys he works with often yearn for emotional closeness with their fathers. “Being committed to work like my father competed with my image of being a different kind of father, an emotionally clued-in father,” he noted. In order to advance beyond emotionally distant models, he said, “practice makes the parent” – meaning, “the more you do it the better you get at it.” What was his other critical piece of advice? “Amplify the things that you love with your children,” Thompson suggested. “They are the seeds of significant moments. I call these rituals. Something that makes you feel like a successful father and makes the child feel successful.”

THE NOT-EXACTLY BALANCING ACT

Stew Friedman, Ph.D., founder of the Wharton School’s Work/ Life Integration Project and a participant on the panel “Juggling Dads: Finding Time for Work, Family and Play,” offered enlightening thoughts on the “have it all” debate usually reserved for moms and made a strong case for swapping the concept of “balance” for “integration” instead. “‘Work/life balance’ is a misguided metaphor for grasping the relationship between work and the rest of life; the image of the scale forces you to think in terms of trade-offs instead of the possibilities for harmony,” he said. “And the idea that ‘work’ competes with ‘life’ ignores the nuanced reality of our humanity. It ignores the fact that ‘life’ is actually the intersection and interaction of the four domains of life: work or school; home or family; community or society; and the private realm of mind body and spirit.”

Acknowledging the serious challenge of many men’s “addiction to the digital stream” and how technology interferes with parenting and other relationships, Friedman stressed “psychological and physical presence” and noted that pulling out your phone while “engaging with people who are present with you” is not OK. “Consciously and deliberately focus on just one person with no other distractions. Learn from what it took to make that happen,” he advised. “When you are clear in your actions and intentions in all of your domains (work, home, spirit), you perform better in all of those domains.”

MODERN MASCULINITY

Untangling gender norms and how they affect parenting goes well beyond TV commercials and corporate policies. In the panel “The Science of Fatherhood: How Research Is Changing the Conversation,” James Curley, Ph.D., assistant professor at Columbia University, noted that while fathering is “an understudied topic in the scientific community … new studies show that a father’s life experiences are expressed through children genetically beyond just DNA.” Michael Kimmel, Ph.D., author and renowned sociologist, challenged previously accepted biological concepts of masculinity, and said the old “stoic model” of fatherhood is “eroding in dramatic fashion,” adding that fathers today are spending far more time with families, are doing more child care than ever, and see “caring for others and self care as a sign of manhood.”

Parenting expert Lance Somerfeld, cofounder of City Dads Group, declared 2015 the Year of the Dad, adding that resources for fathers are exploding via blogs, books and parenting workshops. Fathers today, he says, are “changing workplaces, culture and homes.” One of the 92Y conference attendees has an even bigger mission in mind: “Fatherhood is the most important calling I have,” says Devon Bandison, a speaker and executive coach. “Whenever I have a chance to tap in and be a part of this growing community of fathers, I jump at it. It is always a special experience for me seeing fathers get together to share their experiences, concerns and, yes, vulnerabilities. This wasn’t the case not too long ago.”

This Father’s Day may be a good time to encourage children to thank dad for all that he does – including those activities grandpa might not have done – such as nightly tuck-ins or Saturday morning breakfast duty.

Terri Prettyman Bowles is a writer, editor and content producer based in Westchester.

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