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Dads Struggle with Work/Life Balance, Too

Featured Author:

Lylah M. Alphonse

Lylah M. Alphonse is a Boston-based journalist and blogger. She writes about parenting news and family issues for The Boston Globe and Boston.com/moms, about work-life balance and family finance for Shine.Yahoo.com, and about juggling a full-time career and a more-than-full-time family at The 36-Hour Day at Workitmom.com where she's also the managing editor. Her product and book reviews appear in The Boston Globe and in the Affordable Luxuries shopping blog at Work It, Mom. She blogs about all of this and more at Write. Edit. Repeat; follow her on Twitter.

More articles from this author:

• Working Moms: The Kids Are Fine

A newly released Boston College study called “The New Dad: Exploring Fatherhood Within a Career Context” points out that career-minded fathers may be facing an issue similar to that which working mothers know all too well: the difficulties of balancing career and parenthood.

“Men are facing the same clash of social ideals that women have faced since the 1970s — how do you be a good parent and a good worker?” Joan C. Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California, told the New York Times on Sunday. “This is a pretty sensitive indicator of the rise of the new ideal of the good father as a nurturing father, not just a provider father.”

But there’s a twist: Part of what’s making it harder for modern men to be good fathers is the fact that their wives often discount the work these dads do at home (check out the discussion going on about this at my In the Parenthood blog at Boston.com).

I’ll admit it: I know I do this sometimes. In spite of the growing acceptance of fathers in the workplace who put their families first, the overwhelming assumption is that dad can work late because mom’s there to pick up the slack at home. And that breeds resentment. It’s easy to fall into bed after a long day of juggling work and parenthood and housework and start thinking of all the things you did that he didn’t have to do — without considering the things he does that you don’t.

In my household, I tend to do all of those treading-water chores that have to be done so you don’t drown in them — things like laundry and vacuuming and decluttering and cooking. But in all of the years we’ve lived in our home, I’ve never once mowed the lawn or fixed a clapboard — my husband takes care of all of those things. So doesn’t that mean our “housework” chores even out in the end? And wouldn’t that be the case for most families where both parents work?

The numbers don’t work out that way. The National Survey of Families and Households from the University of Wisconsin found that when both husband and wife work outside the home (which is the case more than 70 percent of two-parent households with kids, according to 2008 US Census data), the woman spends about 28 hours a week on housework while the husband spends about 16 hours.