GABcast: The Daddy Shift

Why are more men staying at home to take care of children? Does the recession have anything to do with it? And is this switch in traditional parental roles a blip, or a longterm shift? On this week’s podcast episode, we are joined by Jeremy Adam Smith–author of the acclaimed book ‘The Daddy Shift’!

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Transcript after the jump!

The Daddy Shift Transcript

Jeremy Adam Smith (JS)- And you know, the gist of her criticism was that caregiving is not a desirable activity. If it were more men would be doing it. There was this kind of this discomfort I saw with the very idea of caregiving as being a worthy human activity when it fact the argument in my book is that caregiving is an essential human activity. It should be an essential part of every human life.

Emily Heroy- Welcome to the Gender Across Borders podcast!

Sound clip:

Interviewee- I think fatherhood parenting in general should be whatever makes sense for you or your family and for us it makes a lot of sense for me to be home with the kids.

Reporter- It makes economic sense because his wife Martha is the bread winner. He sometimes works for non-profits on social issues but says its minimal income that would all pour back into daycare so it’s preferable to care for the children himself. And he’s noticing, he’s not alone.

Colleen Hodgetts (CH)- Hello my name is Colleen Hodgetts and I’m a senior editor at Gender Across Borders.

Kyle Bachan (KB)- And my name is Kyle Bachan and I’m also a senior editor at Gender Across Borders.

CH- Welcome to this episode of the Gender Across Borders podcast where we will be interviewing author Jeremy Adam Smith who wrote the book, The Daddy Shift: How stay at home dads, breadwinning moms and shared parenting are transforming the American family. Jeremy, welcome!

JS- Thanks so much.

CH- We wanted to jump right in with a couple questions on the research that you did in order to write the book. Could you tell us a little bit about how you picked the families that you ended up featuring in the book?

JS- Well, very half-hazardly I think is probably the short answer. I was really looking for families I felt were representative of the diversity of reverse traditional families and of course also they had to… I mean everybody’s story is interesting but I felt like I needed stories that were in some way illustrated a dilemma or conflict that reverse traditional families face. The book doesn’t try to sell you or anyone on stay at home fatherhood or breadwinning motherhood. The book takes for granted that families are going to be negotiating the roles over time and I felt it was very important to get beyond this idea that wow there are fathers who take care of children which I think is still, to this day, the way stay at home fatherhood is reported in the mainstream media. I wanted to take that for granted and then ask and explore so how do these families overcome the challenges they face—or not overcome and what prevents them from overcoming those challenges? What I was really looking for in the book in constructing these stories was to create a dialogue between them. So for example, the story of Ben and Michelle, it’s about two people, a husband and a wife who by the way, divorced after the book was published who really were not comfortable with their roles and were struggling with them a little bit. And then as the book progresses, the couples become increasingly comfortable and also there’s an autobiographical thread that runs throughout the book where I sort or tell the story of how I became increasingly comfortable with my role as my son’s caregiver.

KB- Speaking of the families that you interviewed, you said that you interviewed them to find out what challenges they faced… did you happen to speak with any of the stay at home dads about any problems that might have had reentering the work force or pay inequality?

JS- That is a really interesting question. That was not really covered by my book. My book was about when biological mothers and fathers switch their traditional roles. I tell the story a little bit about how I reentered the workforce. What I find for a lot of fathers is that often times they’ll have suffered a career setback—they’ll have been laid off or… I just talked to somebody yesterday who had been an electrical engineering professor at Stanford and he failed to get tenure. So he left Stanford and now he’s taking care of his children fulltime and his wife is supporting his family. So they’ll be some sort of setback or perhaps they decide to transition. One of the fathers I interviewed had been a teacher who decided he didn’t want to be a teacher anymore, at the same time he decided he wanted to be a father and so he spent the time getting his real estate license. So often times, what these fathers were doing was true for almost everybody that I interviewed actually was that they were engineering some sort of career transition or at least they chose to see it as some sort of career transition. Now if they had another child, often times what would happen was that they would begin to transition into career homemakers. I know many people both moms and dads for whom things have not gone according to plan. But I had interviewed a number of fathers who did go back to work. I know personally a number of fathers who took time out to take care of their kids and have gone back to work. I have to say that, for fathers at least, I think that a lot of fears about experiencing a setback in your career are somewhat overblown. This may or may not be true for mothers. Statistically speaking, there’s a pretty severe consequence for motherhood in terms of your income potential. But empirically speaking, and also anecdotally speaking, I’m not sure that that’s true for fathers who took time out to take care of their kids.

CH- I think we just gave you the idea for your next book. I’m just saying. One question that we had was that you did a really great job of laying out the quick but comprehensive of the path that American society has taken to get to the point where these families could even exist and women were able to work more and therefore men were able to take on this option of the stay at home dad. Do you feel that this Daddy Shift is a linear path or have you seen signs of a reversal? How do you feel that that’s progressing?

