Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (24 page)

Of course, other mothers were taking part-time jobs outside their homes, then full-time jobs. And life for most American families was irrevocably being transformed. Now it is nearly impossible for a middle-class family to get by on one parent’s income.

This was in the 1960s, and when we talk about the division of labor in the family, that’s usually where we start. Taking a longer view might mean looking back to women’s employment during World War II, or possibly even to the beginnings of the industrial era, when fathers left their homes for factories. But the division of labor in the family goes back much, much further than that. As far back as we can see into prehistoric time, fathers and mothers divided up the work of the family, each making different contributions to the children and to the family’s economy and welfare.

It’s also true, however, that the structure of the family has changed in more recent decades, with many more fathers now living apart from their families—a situation that has prompted ferocious debate over the problem of fatherlessness and how serious its consequences might be for children. Whatever we think about that, and opinions vary, fatherless families give us a different way of understanding what fathers do—by watching what happens when they are not there. First we’ll look at what has been learned about what fathers do in their homes and for their families; and then we will take up the subject of fatherless families.

*   *   *

Speculation about the social behavior of humans before recorded history is difficult to prove or disprove; we might never know what happened. Yet division of labor according to gender “is a human universal,” true in all cultures, says the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. That means it would have appeared at least sixty thousand years ago, before humans began to spread around the world and diversify into those different cultures. Wrangham has an intriguing view of how and why this happened.

I find Wrangham’s work interesting, not only because it says a lot about fathers and their families, but also because it forces us to take a long view of human family life and to reexamine what we believe to be true. For Wrangham, it starts with the discovery of fire. To learn more about how the gender division might have arisen, Wrangham, like Barry Hewlett and others, relies on observations of modern-day hunter-gatherers. In Wrangham’s case, it’s the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. In the morning, Hadza women take their babies and older children with them in search of a tuber called
ekwa
, a mainstay of their diet. They spend a few hours collecting enough for the day. Then they break briefly for lunch—a lovely spread of baked ekwa—and head back to camp, each carrying thirty pounds of the tubers. The men leave camp in the morning with bows and arrows, seeking food for the evening meal. Some come back with meat, some with honey, and some with nothing.

One of the things that’s notable here is not only the kind of work men and women do, but the kind of food they collect. Each has different items on his or her shopping list. Women generally provide the staples and men the delicacies. One of the other notable features of their lives is that they pool their resources and share everything. This might not seem terribly surprising to us, but it is quite unusual: humans are the only primates in which adults share food. “Plenty of primates, such as gibbons and gorillas, have family groups,” Wrangham writes. “Females and males in those species spend all day together, are nice to each other, and bring up their offspring together, but, unlike people, the adults never give each other food.”

We’ve attached all kinds of importance to the sharing and division of labor in human families. The sociologist Émile Durkheim thought it promoted moral behavior by “creating a bond within the family.” Some scholars thought it must have encouraged the evolution of intelligence and cooperation. One pair of anthropologists called the sexual division of labor the “true watershed for differentiating ape from human lifeways.” Wrangham agrees that the division of labor is important, but he places more importance on another crucial development that accompanies it: cooking. Great apes spend half of their time chewing, because the rough, raw foods they eat—mostly ripe fruit, often with inedible pulp or seeds—require serious mastication before they can be swallowed and digested. If we ate the same raw foods that gorillas eat, we would have to spend about 40 percent of our day chewing—nearly half of our waking hours. If a hunter had to spend five hours eating every day, he wouldn’t have enough time to hunt. Cooked food is softer and easier to eat, so men can eat more quickly. Cooking, Wrangham argues, extended the workday. It freed men to hunt and thus played a critical role in the sexual division of labor. Fire not only shortened the time it took to eat; it also enabled returning hunters to eat after dark, extending the useful amount of time in the day. The hunter could pursue game until dusk and still be able to eat after returning to the family camp. That was good for everyone, women and children included. But it was particularly good, Wrangham notes, for the men. Women cooked for them every night. The reason men got such a good deal, he suspects, is that they bullied women into it. It was “a primitive protection racket in which husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favor by preparing their husbands’ meals,” Wrangham writes.

Researchers have looked for exceptions to this division of labor, but they haven’t found many. A study published in the 1970s looked at cooking and other family activities in 185 different cultures. It found that women did the cooking in 98 percent of those societies. That’s not the kind of study that’s likely to be repeated, but there’s no reason to think there has been any substantial change in the decades since. Even in the rare communities in which women did not do all the cooking, men cooked only for the community; women still cooked household meals. And the authors found one small exception in some of the groups: men often liked to cook meat. (It seems that men who like to barbecue are not a modern invention or an American one but just the latest example of a widespread human practice.)

Wrangham struggled to find one community, one tiny slice of humanity anywhere, that broke this pattern. He found studies by the anthropologist Maria Lepowsky of the people of Vanatinai, an island in the South Pacific. “Life was indeed very good for women,” Wrangham writes. “Both sexes could host feasts … raise pigs, hunt, fish, participate in warfare, own and inherit land,” and so forth. It was, in many respects, a fascinating example of equality of the sexes. Yet women still did all the cooking and dishwashing, fetched the water, and cleaned up pig droppings.

What’s remarkable is that this arrangement didn’t fall by the wayside somewhere during the course of history. American families in split-level houses or high-rise apartments don’t have a lot in common with forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers, but both have organized their households in roughly the same way. “Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits,” Wrangham writes. “But it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture … It is not a pretty picture.”

