By Suzanne Braun Levine
Back in 2000 my first book Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First came out. In it I talked about men who desperately wanted to be more involved with their families and do more of their share at home but were constrained by the workplace culture and the prevailing image of how a Real Man prioritized his work and family. One told me that he was so afraid of getting caught leaving his office at 6:00 p.m. and being thought not committed to his work that he parked in a distant corner of the parking lot. Another told me that when he went to the playground with his baby daughter on a weekday, people assumed one of two things – that he was unemployed (a failure) or a sexual predator.
Since then a lot has changed. My neighborhood is full of fathers pushing strollers or wearing Snugglies or wiping a messy chin at all hours of the day and night. But a new study – by the prestigious and reliable Families and Work Institute – reports that they are paying a price. Men trying to balance work and family have become victims of what they call “The New Male Mystique.” They are stressed out trying to fill a new model of masculinity that is just as oppressive as the Master of the Universe model was twenty years ago – a combination of loving dad, conscientious (and still ambitious) employee, and supportive and responsive husband.
Is this bizarre turn of events just another example of the “be careful what you wish for” retribution? I don’t think so. For one thing, those men are still doing less of the household tasks and childcare than their wives, so in that department, we are still wishing. But I think the stress that now crushes men as well as women who are trying to maintain family life and a serious work life at the same time is due less to impossible role expectations than to the workplace itself.
A lot has changed in our culture, but the shape of our work life has barely shifted off the classic 9-to-5 time frame and the drive-to-the-top career trajectory. Technology has made it possible to work from home and to work all night instead of all day, but flextime, job-sharing, family leave and childcare policies have barely made a chink in the structure. The message remains: when it comes to balancing family and work, there is not enough time to go around – deal with it. We are all on our own.
Parents are not the only sector of the population whose efforts at achieving a meaningful life that combines – in Freud’s words – “love and work” are being stymied by the hidebound workplace; the new generation of Second Adulthood men and women are caught in the same bind. Another recent report – this one from Louis Harris for SunAmerica and Age Wave founder and renowned gerontologist Kenneth Dychtwald – describes another group afflicted by the work-family bind. Entitled “The SunAmerica Retirement Re-Set Study,” it finds that people over fifty intend to work way past the traditional retirement age. Some because they find the work itself rewarding, others because their finances require it, and nearly half (!) of them because they expect to have to help support “aging relatives, adult children, grandchildren, and siblings.” Yes, adult children, including those for whom – I’ll wager – Having It All hasn’t worked out.
Like the young parents, they too would welcome options that would enable them to participate in the working world on more nurturing terms. “Most Americans want increased flexibility in retirement with the opportunity between periods of work and leisure,” says Dychtwald. Of those, a significant group are struggling to find an enriched kind of work for the next chapter, a job that enables them to earn a living and also give back to society, in what Civic Ventures, the think-tank that is devoted to supporting and encouraging this choice, has identified as an Encore Career, one that combines “purpose, passion, and a paycheck.” (Check out their website Encore.org for more on this new movement). Perhaps one byproduct of their efforts to open new categories of work that contribute to society will be an opening up of the workplace itself.
Right now the parallels between these first and Second Adulthood generations are cited as examples of conflicting interests. Older workers, the argument goes, are “sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere.” Any job we find is one that a younger person will be denied; any social support we get for our stage of life is one they won’t get for theirs – and will have to pay for later. Seeing the situation as a food fight over the same pieces of pie makes it impossible to join forces to enlarge and enrich the pie. As I see it, support for family responsibilities and the opportunity for productive work are not mutually exclusive spheres but a mutually inclusive intergenerational cause; we all – parents and grandparents – can become a force for social change that will bring about a more humane balance love and work.
RESOURCES:
Families and Work Institute (FWI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that studies the changing workforce, the changing workplace, the changing family and the changing community.
Ellen Galinsky, President and Co-Founder, co-directs the National Study of the Changing Workforce, the most comprehensive nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce and is the author of highly acclaimed Mind in the Making.
www.familiesandwork.org
Age Wave, founded by Kenneth Dychtwald, Ph.D., is the world’s leader in understanding the effects of an aging population on the marketplace, the workplace, and our lives.
www.agewave.com
SunAmerica Retirement Re-Set a nationwide survey, developed in collaboration with Age Wave and conducted by Harris Interactive, of Americans age 55 and older that takes an in-depth look at the shift in attitudes and actions toward retirement.
retirementreset.com
Civic Ventures is a think tank on boomers, work and social purpose. Civic Ventures’ Encore Careers campaign aims to engage millions of people in encore careers – combining personal meaning, continued income and social impact – to produce a windfall of talent to solve society’s greatest problems.
Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, has been recognized by Fast Company magazine three years in a row as one of the nation’s leading social entrepreneurs. His new book The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife was hailed by The New York Times as “an imaginative work with the potential to affect our individual lives and our collective future.”
Encore Careers combine purpose, passion and a paycheck.
www.encore.org