CareerBuilder.com has come out with a new study on fathers and the work/family balance.  Although this article on the study is deceptively headlined, it's still worth a read (CNN, 6/22/09).

The title of the piece reads, "Poll: Fewer Fathers Want to be Stay-at-Home Dads."  That's technically true, but misleading.  In fact, all it reveals is that, with the calamitous drop in men's employment, fewer men are willing to risk taking time off from work to be at home with the kids.  That's nothing if not understandable.

But the figures themselves are telling.  Even in the midst of the current recession, 31% of working men say they want to take more time off from work to be with their children.  That's down slightly from last year's 37%, when the recession was getting underway and a lot from the flush times of 2005 when the figure was 49%.  Thirty percent of dads would take a pay cut in order to spend more time with their children and 12% would take a cut of 10% or more.

What all that adds up to is a massive population of fathers who are ready to substitute time with their children for time in the rat race.  That seems healthy.  I don't know how much of men's shorter longevity has to do with workplace stress, but my guess is a fair amount.

The acid test, though, will come in deciding which parent, Mom or Dad, actually does the lion's share of the parenting and which does the most paid work.  To date, we haven't gotten far out of our decades-old rut, and whatever may be the attitudes of survey subjects, the old 'Dad earns/Mom does childcare" habit is still very much with us.  I'd say that biology has at least something to do with that.

That holds true in just about every study I've seen recently and some researchers, like senior research fellow at the London School of Economics Dr. Catherine Hakim, say frankly that it's a myth that women will embrace careerism like men have.  That of course means that women will continue opting out when baby comes around and men will continue taking up the slack at work.  And men will continue to lose out on contact with their children and women will continue to earn less.

Attitudes are one thing, but when push comes to shove...

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