JS- Well… everything depends upon timescale. I think that the long term trend is definitely towards more male caregiving more female economic power, more egalitarianism within couples. That’s definitely the long term trend over many decades. However, if you shorten the timescale—if you look at it in 10, 5, 2 or 1 year increments, you see a lot of blips. In fact, I was at a meeting of the council at contemporary families last year and I ran a panel that was on this topic and we had a series of academics presenting these multi-year trends for both men and women—showing that women’s behavior in the workplace and at home and their attitudes and comparing that with what men were doing and thinking. For both groups to different degrees, if you shrank the timescale you would really see some jumping around—and these were different longitudinal studies, they don’t all have the same methodologies, they’re not all of the same size, they’re not all asking the same questions—so you’re going to see a lot of variation. But, even within the same study, within the same longitudinal study following people over time or even looking year to year at, for example, employment statistics, you just see a lot of jumping around. That can be very confusing, especially when it’s reported that way in the media. Like women’s employment will drop one percent and there will be a certain feminist who will proclaim that to be a crisis. And maybe it is a canary in a coalmine. Maybe we are seeing an insipient crisis, however, whenever you look at a blip like that, you have to look at it within the context of a larger trend. Right now what we’re seeing is men’s employment dropping by a lot. The last anybody checked, women were the majority of the workforce. They still don’t have income equality with men, however, it is the case that right at this moment, this is more women employed than men. So this has triggered a lot of articles—on one hand, some of them worry that men suddenly have been subordinated to women and on the other hand you see some articles saying, well this is great. This is progress. And the truth is, I argue in the book that there is a long term trend for women to gain more and more economic power. There was a very interesting book called Influence that was published by a friend of mine called Christine Larson that really outlines these trends very carefully. For that reason, because they’ve been building for a long time, we have reason to believe that they’re going to continue into the future but really looking at it even in the context of the recession of the last two years, I think is a somewhat tricky game. It’s very difficult I think to read those tea leaves.

KB- So you think that the recession has sped up the Daddy Shift?

JS- I think it’s giving it a kick in the ass. For example, women’s employment has risen every decade in the 20^th century and we saw a huge jump during WWII. And a lot of people missed that—they missed the fact that women’s employment actually increased in the 1950s, that it increased during the 1930s, during the Great Depression. A lot of women went to work because men were thrown out of jobs. I think that what we’re going through right now is one of those jolts. But there will be a period, after WWII ended for example, when the men returned from the war, a lot of women were thrown out of their jobs whether they wanted to leave them or not and so you saw this very precipitous drop in women’s employment which wasn’t just because the men came back from WWII. It was also because the United states experienced a pretty severe recession after WWII. So, if you had just looked at it in that narrow timescale, you would have said, ‘oh, women have been forced back to the kitchen’. The reality though is that a lot of women got a taste of employment and it lit a fuse—this is the way I put it in the book—that burned straight through the Eisenhower years and was one of the factors that fueled the feminist movement of the 1960s. So what you have now is that in the great recession are a lot of men who are taking care of children for the very first time and often times they haven’t chosen these roles, the role was forced on them by economic circumstances. But they’re getting a taste and I think what’s happening is that a lot of men are discovering that that’s not a bad way to live, that there are some very substantial rewards. Right now, in the moment for a lot of people, for both men and for women, it’s a little bit confusing. Most of those men are probably going to find jobs again and go back to work. However, I think it’s very reasonable to expect that we’re going to see a change in… I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as male culture… but in masculinity, where because of this crisis, childcare becomes even more of an option than it was before.

KB- So do you think that the Daddy Shift is where society needs to be in the transitioning process? Or does it need to transition even more for that definition of masculinity to reinvent itself?

JS- Oh yeah, absolutely. We have so far to go. The interesting thing about our situation right now and about masculinity specifically is that it’s very fragmented. There’s a lot of contradictory things going on and people are in radically different social positions and they experience these changes different—especially the economic changes. And I think the experience of becoming a man these days is much less conformist, there’s a lot more options, there’s a lot more negotiation, there’s a lot more anxiety, and there’s a lot more conversation about our identities as men and also our relationship to women. There are conversations happening among men right now that are absolutely unprecedented. They are often heavily coated. Often times, I think these conversations are socially invisible for that reason, but they are going on.

CH- Such as…

JS- So, we’re talking about the Daddy Shift and about childcare—for a long time, as women went to work, and as the definition of motherhood extended beyond caregiving to include a capacity to include breadwinning as well, men didn’t change. They really dug in their heels and resisted contributing at home even though more and more women were going to work. But starting in the 1990s when Gen-Xers became parents, that began to change a lot. Men started to contribute a lot more at home and for a long time it was really the feminist movement that was driving a lot of this participation and people often thought of it as being something that was compelled by this feminist consciousness on the part of individual women and on the part of society. But what’s been happening over the past five or ten years is that more and more men (and I’m an example of this, the Daddy Shift is an example of this), we began talking about what it was like to take care of kids—just talking about it. And talking about it in terms that revealed how meaningful it was and how it actually made our lives better and how it made our families more resilient. And the feelings of satisfaction that we got from acquiring childcare skills and the confidence that came with that—that is a very specifically male way of talking about this kind of relationship, this relationship with children that didn’t really exist for my grandfather and only really tentatively existed for my father.

CH- And then, just to wrap things up, can you tell us a little bit about where you’re going from here, what some of your next projects are and what else you’re doing with the book?

JS- Well, the book continues to have a lot of mileage. Three weeks ago I was on The Today Show talking about it. The book is still very much a presence in my life in terms of doing interviews. We have now, in the United States I think, entered into this very sustained conversation about the meaning of masculinity. And a lot of the questions that reporters ask me, especially on mainstream shows like The Today Show are not very intelligent. People are still thinking in these very clichéd terms about breadwinning moms and stay at home fathers. However, I do see the dialogue starting to shift a little bit. We are moving beyond the Mr. Mom stage where we see the father is doing the mom’s job and getting more into stage where we are talking about male caregiving on its own terms. Talking about what sets male caregiving apart. Men are becoming more confident about speaking about that, about caring for children in ways that make them feel comfortable and confident.

Emily Heroy- From all of us at GAB, we would like to thank our listeners for listening. We hope you enjoyed this installment of the Gender Across Borders podcast, and if you did like what you hear, head on over to www.genderacrossborders.com for more in-depth articles, reviews, and interviews. Interested in taking part in the podcast? If you have something to say, GAB wants to hear from you. Please email info@genderacrossborders.com

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