Fathering

I was once on the way to a wedding with two friends, Trey and Manny. We were all twenty years old.

As we roared through a little down in the Florida panhandle, we passed a lone teenage girl walking on the sidewalk.

Trey leaned out the shotgun window and hooted, “God, you have a great ass!”

Trey leaned back grinning, but both Manny and I were shocked. I didn’t say anything, and I probably never would have–but Manny spoke up.

“Trey,” he said, “did that make the world a better place or a worse place?”

Trey’s grin widened. “Hey, I was paying her a compliment.”

“Put yourself in her shoes,” said Manny. He wasn’t angry or self-righteous; he was just having a conversation. “You’re a woman walking alone down a deserted street, and three guys in a car start shouting at you, talking about your body.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think that’d be scary?”

Trey was quiet for awhile, and I could see the wheels turning in his head. We were now driving down the turnpike, sawgrass on both sides as far as the eye could see.

Finally Trey spoke up. “I guess I made the world worse, didn’t I?” he said.

It was a difficult moment, but afterward, Trey’s behavior improved markedly. Manny didn’t just affect Trey; he was also confronting my pathetic silence.

I was impressed by Manny’s guts, of course; it’s hard to speak out against male stupidity in an all-guy environment. But I was also impressed by his Socratic approach.

Manny didn’t tell Trey that he was acting like an idiot, which of course he was. Instead, Manny asked questions — and the questions were designed to foster empathy and sense of consequence in Trey’s mind.

It’s an example I’ve tried to follow, more than ever as a father.

Empathy and compassion are skills, not fixed traits. And from birth, research has found, those skills are discouraged in boys and encouraged in girls.

Who does the encouraging and discouraging? Parents, mostly. With my wife, I’ve taught my son to walk, talk, use the potty — and I’ve tried to ask him lots and lots of questions about how other people are feelings and what they’re thinking. I do this when he’s battling another boy over a truck, while we’re reading stories, after he’s kicked me for asking him to brush his teeth…whenever and wherever, in hopes that he’ll never turn into Trey.

And of course, I struggle to foster a sense of empathy for my wife. I won’t lie: This can be tough. I lose my temper. I say shit that I later regret. I’m not always fair; I don’t always see things from her perspective. And every time I fail to do that, I make the world–our world, anyway–slightly worse. Worse for her, worse for my son, and, in the long run, worse for me.

“Couples’ relationships suffer less from a failure of words than from a failure of imagination—an ability to imagine what a partner is thinking and feeling,” write researchers Phillip and Carolyn Cowan.

In an ideal world, having children together should bond a couple into an single loving unit. In reality, the Cowans found, conflict shoots up among two thirds of new parents.

The missing ingredient, they argue, is empathy. Parenthood can send men and women off on different roads of feeling and experience; many couples–at least half, to judge by the divorce rate–never find each other again.

Phil and Carolyn make a number of helpful recommendations for fostering empathy between partners, but the bottom line isn’t complicated: I try my best to listen, and to take my wife’s perspective before I take my own.

Perhaps that seems like small potatoes, as might so many items on my list of twenty-five ways for dads to change the world. But I’m going to keep trying anyway.

That’s me in the goofy brown and green sweater, reading a customized version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar; that’s my wife talking about the puppet show we did at our local farmers’ market.

As you’ll see in the video above, we were part of a group that involved almost 20 San Francisco families called “Bees and Butterflies,” whose mission was to explore the life-cycles of bees and butterflies and to introduce basic ecological concepts to our kids. Want to start your own neighborhood group? My pal Olivia Boler describes how we did it over at Shareable.net.

I once wrote an essay for Greater Good magazine about how my circle of families came together in our San Francisco neighborhood, Noe Valley — a process that has resulted in numerous community-building spinoffs. Our urban tribe went on to form a cooperative preschool and, as Olivia describes in her “Bees and Butterflies” piece, a neighborhood group designed to connect our kids to nature, among other projects. As I think is revealed in both Olivia’s article and my own, these activities enriched all our families’ lives in countless ways.

