Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993 TAG: 9306200239
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: NEVADA CITY, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
Six men sit cross-legged on a white carpeted floor. They are in the airy studio of a cedar house that hugs the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, and they are talking quietly and seriously about important things.
Big things. Things that could change the world.
Not once, in two hours, do they mention the war in Bosnia, President Clinton, the price of gold, "Jurassic Park," Charles Barkley, all-terrain vehicles or the San Francisco Giants.
No, for a full two hours and then some, they talk about fatherhood.
Actually, they talk about more than that. They talk about their children, their fathers, their wives and themselves. They talk about after-school soccer, about homework, about who cooks and who fixes the car. They talk about the struggle to balance work and family, about how much discipline is too much discipline. They wonder whether their children can be their pals.
They talk about things that men don't usually talk about.
Or do they?
There's a new man loping about the planet, or so it would appear from reading the literature. Psychologists talk about the "New Fatherhood," whose adherents universally ascribe to the following adage: When a man is dying, he never says, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office."
No, the new dad is the one you see with a toddler at the playground, or standing up at the PTA meeting, or rolling Junior through the aisles of the supermarket. He's the one who misses days at work because a child is home sick; who dashes out the office door at the digital crack of 5 to make it to the day-care center on time.
"Something has changed," says Jerrold Shapiro, a psychologist in Los Altos who has written two books on fatherhood. "Whether men have been enticed or cajoled, the fact is that we're around our kids a lot more."
"And," he adds, "when you're around your kids, you get to like it."
The evidence is both anecdotal and scientific. For instance, Redbook magazine recently conducted a random, national telephone poll of 420 fathers, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percent:
96 percent said they changed their babies' diapers. Two thirds thought their own fathers had skipped diaper duty.
86 percent took their children to the doctor. Only half as many thought their fathers had done so.
75 percent had left work to take care of their kids. Fewer than one-quarter thought their dads had done that.
And nearly seven out of 10 of the modern dads said they'd like the opportunity to stay home and care for their children while their wives worked. The pollsters didn't bother to ask about the previous generation. The question simply wouldn't apply.
"In reality," said the pollster, Ethel Klein, "we haven't asked men these questions. Nobody ever thought about it."
Plenty of people are thinking about it now. Under the influence of the much-maligned men's movement, books about fatherhood have been hopping off the presses in the past few years. Besides Shapiro's books, the most recent of which is "The Measure of a Man: Becoming the Father You Wish Your Father Had Been," they include such titles as "Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man," and "Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity."
Certainly, the men gathered at Troy Rampy's house, perched in the forested hills above Nevada City, have thought about it.
"There's a much more participatory parenting going on than there was when I grew up," says John Daly, a 48-year-old, tousle-haired real estate agent who speaks with the clarity and precision implied by his steel blue eyes.
"We fathers now are much more a part of the process than we were. Wives are working, fathers are working, and we have to share in the household duties. Probably most men and women will admit that women are still doing more of the household stuff, but I think the fathers are much more involved in the kids' lives. We're really taking on a lot more responsibility for the child-rearing."
It's true, as Daly says, that men haven't exactly shoved their wives out of the kitchen, laundry room or nursery.
"Our attitudes have changed," says Ron Levant, a psychologist in Brookline, Mass., who is co-chair of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity. "Our behavior has changed, but not that much."
In the 1960s, Levant says, men did virtually nothing in the way of household chores - about one hour a day, on average, compared to eight hours a day for women.
"In the late '80s, the figures indicate that husbands put in about one-third of the total family work and wives put in about two-thirds. It's still far from 50-50."
Still, Levant says, the changes in attitude are important - and could be a sign of things to come.
"Significantly, men say their families are more significant than their work, and they derive more of a sense of well-being from their families than their work, which is a change."
And, he says, "Men are no longer saying that the main way to be a father is to be a good provider. They're saying that being with your kids is just as important as making a good income."
The guys at Troy Rampy's house couldn't agree more.
This group of acquaintances, living in a former mining town turned New Age haven, doesn't pretend to be representative of men at large. They are all white, they are all well-educated and they all tend to tilt toward the drum-beating fringe of men's consciousness.
