When do you start to feel like a father? For Brian Gresko, it was during a solo visit to the NICU after a traumatic delivery. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus tries to convince Neo that he has the power to manipulate the “reality” of their computer-simulated world. “There’s a difference between knowing the path and […]
1. I’m unsure why, but I get asked—quite often—about the hardest part of being a father. The people who ask me this are almost all younger cats who are about to become fathers or are there already. That question is a Pandora’s Box. Being a father is hard in a million different ways: Balancing fatherhood […]
“I am so bored with that question,” the woman told my wife, M, who had just asked her how they structured their family life so that she could go back to school with three kids. M wanted to know, What was their model? “We used to talk about that all the time,” the woman added. […]
Last week, in one of the highlights of my year (and okay, life), I was honored to sit down in a small group of New York-based writers over lattes and lemon pancakes, along with Anna Quindlen. She is only one of my all-time favorite writers, and possibly yours too, if you’re a parent who writes. […]
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ announcement that he would not be seeking the GOP nomination for the 2012 presidential race because his family had exercised their veto power has gained a lot of traction in the news. This discussion also raises a lot of questions about parenting and spousal roles and responsibility. Both Mitch and his […]
Why is it that no one freaks out when young girls play with trucks or engage in sports but when a boy in an ad has pink nail polish a brouhaha follows? Why is it that women have increasingly moved into previously male professions like law and medicine but nursing remains only 8% male? The […]
My mother, who grew up in the Midwest in the 1950’s, can do anything with her hands. She can sew, cook, fix plumbing, and diagnose an electrical problem. She can garden, compost, paint, and decorate. She taught me how to drive and she could parallel park the Titanic. Like most women of her generation, she […]
I was surprisingly touched by this simple, wise letter by Dan Mulhern to his son, on how to be a Real Man today. Surrounded by a recent sea of articles heralding the end of men, or decrying a male/masculinity crisis, its easy to lose site of how liberating a moment this could be for men […]
This article could set dreams of shared parenting and gender equality back decades. I applaud the honesty of the writer but wonder how much of what was described really has to do with parenting versus a dysfunctional relationship among two people with many idiosyncrasies. The first thing that struck me is the attempt to plan […]
I applaud the idea behind McKinsey & Company’s new special report, Unlocking the full potential of women in the U.S. economy, which hits on a number of important issues including why more women are not getting into higher management positions; how choices about the quality of the work/life balance affect both men and women; and […]
We seem to be seeing more writings from men and women where the man is home with children and the woman works. This is a “blip” statistically but I am guessing that these anecdotes will translate into real numbers eventually. I am curious about the underlying assumption in this and other writings that one parent […]
I’ll never forget when a good friend said of her husband, “I swear he’s happier now that he finally makes more money than I do.” Yeah, many of us might secretly think that when breadwinning roles are reversed. But I’ve never seen any data proving this. Even worse, the media blitz covering the “Mancession” has […]
