Half Changed World

In the past couple of weeks, I keep seeing mentions of what I call "reverse traditional families"’ — families where the mother is the primary breadwinner and the father is a SAHD — in all sorts of media.  I’m most intrigued by the fact that these aren’t stories about SAHDs as such.

• The February issue of Money has an article headlined "Get the Life You Really Want."  One of the families profiled, the Davis family, describes their goal as "wanting their kids to be raised by a stay-at-home mom or dad."  Moreover, they’ve actually managed to take turns at the at-home role, which is a nice trick; I wish the article had talked more about Laurie Davis maintained or developed her work skills while out of the work force, such that she "was recruited for a lucrative job at a medical device company" after having been home for 4 1/2 years.
• In an essay in Working Mother about the value of having two involved parents, Courtney Nowell writes: "Carter and I talked about one of us quitting… "  While they ultimately decided to both work outside the home, I like the matter of fact tone in which she considered it equally possible for either parent to stay home.
• I’m in the middle of reading Life, by Gwyneth Jones. This book is largely about gender relations, so I’m very interested in seeing what Jones does with the fact that the main character is her family’s breadwinner, while her husband is a househusband and SAHD.  So far, it’s mostly been a device for commentary about how hard it is to be a mother and a scientist.
• In one of my favorite comic strips, For Better or For Worse, last week we heard that Liz’s old boyfriend Anthony is taking a year off for parental leave.  Again, I’m looking forward to seeing what Lynn Johnston does with this plot thread; at the moment it seems to be just another way of showing what a great guy Anthony is and what a bitch his wife is: "Therese told Anthony that when the baby was born, it was HIS.  She said he was the one who wanted a family, so he could raise the baby, and he said he WOULD!"

In Kidding Ourselves, which I’ve discussed here previously, Rhoda Mahoney argues that reverse traditional families are a tipping point phenomenon.  More formally, she argues that men’s willingness to be primary caregivers is in part a function of how many other men are (or are perceived to be) primary caregivers. So the fact that SAHDs (and their wives) are showing up in the media, and not just in stories describing them as exotic Desperate Househusbands may actually be making a difference in the choices that families consider for themselves.

Yes, I’ve read Jennifer Medina’s article in the New York Times on "Desperate Househusbands."  It’s a lousy article, worth notice only because so many people read the Times.  (Earlier today the article was on the list of top 15 emailed articles.)  Obviously, the editors there were hot to get out the door for vacation too.

As Greg at DaddyTypes notes, Medina seems to have forgotten that Desperate Housewives is fiction.  If she can cite it as evidence that stay-at-home moms are busy having affairs while a "man loaded down with diapers" isn’t sexy, I could cite Tom Perotta’s Little Children to make the opposite argument.

And as Brian at RebelDad points out, most of the dads quoted in the article are actually pretty content with their gig.  One of them even responded to his post, objecting to how his comments had been edited.  Sigh.

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I’ve been noticing a fair number of search engine hits to this blog.  Based on the terms, I’d guess that many of them are from students working on assignments.  If you’re thinking of plagarizing, don’t.  It’s wrong, you won’t learn anything, and you’re probably going to get caught.  Teachers know how to use google too, you know.  On the other hand, if you’re doing research and find this site a useful source of info, I’d love to hear about it.  Post a comment and let me know what you’re writing about.

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Yahoo now allows you to add anything that has a RSS feed to your My Yahoo page.  That includes this blog!  Click on "Add Content" and then type "Half Changed World" into the "Find Content" box and it will come right up.  The advantage of adding blogs to a portal is that you can quickly see which of the blogs you’re following have added new content.

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I’m going to be on vacation next week, and probably won’t have access to the internet.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and I’ll be back around the New Year.

Best wishes.

The new issue of Brain, Child has an essay by Katy Read on "Mom Blame."  Read argues that society gives parents way too much credit — and too much blame — for how children turn out.  She bases this both on her experience as the mother of a "spirited" child, who was unruly regardless of how faithfully she followed the guidance of various parenting books, and on the findings from twin studies, which suggest that parenting styles have very little effect on children’s personalities.  In the "nature versus nuture" debate, she’s strongly in the nature camp.

In the author’s note, Read comments that she was recently interviewing "the author of a particularly reprehensible parenting book" who asked her if she’d "like some help changing them" when she commented that her sons were often difficult.  I’d bet dollars to donuts that this author was Phil McGraw and the parenting book Family First (see Tuesday’s post for my review).  McGraw explicitly states that he holds parents responsible for how their children behave — he thinks that if your children are unruly, it’s because you haven’t created sufficient consequences for such behavior.

