RebelDad

Posted on 10. Oct, 2003 by Brian Reid in General

There’s a suprisingly deep look at childcare choices in the latest issue of one of those free local parenting publications from the Richmond, Virginia area. The story focuses largely on at-home moms, but shows a remarkable even-handedness in talking about dads — and families making more complex, more flexible arrangements that allow everyone to get what they want (more or less) from work and home. It also mentions Arlene Cardozo, who published a really interesting, 17-year-old book called Sequencing that suggested the parents could “have it all” if they followed career establishment with child-rearing, followed by career resumption, rather than trying to juggle kidcare and job maintainence at the same time.

I haven’t talked about Sequencing before, but I wonder how much resonance the idea really has. The book, of course, is almost two decades old, and it hit the shelves in the midst of the “supermom” period (in which moms were repeatedly told they could, in fact, have it all … at once). But I hear very little about “sequencing” as a concept today, and my conversations with work/family experts suggests that sequencing is a good way for parents to wreak havoc on their long-term career plans by making re-entry into the workforce more difficult.

So I’ve been playing with the idea that more and more at-home parents (with a particularly high rate of at-home dads) are continuing to work even while at-home parents, be it though contract work, flexible schedules or vastly reduced hours. A number of the local dads have side projects going on (web work, consulting, etc.), even though they serve as a primary caregiver. And the disparate Census stats (initially discussed here) would seem to support that. On the one hand, there are a couple million fathers who serve as primary caretakers, but only 105,000 are considered “out of the labor force,” meaning that in the last year, they made no money and didn’t looking for work. That’s a huge, huge disparity, and it probably reflects a rejection of sequencing in favor of a restructured, scaled-back but still somewhat active work life.

That clearly doesn’t apply to all dads — I’ve met plenty of fathers who would fall into the smaller “just-childcare” group — but let me throw it open to the readers: are parents today more likely to keep minimal professional involvement even when they’re home with their kids? And are dads more likely that moms to do so?