| brucekluger.com |
USA Today, April 18, 2001 Fantasy of full-time fatherhood falters
Two months ago, I was browsing through the magazine section at Barnes & Noble, accompanied by my daughters Audrey, 2, and Bridgette, 5. We were searching for the new issue of Dads magazine, in which my latest essay about being a father was scheduled to appear. "OK, Bridgey," I announced, after unsuccessfully scanning the racks for a few moments, "Dads is spelled D-A-D-S. Whoever finds the magazine first wins." Always up for a contest, Bridgette combed the shelves for only 45 seconds before announcing, "There it is!" As Bridgette ran to get me a copy, I lifted my eyes to read the name of the section in which the good people at B&N had chosen to display the magazine: "Women's Interests." "Of course," I grumbled to myself. "Why didn't I think of that?" Then again, I'm used to the dis. I left my full-time job as a magazine editor in 1999 to begin freelancing out of my living room, writing primarily about parenting. Now well into my second year as an at-home dad, I have come to learn that, despite our society's impassioned call for more participation by fathers in the family unit, America isn't all that crazy about daddydom. As it turns out, my essay would never appear in Dads. Launched in the midst of a mini daddy-boom that flashed through the popular culture last summer, the bi- monthly journal, a handsome and noble effort that portrayed fatherhood in an upbeat, refreshingly hip way, ultimately folded after three issues—along with Offspring (a parenting magazine whose editor-in-chief was uncharacteristically male), the Website odaddy.com and two TV situation comedies, Normal, Ohio and Daddio, both of which portrayed fathers as the primary caregiver. All of these efforts debuted—and tanked—within the same year. The rapid rise and fall of this fatherhood fad is, to say the least, troubling, but not nearly as baffling as the ire the fleeting trend seemed to generate among, of all people, women. Indeed, when Dads magazine first appeared last summer, an opinion piece by freelance writer Joyce Winslow printed on this page greeted the new publication not with a clap on the back or a friendly rib (e.g., "It's about time!") but instead with open disdain. Winslow mocked Dads for everything from the selection of its cover subject—the peerless role model, Cal Ripken—to its exclusion off any articles on ballet. (In the 38 years I knew my father, we never once discussed Swan Lake.) Unfortunately, from my vantage point, Winslow's disregard for fatherhood seems to be more the rule than the exception these days. In response to an essay I wrote in Newsweek about how fathers are undervalued in our society, a woman from Charleston, S.C., wrote: "As long as it is women, not men, who suffer through the ordeals of pregnancy and childbirth, and as long as breast milk is considered superior to formula, fathers will indeed be parental also-rans. It's biology. Get over it." Now, I ask you, were a man to address, say, sexism in the workplace with such a cavalier shrug—in other words, if the stiletto were on the other foot—would women tolerate it? Would a magazine even publish such a boneheaded letter? Curiously, hard statistics vividly illustrate how America continues to overlook the true value of the father’s role in society better than any sitcom or dad-friendly Website could hope to. A recent study by two economists from the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara, for example, reports that children who are raised in fatherless homes are more than twice as likely to become male adolescent delinquents or teen mothers than those raised with fathers on-site.
Need To The Children We Love, Warren Farrell, Ph.D., reveals that, in the case of broken homes, the United States government spends 340 times as much money in its efforts to get fathers to pay child support as it does to ensure that those same fathers have continuing access to their children without interference by the mother. Bottom line: In other words, even as evidence mounts that a father’s influence on his children’s lives is both profound and invaluable, the government seems interested only in his paycheck. Consequently, with the Feds dropping the ball on the fatherhood front, it is once again up to the mass media--the Dads and Daddios and odaddy.coms--to get the word out on our behalf. And yet, I watch in amazement as this unique journalistic niche, so promising a year ago, closes before my very eyes. Four essays I recently submitted to Parents magazine were rejected because, as the editor-in-chief explained to me, "we recently ran a piece by a dad," as if a father's contribution to the editorial mix was more novelty than elemental, sort of like the way Hollywood casts a dwarf in comedy, just to liven things up a bit. Then there was the essay I submitted to Oxygen.com, America's leading all-women- all-the-time Website, which bought the piece with reservations ("Can you knock out the word exhilarating when you talk about being a dad?" asked the editor. "I mean, do you really, honestly find it exhilarating?) only to bump the article at the last minute in favor of a story about New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's extramarital affair. But the coup de grace came courtesy of the ever perky NickJr.com, which earlier this year unceremoniously dumped my regular column about the joys and fears and magic of fatherhood, replacing me the first month with—I kid you not—a pair of articles called “Five Things to Do With a Shoebox” and “How to Make a Sock Puppet.” In the interest of journalistic science—and to prove to myself that my beef with the mommy-bias of these parenting publications was based in reality, and not just because they weren’t buying my stuff—I decided to conduct a little experiment. Plunking down three bucks of my own hard-earned cash, I picked up the most recent issue of Parents and gave it a serious thumb-through, page by chirpy page. Wow. If I wasn’t entirely sure before that, journalistically speaking, dads are routinely being relegated to the ol’ editor’s spike, I am now. To be sure, a few of the writers featured in the current Parents are indeed men, but their names are almost always followed by letters, indicating (to me, at least) that their presence among the formidable team of female contributors in the issue is more because of their academic credits than their fathering skills. Furthermore, even in those articles in which parents are mentioned as a unit, closer scrutiny reveals (to me, at least) that, it still always comes back to Mom. Case in point: In an article entitled, “What Makes a Great Parent?” (in which the term “parent” was presumably intended to refer to both mothers and fathers), the text is awash in data that is strictly maternal—e.g., “60% of moms say they have more fun with their kids than their parents did with them,” “52% of moms agree that kids who are raised with strict rules grow up to be the best adults,” “72% of moms say that religion should play a strong role in family life.” Reading the piece slack-jawed, I got the queasy feeling that Parents had begrudgingly decided to invite dads to the party, but then instructed them not do dance. I felt ripped-off. But, alas, toward the end of my search I finally happened upon one page in the issue—one out of a total of 222—that finally addressed fathers in their own right. The column was called “Time For You: Sex & Marriage,” and it included three letters from readers seeking advice. In the first letter, a woman complains that her husband races through sexual foreplay, leaving her unfulfilled. The expert responds that perhaps hubby is worried about climaxing too soon. In the second letter, a man reveals that his wife is angry with him for buying stock without her permission. (The expert’s advice? “Admit that you were wrong, and tell your wife that you won’t make financial decisions again without her agreement.”) And the third letter begins simply with: “My husband thinks nothing of slurping his food, belching, or passing gas in front of the kids. How can I get him to shape up?” There you have it: a premature ejaculator, a selfish spendthrift and a farter. Welcome to the American Dad. Maybe I simply made a bad career choice here. Perhaps I should forget this whole idea of staying home and writing about fatherhood, and instead try my hand at something more manly, like boxing. At least in that game, no one's allowed to hit below the belt.
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