families

A new book has caught my eye, covering some of my favorite themes: Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (The Real Utopias Project), by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers et al.

In a nutshell, the book proposes a set of policies-paid family leave provisions, working time regulations, and early childhood education and care-designed to foster more egalitarian family divisions of labor by strengthening men’s ties at home and women’s attachment to paid work. Its policy proposal is followed by a series of commentaries–both critical and supportive–from a group of distinguished scholars, and a concluding essay in which Gornick and Meyers respond to the debate over how best to promote egalitarian policies.

Contributors include heavy hitters like Barbara Bergmann, Johanna Brenner, Harry Brighouse & Erik Olin Wright, Scott Coltrane, Rosemary Crompton, Myra Marx Ferree, Nancy Folbre, Heidi Hartmann & Vicky Lovell, Shireen Hassim, Lane Kenworthy, Cameron Macdonald, Peter McDonald, Ruth Milkman, Kimberly Morgan, Ann Orloff, Michael Shalev, and Kathrin Zippel.

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up!)

Since I was busy puking my guts out this morning (month 6! when will the nausea end?!), Marco filled in for me over at Recessionwire.com.  I think his post is better than any of mine.  Check it out: he’s stepping out as “The Man Behind the Curtain.”

Chest hair, growth spurts, voice changes, lust! In this edition of The Man Files, Rebekah Spicuglia writes about the challenges of feminist parenting when boys start coming of age.

My 11-½-year-old son recently announced that he is going through puberty.

My usually obsessive preparations for Oscar’s visits now have a new urgency. I find myself planning discussions I somehow never thought I would need to have. When kids grow up it’s an exciting — but scary — time for any parent. And as a noncustodial, long-distance mom, the challenges and opportunities for me are unique. Over the years, lots of conversations with my son have been held over the phone. Lately, we’ve had some incredible talks about more adult things (you know … coffee, sex ed). more...

A must-read this morning: WGL panelist Courtney Martin expounds on many of the themes we discussed at Saturday’s panel in her column this week at The American Prospect. Thank you, Courtney, for so beautifully summing up some of the issues, and then taking it the next step.

For another great post-Father’s Day fix, try this latest interview with Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, over at Salon, “Daddy on Board”, where Jeremy discusses why dads are spending more time with their kids.

There’s so much Father’s Day goodness out there today I don’t know where to start.

Former NYTimes blogger Marci Alboher asks “Are Dads the New Moms?” over at her new Yahoo blog, Working the New Economy.

Lisa Belkin conducts a two part interview with The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared ParentingAreTransforming the American Family author and Daddy Dialectic blogger Jeremy Adam Smith

Michelle Goldberg of ABCNews.com tells us What Laid-Off Dads Want

And I offer “Findings from from the Layoff Lab”— a Father’s Day assessment of recession-era dads — over at The Big Money! 

You can bet we’ll touch on many of these themes — and more, and from a fresh and feminist perspective — at the Brooklyn Museum tomorrow when the WomenGirlsLadies talk about “Dads, Dudes, and Doing It.” Event is free!  We’ll be giving books away!  I’ll be wearing straight-up maternity wear!  This is one you won’t want to miss 🙂

PS. Time Out New York just listed us as one of the “Ten Best Father’s Day events” in town!

My dear friend (and fellow member of my writers’ group) Rachel Lehmann-Haupt appeared on Good Morning America this week discussing women’s fertility options without that note of sensational panic with which this topic is usually covered.  Remember the one about how a woman over 35 has a better chance of being in a terrorist attack that getting married and having kids?  No more.

I heart Rachel for writing In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood, for celebrating choice in an age of mixed messages about the “proper” timing of women’s lives, and for honoring the myriad configurations of the modern family these days.  Watch her, right here!

(“Love the purple.  It’s working for you.”)

We’ve heard of the cock block, right? Well, here’s a new one (I just made it up — maybe): the Dad block.

According to a Wall Street Journal article today, “Helping Moms to Let Dads Be Dads,” research shows how kids benefit from having a positive, involved father, but negative “gatekeeping” by mothers can be an obstacle.  Hmm…Must go investigate this.

For another look at modern fatherhood, check out Sharon Jayson’s article in USA Today, “New Daditude”.

Look for more from me on dads at Slate’s The Big Money on Friday! And, of course, ahem, at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday at 2pm, where I’ll be whooping it up with my fellow WomenGirlsLadies.

(Thanks to CCF and to Rebekah at the WMC–always–for the heads ups)

We’ll be at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, June 20 at 2pm for what promises to be one of our liveliest versions ever. There’s more over at the WomenGirlsLadies blog, and on a YouTube channel coming soon. Please spread the word!

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In the spirit of Father’s Day on June 21 — and in honor of fathers everywhere — this edition of The Man Files features a guest post by Dani Meier. Dani writes about his experience as both a custodial and non-custodial parent. This stuff doesn’t fit neatly on a Hallmark card, but it should! It comes from the heart and speaks to so many, whether we are fathers, have fathers, or watch our children’s relationships with their own dads unfold.

One in three children in America — 24 million kids — do not have their father in the home. Forty percent of them have not seen their dad during the past year. Half of them have never set foot in their father’s home. And then there are the fathers who live under the same roof, but are absent in other ways. Just plain MIA. Many dads leave.

I was one of them.

When my daughter was three, her mother and I separated. When she was six, though I’d shared equally in parenting till then, I moved out of state, 650 miles away.