The Bees and Butterflies group was initiated and basically run by moms, with lots of father involvement. In my experience, that’s pretty typical. Most of these moms were the primary caregivers, and I think they really enjoyed the meetings at night, when they’d get together sans kids and partners to plan the group’s activities over dinner and wine. That’s fine with me; they deserve nights out, and they do great work.

But, as has been noted in many places, the estrogen-drenched atmosphere of these meetings can keep dads away, even if everybody wants them to be there and involved.

That shouldn’t stop dads from organizing their own activities (as well as trying to find a place for themselves in mom-dominated groupings). As I write in the Greater Good essay, I was very deliberate in building a community for my son. “You have to work very hard to have a community here,” says my friend Viru Gupte, who was raised in a cooperative and tightly knit urban community in India. “It requires planning.” Viru and I organized playgroups, all-dad-and-kids museum trips, monthly brunches, and lots of other stuff, with the help of other dads and moms.

As a result of all these regular, planned activities, our bonds tightened and we started helping each other out in various ways. We set up weekly kid swaps so that the parents could take turns going out on dates, and we all developed genuine affection for each other’s children.

One day on a beach outing, reported our friend Jackie Adams, a woman next to our little gang said she “couldn’t tell which kids were connected to which parents because all of the adults gave equal amounts of attention to each kid, and each kid seemed familiar and comfortable with each of us.”

Scientists have a name for this kind of behavior: alloparenting, where individuals in addition to the actual parents take on responsibility for children. “Among humans living in foraging societies,” writes the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her 1999 book Mother Nature, “a helpful mate and/or alloparents were usually essential for a mother to rear any infant at all.”

In recent American history, childcare fell exclusively to mothers and their female relatives—but perhaps economic and social changes are rendering that arrangement obsolete. In a time when biological families are scattered across the world, we might once again be seeing a need for dads and other adults to form voluntary tribes that can share in the care and rearing of children.

The need is there–but for many Americans, that need isn’t being met. Many of today’s moms and dads have spent their adult lives chasing jobs and fleeing their relatives, and so they must forge new communities virtually from scratch. Many studies have found that Americans are spending more time alone, and 25 percent now say that they have no close friends—twice as many as two decades ago. This loneliness is linked to mental and physical health problems.

Dads might want to see themselves as more tough and self-reliant than moms, but they are not immune to the effects of isolation. In fact, many studies find that new fathers are plagued by feelings of depression and anxiety, and at least one recent study finds that stay-at-home dads are especially susceptible to stress-related illnesses.

So, dads, whether you’re the breadwinner, the caregiver, and a little bit of both, do what you can to build community and community organizations. It’s good for your kids, good for your mental and physical health, and good for our world.

It’s an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children’s books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children’s books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children.

No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids. But where does that leave families who don’t fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?

There are books out there, few and far between, that depict dads as co-parents and primary caregivers. My list is not exhaustive; these are only the ones I can recommend, and there are many titles I found online that I wasn’t able to read in real life. And because these kinds of books are so rare, I’m willing to bet that there are plenty out there that few people know about.

I look forward to reading your own suggestions!

My list is arranged according to target age, from youngest to oldest:

Mama’s Home! By Paul Vos Benkowski, illustrated by Jennifer Herbert (Chronicle Books, 2004; ages 1-3): I bought this board book, which tells the story of a stay-at-home dad and toddler waiting for mom to come home from work, for Liko when I was taking care of him. It turned out to be a genuine comfort for him to read (over and over!) in the hour before his own mom came home from work, and he delighted in the simple, fanciful storyline: “Is that Mama? / No, that’s not Mama….that’s just a pirate ship.” Strongly recommended.

Kisses for Daddy, by Frances Watts and David Legge (Little Hare Books, 2005; for ages 1-5, I’d say): This is a simple, lightweight picture book with bears, whose title pretty much says it all.

When Bunny Grows Up, by Patricia and Richard Scarry (Golden Books, 1998; ages 1-5): Baby bunny’s family tries to guess what he will be when he grows up–a fireman? a lion tamer? a train conductor? Nuts to all that. Baby bunny wants to be a full-time daddy when he grows up. Originally published in 1955, When Bunny Grows Up was way ahead of its time, and it’s perfect for families with a stay-at-home dad.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George, by Margaret and H.A. Rey (Houghton Mifflin, 1941-1966; ages 1-5): Is the Man with the Yellow Hat the equivalent of George’s father? If not that, I’m not sure what he is.