Not everyone agrees with Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis. For one thing, there is a problem with the timing. Wrangham believes the cooking of food began during the time of
Homo erectus
, a human ancestor that lived between 1.6 million and 1.9 million years ago. It had a much larger brain than
Homo habilis
, which came before, and in Wrangham’s view that vast increase in brain size was likely due to the adoption of cooking. The transition to a larger brain occurred at the same time that the size of human teeth was decreasing, another sign that cooking had arrived, because cooked food is easier to chew. The problem is that there is little evidence that humans had discovered fire that long ago. C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, notes that Neanderthals developed cooking 200,000 years ago, nowhere near as far back in time as Wrangham’s theory requires. The larger brain and smaller teeth could have been due to a change in diet, not to cooking. Despite the criticism, Wrangham’s theory is compelling, and it adds an important evolutionary component to a discussion of gender roles in the contemporary family, where this division of labor persists.

It continued with the arrival of farming, some 10,000 years ago. Men tended the fields and women prepared the food. Women likewise provided most of the child care. The division of labor survived the establishment of the first nation-states about 5,000 years ago. None of this is to argue that we’re stuck with the household division of labor that arose in prehistoric times. There is no evolutionary argument that women must do the cooking. The point is that if we want to alter the way work is divided in the family, it’s helpful to know that the current arrangement did not arise with our parents, our grandparents, or their parents. It’s been entrenched far longer than that. Our gender roles have been with us for quite some time.

Not too many discussions of the roles of mothers and fathers in chores and child care begin with this long view. But if we want to learn something about fatherhood, we should look at how fathers were shaped during the living situations that characterized human history for hundreds of thousands of years—almost all of human existence. The rise of farming, nation-states, and factories each in turn forced dramatic changes on family life. For most of human history, fathers were responsible for protecting their children and for teaching them the things they needed to know to survive and prosper. Because that was true for so many millennia, fathers adapted to those demands, which became a matter of routine.

In that long prehistoric era, fathers taught their children how to work. Their children watched them work and often worked with them. Now children often instruct their fathers, showing them how to use their phones and computers. Cultural traditions handed down from fathers to children now compete with pop culture, which children often introduce to their parents. We no longer judge fathers exclusively on their ability to protect and educate their children, because we’ve turned those jobs over to the state. Instead, we judge fathers on their economic contributions to their families and on their caregiving. Fathers now earn the money they need to have someone else teach their children.

Changes in work and family life in the United States have accelerated during the past fifty years, in what is now a familiar trend. In 1965, 42 percent of women sixteen to sixty-four were employed. The same was true for 85 percent of men, more than twice the percentage of women. Women’s employment rose through the rest of the twentieth century, peaking at 68 percent in 2000 before dropping back to 62 percent in 2011, mostly because of the recession. While women’s employment was rising, men’s was falling through 2011, when it stood at 71 percent.

But the difference in the trends for mothers and fathers is even greater than those numbers suggest. During that same period, from 1965 to 2011, the time that men spent at work fell from 42 hours per week to an average of about 37 hours per week. For mothers, the trend once again went in the opposite direction. They worked for pay an average of 8.4 hours a week in 1965 and 21.4 hours a week in 2011. In addition, fathers
and
mothers have both increased the time they spend with children. For fathers, the figure has nearly tripled, from 2.5 hours per week in 1965 to 7.3 hours. Mothers’ time with children has increased slightly and is now 13.5 hours per week—nearly twice that of fathers.

Mothers spend more time at housework and child care than fathers do, a gap that we’re familiar with. But when all the hours that men and women work inside and outside the home are put together, there is a surprising convergence: Fathers spend 54.2 hours per week working, counting paid and unpaid work. Mothers spend 52.7 hours per week in paid and unpaid work. So while discrepancies and differences remain, mothers and fathers are working roughly the same amount. Both mothers and fathers were working about three hours per week more in 2011 than they were in 1965.

Ellen Galinsky and her colleagues at the Families and Work Institute have found that men experience more conflict between work and family than women, a surprising finding considering that most of the discussion about work and family has centered around women. This is a big change. According to surveys of a national sample of men and women in 2009, 49 percent of men reported work-family conflicts, up from 34 percent in 1977. Men surpassed women, among whom 43 percent reported such conflicts in 2009. This doesn’t mean that men have a monopoly on work-family conflicts. But it does mean that women no longer do.

A comparison with other countries makes that point. Americans work longer hours than many other people in developed countries, including Japan, where there is a word for “death by overwork”—
karoshi
. The United States is the only country out of thirty leading democracies that does not have laws protecting workers’ paid maternity leave. Even unpaid leave is available to only about half of U.S. workers. Many Americans do not get paid sick days and can be forced to work overtime without any limits.

Why have work-family conflicts increased for fathers while remaining relatively steady for mothers? Many men say they feel they’re being pushed harder at work, while their wages stagnate and the boundaries between work and family life are blurring. The situation is particularly difficult for fathers. Interestingly, they work significantly
more
hours per week than men without children. You might expect the reverse, but fathers say they work longer because the extra money is important for their families. The problem of work-family conflict is worst for men who believe flexibility will hurt their chances of advancement, and whose superiors make it difficult for them to respond to family emergencies and change their schedules on short notice. Men face an impossible ideal, a “male mystique” that puts demands on fathers that they can’t possibly meet, Galinsky says. Men, in other words, like women, are now experiencing the pressure to have it all.