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ONE: Introduction: More Dads at the Bus Stop
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1 One Introduction More Dads at the Bus Stop A few days ago I was at the afternoon bus stop. The bus from the elementary school comes anytime between 3:50 and 4:05, dropping off somewhere around 15 children. What I noticed this day was that there were more fathers at the bus stop than mothers. This is not completely unusual for our block, but rather you could see it coming if you paid attention to the ups and downs of the market and the individual job changes within this particular group of fathers. I suppose I should qualify my observation by noting that two of the fathers are professors, one is a pilot who mainly works weekends, and one is recently unemployed. Not to mention my husband, a writer who works from home. But we have had other, more occasional, fathers , ones whose schedules are not quite as flexible but who still make the effort to move things around at work if they need to be at home. The point is that fathers are no longer an anomaly at the bus stop. There are more dads holding hands, tossing balls, and talking with children as they wait for the bus. One local dad plays “rock, paper, scissors” with his young daughter through the bus window as other children board the morning bus. Sociologists such as myself call these men “new” dads or “involved” dads, a sign that times are changing and men’s roles as fathers are changing too. But we have been talking about new dads for a while now. They have Introduction 2 become an accepted and perhaps expected part of our culture. Most dads today want to be involved and are actively seeking ways to spend more time with their children. And men are expected to be more and more involved with their families. The new father takes time to eat with his family, read to his children, throw a ball around, and even change diapers. At the same time, however, men are not routinely offered options when it comes to negotiating issues of work-family balance. Instead, after becoming fathers, they are expected to continue on with their work lives as if they had experienced a minor blip on their family radar screens. Given these contrasting expectations, I became interested in discovering if fathers feel conflicted between their work and family lives. Moreover, I wanted to find out what issues are important to fathers and what kinds of strategies they use in order to balance work and family obligations and expectations. Although there has been growing research on work and family suggesting that not only women but also men experience work-family conflict, less is known about the strategies working fathers use in an attempt to balance their work and family lives. With dramatic changes in work and family life over the past few decades, including increases in women’s labor force participation, especially mothers’ labor force participation, and increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, families consisting of a breadwinner husband/father and homemaker wife/mother are fairly uncommon. Instead, dual-earner families and single-parent families are the more standard family forms of today. These working parents often struggle to balance the time commitments involved in performing work and family roles. Superdads provides a glimpse into the lives of American fathers in the 21st century as they attempt to be more involved fathers while fulfilling the more traditional role of provider for their families. Today’s dads want to spend more time with their children and yet struggle with how they will spend that timewiththeirkidswhilestillbeingresponsibleworkers.Theymaythinkand planbeforetheirchildarrives.Oritmaynotoccurtothemuntiltheyareholding their newborn. But more often than not fathers come to the realization thattheywanttobemorethanfinancialproviders—theywanttobedads. While expectations for father involvement have risen, the societal supports to make greater involvement possible have not kept pace. The workplace still sees men as men and not as fathers. This book offers a picture [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:02 GMT) Introduction 3 of men’s experiences and struggles as they make the transition to fatherhood . It begins with the very real feelings of stress that are often wrapped up with a sense of work/life imbalance. This often starts with (or is exacerbated by) the birth of a child. Fathers find themselves scrambling to take time off as their options for family leave are limited. But here is where the story becomes more complicated. While some fathers accept their situation for what it is...