Daddy’s Lullaby, by Tony Bradman, illustrated by Jason Cockcroft (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2001; ages 2-5): Dad comes home late from work and sings a lullaby to his baby. A very tender book, which shows a working Dad in a caring role.

My Dad, by Anthony Browne (FSG, 2000; ages 2-5): With one or two lines of text per page, the goofy pictures dominate. Dad (in a bathrobe, PJs, and slippers) engages in various fantastical adventures, from jumping over the moon to singing opera with Pavarotti. Silly and sweet.

A Father’s Song, by Janet Lawler, paintings by Lucy Corvino (Sterling, 2006; ages 3-6): A simple, somewhat solemn verse story about a father and son’s day in the park, beautifully illustrated.

Mama’s Coming Home, by Kate Banks, pictures by Tomek Bogacki (FSG, 2003; ages 3-6): Similar to Mama’s Home (above), a solid and heartfelt portrait of a reverse-traditional family in action. Dad and the kids clean up, cook dinner, and set the table, as a parallel narrative shows Mom trudging through sleeting rain and New York subway stations on her way home from work. Especially recommended.

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, by Mo Willems (Hyperion, 2004; ages 2-6): Why is this story such an instant classic? There’s something about Willems’s tone, pacing, and combination of words and pictures that kids think is tons of fun, and I confess this is one of the books I most look forward to reading to Liko. Don’t miss the sequel, Knuffle Bunny Too. Willems’s daughter shares a name with the protagonist of his books, and these stories feel like mini-memoirs, depicting a dad who shares life with his growing little girl.

My Daddy Can Touch the Moon, by Kori Reed, illustrated by Kendra Reed (Reed Family Books, 2002; ages 2-6): This is part of a series that includes titles like Daddy Does the Dishes and My Daddy is Supersillious, which were all handed to me at the 14th Annual At-Home Dad Convention. The pictures are exceedingly simple and some of the text borders on propagandistic (”We love our special Mom and Dad/who care about our needs”), but my son was thoroughly amused and charmed by these little stories of stay-at-home fatherhood, written by a breadwinning mom and illustrated by her sister. Each book ends with a series of questions that my son and I both enjoy exploring: “What is your favorite Daddy-made meal? What do you like to go with your daddy? What is your Daddy’s favorite book to read to you?” You can order these self-published books on Amazon.

Daddy Calls Me Man, by Angela Johnson, paintings by Rhonda Mitchell (Orchard Books, 1997; ages 3-6): Dad doesn’t actually appear until near the end. And yet I think every previous page points to that moment, as a little boy paints a picture of everything that’s most important to him.

Papa, Do You Love Me? By Barbara M. Joosse, illustrated by Barbara Lavallee (Chronicle Books, 2005; ages 3-6): A father in a Kenyan village tells his son how much he loves him. This is a lovely book; the images in the words might be even more evocative than those in the pictures.

Tell Me One Thing, Dad, by Tom Pow, illustrated by Ian Andrew (Candlewick Press, 2004; ages 3-7): Dad reads Molly a story, but she’s not sleepy yet. She asks to hear one thing he knows about polar bears, crocodiles, and so on; at the end, Molly tells Dad things that she knows about him. This is a gentle, beautifully written, unusually paced, and interestingly illustrated story.

Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1940; ages 3-7): You probably already know that Dr. Seuss was a genius. Not just a genius, but probably one of the most successful progressive writers of his day. From environmental responsibility (The Lorax) to anti-racism (Sneetches & Other Stories) to resistance to tyranny (Yertle the Turtle & Other Stories), Dr. Seuss could tackle any topic, no matter how terrible, and teach children something about how the world really works in ways that are inspiring and fun. In Horton Hatches the Egg, Dr. Seuss gives us an elephant hero who hatches himself an elephant-bird baby–and in the process, gives children an archetypal model of male caregiving.

And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, illustrated by Henry Cole (Simon & Schuster, 2005; ages 3-7): This picture book tells the somewhat-true story of Roy and Silo, two boy penguins in Central Park Zoo who shacked up together and adopted a baby penguin of their own, named Tango. And Tango Makes Three isn’t a boring “message” book that tries to teach your kids to be tolerant. It’s genuinely fun for kids to read.