Rich McCutchan is a family counselor who works part time at home. He considers himself a househusband. Paul Jorgensen, a shop owner, spends as much time as he can playing with his 5-year-old son, Narayan, and believes he shares equally with his wife in household duties. Craig Rubens, a teacher who is in the midst of a divorce, says he takes care of his two small children at least two-thirds of the time.
Rampy, who runs a small business selling educational materials, comes closest to being a traditional dad, if your idea of traditional encompasses someone who conducts a "Shadow Workshop" in which men use masks and drums to help "come face-to-face with another part of yourself."
Rampy works out of his house and sees his two children constantly, but his wife is their "primary care-giver"; i.e., a full-time mom.
Even so, he says, he and his wife, Maryann, have "totally divided" the housework. "Men can cook," he says. "Most of the best chefs are men. Men can do housework. Women can fix cars. Maryann is more mechanically inclined than I am, so something breaks and we say, `Maryann! You get here!' I think all that is up for grabs. We're all making it up as we go."
Fatherhood, the improvisational jam.
In a paper published in 1991, David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values compared the rules for fatherhood to a book or movie script:
"Three decades ago, the text was quite long, like a Victorian novel. As a script, its supreme virtue was in telling the actors exactly what to do and why.
"Today, we have a new book, a new script. Its defining style and characteristic is minimalism. The result is not surprising. Almost no one can follow this script. The actors simply do not know what to do. They are bewildered. They wander around. They are lost."
In general, these men in Nevada City don't seem lost. If anything, they seem a bit like pioneers who know where they're going but don't know what obstacles they'll encounter along the way. Nor do they always agree about how to surmount them.
Rampy wonders aloud: "How do you establish a sense of core and authority? How does a father do that without coming down on his kids? How do you do that?"
"Ultimately it's love, is it not?" responds Jorgensen. "I mean, it seems to me that what works the best with Narayan is that he respects me as long as he's my buddy. My experience is that when I am there for him, and I am playing with him and I am connected, he listens."
"OK," Rampy says, "I have a problem with the word `buddy.' The thing is, I am not my children's buddy. I'm their father."
"You see, I think I'm both," Jorgensen says.
Rampy is having none of it. "As soon as there are no boundaries," he says, "as soon as there are no limits, chaos ensues."
Jorgensen says he has boundaries. "Things are pretty well delineated."
And so it goes, out here on the frontier of New Fatherhood.
It's hard to pin down exactly where this New Fatherhood stuff comes from. These men attribute it mainly to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which began with the premise that almost everything the previous generation did was wrong.
It goes beyond that, though. The women's movement obviously played a major role. For one thing, it forced men to become more involved in family life: Their wives didn't have time to do it alone. And the women's movement gave birth - quite by accident and with chagrin - to the men's movement, which has helped some men see beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional gender roles.
And finally, children have played a role - perhaps the biggest one. Thirty years ago, men weren't expected to play such an intimate role in their children's lives; until around 1970, for instance, it was almost unheard of for a man to be present at his child's birth. Now it is the norm.
"It's a long process," says Klein, who conducted the Redbook poll, "but as men become involved in the details of their kids' lives, they get hooked into their kids just the way mothers do. It's the way children seduce parents. They fall in love with you, and you fall in love with every little change, and that's happening to men more and more."
It is happening to these men in Nevada City. You can hear it in the way they speak about their children - "the best two boys in the world," Rich McCutchan says with bursting pride - and in the way they describe their enjoyment in the seemingly mundane tasks of childrearing.
"I'm really happy to be able to put that much time into my children," John Daly says, "to be with my children much more than my father was. It gives a whole new perspective to my life. Having three children and each one of them is very different . . . you learn a lot.
"I feel really privileged that I am able to do this, because I know there are a lot of families - probably the majority of the families that are out there - that are still doing what my parents did 40 years ago. Hopefully what we're doing will grow. I think it will. And I think what we're teaching our children, they'll want to teach their children too."
by CNB