In my case, however, I came back. Again and again, I came back.

I committed myself to staying in my daughter’s life. I got a second job to pay for flights and for the next twelve years, we alternated every other weekend, sometimes more, between my going to her and her coming to me — a schedule that she and I maintained till she graduated from high school. A unique father-daughter bond evolved between us, emotional closeness despite geographical distance. But two roundtrip flights a month for twelve years adds up to nearly 300 flights that she or I took back and forth to see each other. That’s a lot of goodbyes to start logging at age six.

She’s now 21. Totally legal. No fake IDs.

I recently visited her in Rome where she spent part of her junior year of college. More than the Eternal City’s sweeping arc of history and culture, however, small moments stand out: ambling around Piazza Navonna after midnight, sipping Limoncello, strolling aimlessly. We bar-hopped in Trastevere where, in one café, a phenomenal swing jazz trio accompanied us as we danced for the first time ever as two adults. On my last day, we took a train to the Umbria hillside village of Orvieto, a medieval town with winding alleyways and cobblestone streets, sitting on a chunk of volcanic rock overlooking a valley.

Hugging my daughter goodbye the next day was wrenching. It was as if all our goodbyes were distilled into this single hug: twelve years of goodbyes, hugs that bridged childhood, adolescence, and, now, adulthood.

I’m also father to a six-year-old son. As I look into his beautiful eyes today, I see the eyes of my daughter. My mind frequently jumps involuntarily to how confusing it would be for him if I moved away. Yet I know that’s what my daughter lived through at his age.

Goodbyes can cause a lot of heartache. The problem for many children, however, is that they don’t get to say goodbye to their fathers on a regular basis. That would imply that they actually see their dads in the first place. As a therapist, many of the youth and adults I work with have never met their fathers or they see them rarely if at all. Other fathers lived with their kids but were invisible, buried in their work or a bottle or some other distraction.

There’s a paradox of contradictory trends in Daddy Land. Lots of fathers are rewriting what it means to be a dad: They are more involved in their children’s lives than any fathers in American history. They not only play catch or coach Little League, they also change diapers, make meals, help with school work, and are emotionally open with their children. This coincides, however, with the fact that from 1947 to 2007, single-parent households — predominantly mother-headed homes — jumped from 12 percent to over 25 percent. And whether those fathers remarried or not, too many of them don’t maintain consistent ties to their biological children from previous relationships.

Some men claim that divorced mothers block access. But in my experience that’s the exception, not the rule. Fathers who aren’t involved with their children nowadays are usually disengaged by choice. Many don’t even meet their legal obligation for child support while others do so only under threat of legal sanction or garnished wages.

As a father and a husband — and as a therapist — I try to allow for the fact that shit happens. Divorce, breakups, new loves, new jobs, new opportunities. We each must sort through what makes sense as we move through life. And sometimes as we muddle through, we hurt others on our path. Hopefully, we learn, grow, and try to make it right.

My hope is that other fathers who’ve left can still learn, grow, and make it right. Perhaps by next Father’s Day, some of those fathers who’ve said goodbye will realize the importance of coming back. And then they’ll make it right, they’ll come back, and they’ll stay involved, being fathers their kids can count on, dads worthy of the Hallmark card.

Dani Meier, PhD, MSW, is a psychotherapist, school social worker, community activist, lecturer, and writer. He is a founder of The Real MEN’s Project: Men Embracing Non-Violence, which seeks to place men at the center of the battle against domestic violence and sexual assault. He’s one of a small handful of men who’ve been awarded the Susan B. Anthony Award for efforts on behalf of girls and women in his community, and he is a faculty advisor for his school’s gay-straight alliance. He’s lectured to a range of audiences, from mental health professionals to parent groups on raising strong and gentle sons. He is currently involved in state-wide suicide prevention and intervention initiatives. He is a proud father and a lucky husband.

I’m supershort on battery so may only get through part of this next session, but here we go…

Jeremy Adam Smith, creator of the blog Daddy Dialectic and author of the book The Daddy Shift, is introducing the panel by talking about the difference in attitudes about fatherhood among his grandfather, his father, and himself.

Panelists are:

Reeve Vanneman (he’ll be talking about The End of Gender Revolution?)
Oriel Sullivan (on Slow but Steady-ish Change)
Josh Coleman (speaking on The Ghost of Traditional Marraige in Contemporary Ones)
Mignon Moore (talking about Is Convergence Moot in Same Sex Copules?)
Amy and Marc Vachon, bloggers at Equally Shared Parenting and coauthors of a forthcoming book on the subject (on that)

Reeve Vanneman is up first:  There was a big shift in the 1990s, he notes, a stalling in gender revolution. But the question is, why?  Three possible reasons:

1. End of feminist protest: in the mid-1990s, media coverage of feminism declined…

2. Economics: in the mid-1990s, for the first time in a long time, men’s earnings increased.  They had stagnated in the 1970s, but during the early Clinton years, there were fairly broad-based increases in men’s earnings.

3. Culture: gender attitudes shifted (ie, when surveys asked questions like “do you agree that a working mother can have a warm relationship with her children?” the answer “yes” trended upward from the 1970s, then leveled off in the 1990s; other questions tracked were questions like “do you believe that men make better politicians”? etc)

In sum, we have evidence that there was a stalling of gender revolution in the mid-1990s. But we don’t fully know WHY.

ARGH! Hate to leave ya’ll hanging, but I’m running out of battery here…