My position is generally closer to Read’s side of the spectrum.   I’ll never forget the woman I once overheard at a party saying "I thought I had this whole parenting thing down cold until I had my second child."  She had mistakenly attributed the results of her first child’s compliant nature to her skillful parenting.  Children clearly have their own personalities from quite young, and they respond very differently to the same treatment. McGraw says that you have to model the behaviors you want your children to adopt.  Well, we model adventurous, healthy eating to our kids and have one who will eat anything that he can swallow and one who lives on peanut butter crackers and chicken nuggets.

But what Read seems to miss is that there’s a difference between personality and behavior.  I’m not sure where my older son got his extroversion — he sure didn’t learn it from my husband or me.  But I do know where he learned to say please and thank you.  So, if her kid is running all over the place in a fancy restaurant and bumping into people, I won’t blame her for not having the kind of kid who can sit quietly and draw for half an hour.  (Mine can’t either.)  But I will blame her for not taking him outside, or getting a sitter.

In reading one of the profiles in the new issue of Working Mother, I was interested to see Erica Carrasco’s description of her husband, Stephen.  She works during the day as a technical writer; since their daughter was a year old, "he’s been Mr. Mom, tending the home fires and working nights as a cashier."  Because she earns more than he does, they’ve decided to focus on her career, although they’re hoping that she’ll have more flexible hours when she starts her own business, allowing him to go to college.

I was particularly struck by the comment that her husband has been depressed since before their daughter was born.  She also says that being at home is "good for our finances but hard on Stephen’s ego."  I haven’t seen any formal research on it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that depression is at least as common among stay-at-home dads as it is among stay-at-home moms (who are more likely to be depressed than working moms). Men don’t have post-partum hormones complicating things, but they have less societal support for their role.

It’s also likely that depressed individuals are less successful in the world of employment, and so they may be more likely to choose to stay home for financial reasons.  Unfortunately, there’s some evidence that depressed parents are less responsive to their kids, leading to worse emotional and cognitive outcomes.

TGIF: Thank God it’s Friday. I’m looking forward to the weekend, to hanging out with my kids, to taking them trick-or-treating.

An article by Sue Shellenbarger that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, however, raises the question of how parents’ attitudes towards work affect their children. Interestingly, the CareerJournal site carries the article, which talks about both moms and dads, under the neutral headline “Use Caution When Discussing Your Career with Your Children,” while the original WSJ headline was “The Right Way to Answer the Question: Mommy, ‘Why do You Have to Work?’“

The silliest part of the article is the statement that parents are “acting as if they don’t have a choice” when they say to their children “Sorry, honey, I have to go to work.” I say that several times a week, and Schellenbarger acknowledges that she said it too. Actually, most parents don’t have a choice whether or not to work, not if they want to eat. And even if they do have an overall choice whether to work, they don’t have a choice on a day-to-day basis.

Citing the Families and Work Institute, the article includes the statistic that an impressive 69 percent of the mothers and 60 percent of the fathers said that they liked their jobs a lot. I thought it was interesting that the mothers were more likely to like their jobs; my guess is that because of gender roles, women are more likely to be able to take jobs that interest them even if they don’t pay as much, and are also more likely to drop out of the labor force if they’re unhappy. The loss of this flexibility is the hardest part of the “reverse traditional” family arrangement for me.

Shellenbarger emphasizes the gap between the percentage of parents who said they liked their jobs and the smaller percentage (about 40 percent) of children in 3rd to 12th grade who thought their parents liked their jobs. She makes some good points about how people often fall into the pattern of talking about the day-to-day frustrations of our jobs, and rarely about what we like about them, and how this can give children a distorted sense of what work is like.

The article includes a quote from a portfolio manager at a hedge fund who tells his children that he loves his job. Is it too cynical of me to wonder if he’d still love it if it paid $40,000 a year? (I’m reminded of the scene in Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, where the hot-shot trader’s kid asks him to explain what he does for a living. The kid says “so and so’s daddy is a publisher. He makes books. What do you do, daddy?” And the wife jumps in and makes the analogy that he’s passing out slices of cake and whenever he cuts a slice, some crumbs fall off, and he gets to keep the crumbs.)

The article doesn’t, however, offer much in the way of advice for the 30-40 percent of parents who don’t like their jobs “a lot.” Should they worry about the example they’re setting for their children? Shellenberger quotes a parent who says telling her child “we need to buy groceries” “didn’t make a lot of sense,” but I think there are worse answers. I don’t think it’s terrible for a child to learn that the way we get money to buy groceries and clothes and toys is to work, and that when you spend money you’re really spending “life energy.”

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, there’s a nice article about the 22-year-old daughter of a lesbian couple. They suggest that she’s one of the oldest children deliberately conceived and raised by a homosexual couple (as opposed to having been born before one of their parents came out). This seems plausible to me — I grew up in Greenwich Village, and attended what is probably the only public elementary school in the US that is next door to a gay bookstore, but to the best of my knowledge, none of my classmates had gay or lesbian parents.

