The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (33 page)

Added to this was the influence of his wife. Nearly every man who shared had a wife who urged—or at least welcomed—his involvement at home. They did not hoard their children, as Nancy Holt came to do with Joey. When Evan had been about to leave to take Joey to the zoo for a father-son outing, Nancy had edged Evan out by deciding at the last minute to “help” them get along. At first awkward and unconfident with children, Michael Sherman might have retreated to the “downstairs” had it not been for Adrienne’s continual invitation to pitch in. Often, something as simple as the way a mother holds her baby to “see Dad” indicated
her effort to share. Adrienne Sherman didn’t just leave her twins with Daddy; she talked to them about what Daddy could do with them. She fostered a tie. She didn’t play expert. She made room.

As a result, such men were—or became—sensitive to their children’s needs. They were more realistic than other fathers about the limits of what their wives provide, and about what their children really need.

Involved fathers had a much more elaborate notion of what a father was than uninvolved fathers did. Involved fathers talked about fathering much as mothers talked about mothering. Uninvolved fathers held to a far more restricted mission—to discipline the child or teach him sports. When asked what he thought was important about being a father, one black businessman and father of two said:

To him, being a disciplinarian
was
being a father. As a result, his children gravitated to their mother. In a strangely matter-of-fact way, she remarked that she didn’t “feel comfortable” leaving the children with her husband for long periods. “If I go out to the hairdresser’s on Saturday, I might come back and find he didn’t fix them lunch; I don’t leave them with him too much.” Developing a “longer temper” didn’t feel to him like part of a father’s job.

When I asked uninvolved fathers to define a “good mother” and “good father,” they gave elaborate and detailed answers for “good mother,” and short, hazy answers for “good father,” sometimes with a specific mission attached to it, like teaching a child about cars, soccer, baseball.

I asked one man, “What’s a good mother?” and he answered: “A good mother is patient. That’s the first thing. Someone who is warm, caring, who can see what the child needs, physically, who stimulates the child intellectually, and helps the child meet his emotional challenges.” “What is a good father?” I asked. “A good father is a man who spends time with his children.” Another man said simply, “A good father is around.”

It is not that such men have an elaborate idea of fatherhood and don’t live up to it. Their idea of fatherhood is embryonic to begin with. They often limit that idea by comparing themselves only to their own fathers, and not, as more involved men did, to their mothers, sisters, or other fathers. As a Salvadoran delivery man put it, “I give my children everything my father gave me.” Michael Sherman gave his twins what his mother gave him.

Men who are greatly involved with their children react against two cultural ideas: one idea removes the actual care of children from the definition of
manhood
, and one curtails the notion of how much care a child needs. As to the first idea, involved fathers’ biggest struggle was against the doubts they felt about not “giving everything to getting ahead” in their jobs. But even when they conquered this fear, another idea often stood in the way—the idea that their child is “already grown up,” “advanced,” and doesn’t need much from him.

Just as the archetype of the supermom—the woman who can
do it all—minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the “superkid” minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older. Often uninvolved parents remarked with pride that their small children were “self-sufficient” or “very independent.”

I asked the fifth-grade teacher in a private school how she thought her students from two-job families were doing. She began by saying that they did as well as the few children she had whose mothers stayed home. But having said that, her talk ran to the problems: “The good side of kids being on their own so much is that it makes them independent really early. But I think they pay a price. I can see them sealing off their feelings, as if they’re saying. ‘That’s the last time I’ll be vulnerable.’ I can see it in their faces, especially the sixth-grade boys.”

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as women were increasingly excluded from the workplace, the cultural notion of what a child “needs” at home grew to expand the woman’s role at home. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note in
For Her Own Good
, doctors and ministers argued strongly that a woman’s place was at home. The child needed her there. As the economic winds reversed, so did the idea of a woman’s proper place—and a child’s real needs. Nowadays, a child is increasingly imagined to need time with other children, to need “independence-training,” not to need “quantity time” with a parent but only a small amount of “quality time.” As one working father remarked: “Children need time to play with other children their age. It’s stimulating for them. Nelson has enjoyed it, I think, from when he was six months.”

If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are a cultural football in an economic and marital game.

An Orwellian “superkid” language has emerged to consolidate
this sense of normality. In a September 1985
New York Times
article entitled “New Programs Come to Aid of Latch-Key Children,” Janet Edder quotes a child-care professional as follows: “Like other child-care professionals, Mrs. Seligson prefers to use the phrase ‘Children in Self-Care’ rather than ‘Latch-Key Children,’ a term coined during the depression when many children who went home alone wore a key around their necks.” “Children in Self-Care” suggests that children
are
being cared for, by themselves. Unlike the term “Latch-Key Children,” which suggests a child who is sad and deprived, the term “Children in Self-Care” suggests a happy superkid.

