I have decided, after careful consideration, to resign my post as the Chief Creative Officer of DadLabs.com in order to spend more time with my family. It has been my pleasure to serve, but I feel that I need to spend more time with my wife and our three children.
Kidding. But have you noticed that whenever a high profile corporate or political figure resigns that he almost invariably cites a need to spend more time with his family? And exactly how much do we believe that garbage?
What “I need to spend more time with my family” actually means is “I’ve done something deeply embarrassing and damaging to my family, and so I had to resign before I got sacked. I will actually be spending some time at home but most of that will be on the Blackberry with the headhunters until I can get the next gig so I can get the hell out of the house before my wife asks me to pick up the dry cleaning again. How humiliating.”
The problem here is that using “I want to spend time with my family” as the standard explanation for getting canned is that it demeans every guy that ever actually made a decision to compromise his career in order to be with his kids. Every guy who ever went part time, that works from home, that didn’t take a promotion that required travel hears some corrupt jerk claim that he wants to spend more time with his family it makes us throw up a little in our mouths.
I certainly hope that this is not the case with Dan Bartlett who resigned on his 36th birthday after serving as a close advisor to George Bush for almost fourteen years. Not that I would ever doubt the veracity of a member of the Bush administration, but when I read that he was citing a need to spend more time with his three-year old twins and his five-month old I hoped that he wasn’t just grabbing the nearest cliché. That’s a bunch of young kids that need to spend some time with their dad.
The crazy thing is that, just because of the age of his kids, Bartlett’s claim seemed more legit to me. Two three-year-olds and a newborn? What kind of stone-hearted bastard could possibly resist that?
That dude had better spend some time with his kids. He needs to build some credibility. Because by the time those kids are teenagers, he’s going to have some serious explaining to do.
If a high-ranking woman made the claim that she was stepping down to spend time with her kids, would our assumptions be different? What does that say about the state of modern American fatherhood?
Clay Nichols, Health Correspondent:
Clay’s column, DADVENTURE, published twice monthly to Gather Essentials: Health, is a sure-fire guide to raising flawless, perfectly behaved, and always obedient children. Yeah, right.
Clay is the co-author of Filmmaking for Teens: Pulling Off Your Shorts, an award-winning playwright, and the Chief Creative Officer (or not?) at DadLabs.com, a fatherhood website.
You can find all of Clay’s Dadventure articles at http://gather.com/dadventure
Keep up with Clay’s other postings and Gather activity by joining his Gather network -- just click here and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page
You’ll find Clay and other health correspondents, plus expert guest columnist content and plenty of other health nuts at Health.gather.com
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Comments: 17
I am sure you have run into all sorts of extreme reactions to both dads who stay home and moms who don't. Like there is no room for balance and personal choice. (Have you written about the guys who get a tickertape parade for changing a diaper? That always amuses me in a sort of WTF? way...)
JS -- Sounds like you hubby made a very honorable sacrifice. Bravo.
Honestly, though, I hadn't even considered that someone saying that would automatically be lying. I've stepped away from work situations because my children's needs came first. I didn't reenlist in the Navy, which I loved, because my kids needed someone home and later my best chance at having a career and building some sort of work experience that wasn't low-level service work was halted because I needed to stay home. I still worked but I took jobs that made it possible for me to be available for my husband and kids.
And the idea that people who have made faux pas need to find some sort of excuse to step down as a way to save face... is that so odd? Or hard to understand? It would be nice if they didn't use their family's as that excuse but it's a time honored tradition. Cynical, but true. It's like saying the dog ate my homework. :-p
I know several women who claim to have never been meant to be parents, and who would do nearly anything to be able to keep away from their kids all the time and not have to "be bothered" with them.
I think the reason we hear more about it from men is because frim a man it is considered an honorable sacrifice of his god-given right to be the breadwinner, whereas a woman is seen as being selfish if she gets a job instead of "preforming her duty" as a mother and housewife. Women are expected to spend time with the kids, for men time with the family is commonly viewed as a weekend-only adventure.
When a woman abandons her c areer it is seen as a positiv e reinforcement of old-fashioned "family values"...
KR -- I think that you can definitely see the power of socialized gender roles in this dynamic.