However, the part of the article that caught my attention the most was this comment by Judith Stacy, a sociologist who rejects the conventional wisdom that the children of gay and lesbian parents are no more likely to be homosexual than the children of heterosexual parents.

”My position is that you can’t base an argument for justice on information that’s empirically falsifiable in the long run,” she said. ”If your right to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes along and says you’re wrong, then where are you?”

This point has wide applicability beyond the specific question raised in the article. One example that comes to mind is child care. The research at this point is pretty darn inconclusive. There’s some evidence that kids in child care have better cognitive skills, some evidence that they are more aggressive (although within the range of normal kid behavior), some evidence that very long hours of child care in the early months may have negative effects, especially for shy kids. It’s all based on observations, rather than on rigorous evaluations, so anyone who says that they have proof of causation is lying. (For a solid review of the data, my favorite recommendation is Working Families and Growing Kids, by the National Academy Press.)

But let’s say a report came out next week that had solid clear findings suggesting that children who spend their first two years in child care have worse outcomes than children who spend them in primarily parental care. What would we do? Would we ignore the findings, saying that they’re just another way to beat up on working mothers? Would we demand higher quality child care? Would we demand that the government provide childrens’ allowance to enable low- and moderate-income parents to cut back on work? If no possible research findings would change the policies and practices that we support, we should acknowledge that they are based on our normative values rather than on facts.

In Caitlin Flanagan’s March 2004 Atlantic screed “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” she suggests that upper-middle-class women are hypocritical in their calls for universal day care, because they would never use it — they all use nannies.

Flanagan’s a good writer, and she makes a persuasive case. But she’s completely wrong — in 1999, less than 5 percent of preschoolers were ever cared for in their homes by a non-relative. Even looking only at families with an employed mother, and family incomes of more than $4,500 a month, or $54,000 a year, the percentage only increases to 7.1 percent. Upper-income families are actually the most likely to use child care centers.

Flanagan concludes her article by arguing that professional-class working mothers (as usual, fathers are off the hook) should “devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in this country.”

One of the great debates among advocates of public support for child care and other benefits is whether to push for programs targeted at low-income parents (who can’t afford them on their own), or if they should be universal. And, Flanagan notwithstanding, there are good arguments on both sides; there’s not an obvious right choice.

The arguments for a targeted program are:

1) It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to provide services for a few million low-income families than for the tens of millions of families who would use a universal program. In an policy climate where taxes are a dirty word, proposals for expensive new programs are unlikely to get very far.

2) It is hard to argue that middle-income families should be taxed in order to provide services to upper-income families. It’s especially hard when some groups — the childless, families with a stay-at-home parent — feel like they’re being taxed to support other people’s choices.

The arguments for a universal program are:

1) Programs that serve low-income populations are stigmatized as “welfare,” which makes people who qualify for them reluctant to take advantage of them. There are administrative costs involved in determining eligibility, and people may move in and out of eligibility over the course of a year.

2) Programs that serve low-income populations are typically underfunded and low-quality. Universal programs — such as social security — have deep popular support which fights any proposed cuts.

3) Any program that is means-tested has some sort of a cut-off above which families lose eligibility. This serves as a work-disincentive for families near the cut-off. Moreover, there is often deep resentment of means-tested programs from people who earn slightly more than the cutoff, but who are still struggling to make ends meet and who don’t qualify for any help.

4) Many advocates of universal public child care believe on principle that caring for children ought to be a societal responsibility rather than that of the individual families. They explicitly reject the notion that only those who choose to have children should bear the costs involved.

File it under "it must be a trend if it’s in the New York Times." Today’s City section has an odd little article with the headline "Dr. Spock Meet Mr. Mom," which tracks the increased involvement of fathers in hands-on parenting by noting the increase in fathers showing up in pediatrician’s offices. Where 15 years ago, a father arriving in the pediatrician’s office — without his wife — was "startling," today "there are days when more fathers than mothers show up."

The article is about as stereotypical as it gets, complete with a cartoon of a man in an apron, holding a baby in one arm and a toddler with the other hand, with a bucket and mop nearby, and the obligatory references to Kramer vs. Kramer and Mrs. Doubtfire. The one novel comment is the suggestion by one of the doctors that he sees more involved fathers because the parents of his clients are older, and the women less willing to give up their "well-established professional identity." Certainly, older mothers are more likely to be earning enough to allow their partners to step back from paid employment.

The overall tone of the article is definitely "look at this odd little phenomenon." The author (Anemona Hartocollis?) is careful to note "for the record" that the one female physician quoted has four children and a nanny. The parental status of the two male physicans quoted is not mentioned.

