Like almost everybody with a laptop, I’m trying to write a TV series. Only one thing stands between me and greatness: time. Between the day job and the kids, there isn’t any.
Most dads I know live more or less like this. Since having children, they have been saying painful goodbyes to their ambitions. True, men still have far more space for careers than most women do. But younger dads especially are starting to make the same compromises as mums. If men ever discussed these issues, you could say we were soul-searching.
Like most middle-aged men, I grew up thinking I would fulfil myself through work. Kids, I dimly imagined, would be taken care of by my lovely wife. My place was at my desk. As Anne-Marie Slaughter explains in Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, from the 1960s the women’s movement copied this male notion. She writes: “We focused on being allowed to do that work ourselves, helping to make a fetish of income-generating work as a foundation of self-worth.”
But men are now changing. In my own sphere, very few of my male friends fetishise career over family. One friend ditched his ambition of running a big institution because it would have meant being out most evenings. Instead, he’s a consultant. Another followed his wife’s job to a provincial town, where he works intermittently. A third has been a nearly full-time single parent since his girlfriend died. Divorced friends cannot move for better jobs, because they won’t leave their children. Then there’s the guy who turned down a plum job in Silicon Valley because he wanted to see his kids grow up.
This European reluctance to live in the office is misread by some Americans as laziness. Jeb Bush recently sneered about the “French work week”: “You get, like, three days where you have to show up?”
Slaughter cites the Cadillac TV ad that crowed: “Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the cafe, they take August off. Off... Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven hardworking believers.”
In fact, crazy driven hardworking believers arguably have it easy. The Frenchman Gilles Verdiani writes in Mon metier de pere that he would have liked being an old-fashioned father: “A dad who comes home from work at dinnertime, kisses the children who have been waiting for him before going to sleep, reads them a story and contemplates on their faces the joy of having such a good daddy.” Instead Verdiani became a “daddy hen”.
Few daddy hens quit work or go part-time, like many mothers do. Rather, in the parlance of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, these men “lean out”. They aren’t shooting for the corner office, because that would mess up the school run. Instead, they work at 90 per cent and hope that the boss (who secretly might be doing the same) doesn’t notice. This is the Daddy track.
Sarah Jackson, chief executive of the British organisation Working Families, says of younger fathers at work: “What we see is that they are resentful and not engaged. A whole cohort is not working as productively as it could be.”
Daddy hens can easily mount smug defences of our choices. We know that almost everybody’s career will appear pointless the day he retires. Watch Mad Men: who now cares who won which advertising account in 1967? In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware quotes the lament she heard “from every male patient I ever nursed”: “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” They didn’t see their families enough. Daddy hens don’t have that regret.
But we have others. On dark winter mornings when the kids are slamming each other’s faces into the floor before we have even had our first coffee, we envy the crazy driven hardworking believers snug in their offices, pursuing their petty work triumphs.
However, social mores are shifting to punish the crazy believers. A friend was recently called to the house of his country’s future president to be offered a big job. While they talked politics over lunch, the future president’s toddler child sat on the floor bawling. The future president chucked her a pacifier. The child couldn’t find it, and kept bawling. “Why is she crying?” the future president asked, baffled. The guy is now president, but his dad rating is low.
And standards for next-generation fathers will be higher. The younger the father, the more time he is likely to spend with his kids, found the Families and Work Institute in the US. There’s a lot of research to show millennial men give high priority to their role as dads. Mums still do most childcare but, among millennials, gender roles are unprecedentedly blurred.
This will mean more fathers forgoing the ego boosts conferred by careers. My TV series may never get written. In theory that’s OK, because endless hours with the children are what life is really about. In truth, I sometimes feel a secret twinge of nostalgia for the 1950s.
— Financial Times