Another article, in the August 1984
Changing Times
, entitled “When You Can’t Be Home, Teach Your Child What to Do,” suggests that working parents do home-safety checkups so that a pipe won’t burst, a circuit breaker won’t blow, or electrical fire start. Parents should advise children to keep house keys out of sight and to conceal from callers the fact that they’re alone at home. It tells about “warm lines”—a telephone number a child can call for advice or simple comfort when he or she is alone. Earlier in the century, advice of this sort was offered to destitute widows or working wives of disabled or unemployed men while the middle class shook its head in sympathy. Now the middle class has “children in self-care” too.

The parents I talked to had younger children, none of whom were in “self-care.” The children I visited seemed a fairly jolly and resilient lot. But the parents I spoke to did not feel much supported in their parenthood; like Ann Myerson, many parents in the business world felt obliged to hide concerns that related to children. Female clerical workers were discouraged from making calls home. Many men feared that their doing anything for family reasons—moving to another city, missing the office party, passing up a promotion—would be taken as a sign they lacked ambition or manliness. As for John Livingston’s coworkers, the rule was: don’t go home until your wife calls.

For all the talk about the importance of children, the cultural
climate has become subtly less hospitable to parents who put children first. This is not because parents love children less, but because a job culture has expanded at the expense of a family culture.

As motherhood as a “private enterprise” declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

Every afternoon Art Winfield knew Adam was waiting for him at day care. Michael Sherman knew that around 6 a. m. one of his twins would call out “Daddy.” John Livingston knew that Cary relied on him to get around her mother’s discipline. Such men were close enough to their children to know what they were and weren’t getting from their mothers.

Uninvolved fathers were not. They
imagined
that their wives did more with the children than they did. For example, one thirty-two-year-old grocery clerk praised his wife for helping their daughter with reading on the weekends—something his wife complained he didn’t make time for. But when I interviewed her, I discovered that her weekends were taken up with housework, church, and visiting relatives.

Sometimes I had the feeling that fathers were passing the child-care buck to their wives while the wives passed it to the baby-sitter. Each person passing the role on wanted to feel good about it, and tended to deny the problems. Just as fathers often praised their wives as “wonderful mothers,” so mothers often praised their baby-sitters as “wonderful.” Even women who complain about day care commonly end up describing the day-care worker as “great.” So important to parents was the care of their child that they almost had to believe that “everything at day care was fine.” Not only was the role of caretaker transferred from parent
to baby-sitter, but sometimes also the illusion that the child was “in good hands.”

The reasons men gave for why their wives were wonderful—e.g., that they were patient—were often reasons women gave for why the baby-sitters were wonderful. Just as uninvolved fathers often said that they wouldn’t want to trade places with their wives, so wives often said they wouldn’t want to trade places with their day-care worker.

As one businesswoman and mother of a three-year-old boy commented: “Our baby-sitter is just fantastic. She’s with the kids from seven o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night. And some kids stay later. I don’t know how she does it.
I
couldn’t.” Another working mother commented: “I couldn’t be as patient as Elizabeth [the day-care worker] is. I love my child, but I’m not a baby person.”

The day-care worker herself was often in a difficult spot. She depended economically on the parents, so she didn’t want to say anything so offensive it might lead them to withdraw the child from her care. And parents didn’t have time to listen. As Katharine Wilson, a day-care worker for fifteen years, remarked:

Some day-care centers even established a policy of check-in sheets that required parents to come inside the day-care center and sign their child in each morning, thus preventing the hurried few who might otherwise leave their children off at the sidewalk.

Pickup time was often hectic, and not a good time to talk. As one day-care worker observed:

Sometimes a day-care worker becomes worried about a child. As Alicia Fernandez confided:

Had she mentioned this to Emily’s mother and father? I asked. She replied quickly and quietly: “Oh no. It’s hard to talk about that. We just don’t get around to it. In a way, I feel badly about it but on the other hand if I told her mother, she might take Emily away.”

The day-care worker, who could best judge how Emily’s day had gone, felt afraid to confide her concerns to Emily’s parents, who badly needed to hear them. Other day-care workers also kept their opinions to themselves. As one noted: “You can feel sorry for them. I have Tim for nine hours. I have Jessica for ten and a half—now Jessie’s mother is a single mother. Like I say, at the end of the day they cry.” “Do you talk to their parents about the crying?” I asked.