The new issue of Working Mother hit my mailbox yesterday, containing their new list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. I’m more than a little dubious about these lists, because there’s often a big gap beween the official company policies that are captured in these formulas and practice on the ground, especially around part-time work and non-standard schedules.

My sense is that if you have a supportive boss, you can often get flexible arrangements even if they’re not company policy, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck, regardless of what the manual says. I’d love to see data on what fraction of the workforce is taking advantage of these policies, broken out by gender (are they just creating a mommy track?), and on the career outcomes for people who work part-time or take extended leaves. I work for the federal government, which is overall reasonably family-friendly (with the glaring exception of ZERO paid parental leave), but I know people’s experiences vary dramatically from department to department and even office to office.

If any of my readers work at one of these 100 best companies and want to comment on what it’s really like, I’d love to hear your point of view.

Amy pointed out that in my discussion of flexibility on Monday, I didn’t talk much about stable flexible arrangements, especially shifted schedules. She’s right, and that’s ironic, as such schedules are very common in the Federal government. People love them, especially people who drive to work and want to avoid the utter craziness of DC-area traffic during rush hour. Working Mother reports that flexible hours are among the most common family friendly benefits, with 57 percent of companies offering flextime, and 34 percent offering compressed workweeks.

Of the benefits discussed in the study, the most common offered nationwide are dependent care flexible spending accounts, offered by 73 percent of all companies and mental health insurance, offered by 72 percent. (These figures are attributed to a Society for Human Resource Management survey, which I think means that it’s mostly large companies who were asked.) The least commonly offered benefits are take-home meals (3 percent), business-travel child care reimbursement (3 percent) and emergency/backup elder care (2 percent).

I’d also like to call attention to Corporate Voices for Working Families’ efforts to increase flexible working options for low-wage and hourly workers.

Many companies — even those that have very enlighted policies for their professional workforces — offer much less flexibility to their production and support workforces. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that only 47 percent of private sector workers have ANY paid sick leave. At a conference I attended, one woman explained how her company, a large food industry corporation, had just changed their policies so it was possible for production line workers to take less than a WEEK of leave at a time (but only if they could find someone to substitute for them on the line). I’m embarassed to admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me in my privileged professional position.

As I mentioned in Why blog? I frequently find myself wondering “where are the men?” in reading stories about parenting issues. So I was pleasantly surprised to pick up the new issue of Brain, Child, my favorite parenting magazine, and see that the feature story is about fathering, with a long discussion of stay-at-home dads.

[9/23 edit: The article is now available online. It’s also discussed today by RebelDad.]

I eagerly read the article, frowned, read it again and then brought it over to my resident SAHD for his opinion. His comment: “If I were the editor, and assigned someone a story about SAHDs, and she brought this article to me, my first question would be ‘how many stay at home dads did you talk to?’ And if the answer were ‘none,’ I’d tell her to go back and try again.”

That’s not quite fair, but close. The author, Stacy Evers, mostly seems to have talked with men who aren’t SAHDs about why they wouldn’t want to be SAHDs (concluding that it’s mostly lack of respect from other men) without ever talking to any SAHDs about why they would.

* In a sidebar article on magazines, she mentions that her brother in law is a SAHD, but he’s not quoted in the main article.

* Evers quotes from author Austin Murphy’s book about being a stay-at-home dad, . She then inserts in parentheses a comment from Peter Baylies, the founder of athomedad.com, that the book is a “venting tool.” I read this as his polite way of saying that the guy is a jerk and shouldn’t be taken as representative of at-home-dads. She doesn’t ask Baylies anything about his experience as a SAHD.

* Evers discusses her friend Dan, who she identifies as “a freelance photographer raising two young children.” She says that he’s “shifted his focus from career to children” but never outright calls him a stay-at-home dad. She talks about three things that made it easier for him to make the shift — that he was already working from his home, that his wife made more money than him, and that he had a role model — but not about anything that made him want to do it.

My more fundamental complaint is that the article doesn’t seem to take the SAHD option seriously. What Evers really wants is for working fathers to take on more family responsibilities — and to fight for the workplace flexibility that is needed to do so. Towards the end of the article, she writes:

“No one’s really suggesting to merely swap stay-at-home mothers for stay-at-home fathers. But why not a more reasonable sharing of all responsibilities and tasks, whether it’s working or caring for children?”

It’s hard to argue against a “reasonable sharing” — but does that have to mean 50-50? Or even 60-40? In the author’s note, Evers comments that she and her husband are “both surprised sometimes at how traditional our arrangement has turned out to be, even though it’s what best suits our personalities.”

I’m arguing that we ought to be fighting as much for a world in which there are options open to both men and women — including being a full-time parent — as for a world in which all responsibilities are shared equally.