A Father Like That, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (HarperCollins, 2008; ages 3-7): This picture book is actually about a boy who doesn’t have a father, but fantasizes about all the things they’d do together if Dad was around. In the end, his mom assures the boy that while he might never have the dad he wants, he could grow up to be the father he imagines. Yes, it’s somewhat depressing, and yet I think this could be a great Father’s Day gift for boys who really don’t have a dad in the picture. Single moms raising boys, take note.

Finally, for older kids, I’d like to mention Danny, Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake (Knopf, 1975; ages 8-12): “When I was four months old, my mother died suddenly and my father was left to look after me all by himself,” says the narrator, Danny. “There was just the two of us, my father and me.” This is a beautifully told, amusingly imaginative, politically radical, and profoundly emotional tale of a son’s devotion to his father and a father’s devotion to his son. I read this out loud to my 3 year old. He followed the story and liked the characters and incidents, especially the bit when 9-year-old Danny drives a car. However, the plot is driven by the father’s desire to poach a rich man’s pheasants, which was too far outside of Liko’s experience for him to find it interesting. But this book is an outlaw classic that older kids (boys especially) may find evocative and thrilling.

I update this list every year. If you’re looking for books to buy, you might also take a look at my family’s list of most-loved children’s books.

Need a good cry? Get a bunch of fathers together in a room and ask them about paternity leave. You’ll hear about the first times they held their children, fed them, and bathed them. For example, listen to the DadLabs guys talk about their leaves in the three-minute video above. You’d have to be made out of stone to not be moved by their stories.

But if you ask a roomful of dads about paternity leave, you likely also hear heartbreaking stories about how they didn’t get any—and the disasterous effects the lack of leave had on their marriages and self-esteem.

“I’d come home from work at night, and my wife just seemed broken by spending the whole day with our newborn,” said one dad at one of my talks in Manhattan. “I wanted to help her, but I had to go to work. I had already used up my sick time and my vacation. I didn’t know what to do.” As he spoke, this dad’s eyes were fixed on the floor, trying to hide a combination of shame and guilt.

But he learned a lesson. When his wife was pregnant with their second child, this dad got another job—one that offered a generous paid parental leave package.

That benefit is hard to find. The federal government doesn’t require employers to offer paid parental leave, and only 13 percent of American companies do. Even when the leave is available, many new dads don’t take it. One Michigan-based company that offers six weeks of paid leave reports that only 10 men a year, out of 2,000 total employees, take advantage of the policy. A bank in North Carolina found that in 2001 only 12 new fathers took leave, out of 70,000 employees. That same year, 520 mothers took parental leave.

The question is why. Is it because of an innate aversion to child care? An unwillingness to make sacrifices for their families? Or is there another reason?

Despite its obvious importance, there is little empirical data about this question—few researchers have gone out and actually asked fathers why they don’t take advantage of paternity leave, on the rare occasions when it is offered. One 2000 survey of mothers and fathers found that 78 percent of new parents did not take leave because they didn’t feel able to afford the pay cut that usually comes with it. Forty-three percent said leave would hurt their prospects for promotion; 32 percent claimed they’d lose their job if they took leave; 21 percent said their employer denied their request. A 2008 Monster.com survey found that roughly half of fathers did not take paternity leave when offered. The reason? They couldn’t afford it, because the leaves entailed either a pay cut or no pay at all.

These stark numbers are underlined by plenty of anecdotes and speculation by human resources directors and corporate spokespeople. “One reason for not taking advantage of it is because they may perceive that it might hinder their climb up the corporate ladder,” a spokesman for AT&T told HR Magazine. “The best way for companies to promote usage of the leave is for senior management to use it. My impression is that parental leave will take off with fathers after some high-profile CEO stays home for a few days to take care of his children.” His impression is supported by several surveys in the 1990s that showed a majority of managers believed that new fathers should not take advantage of flextime and parental leave policies.

In the rest of the world, of course, paid parental leave is normal. In Sweden today, fathers are entitled to 10 days of paid leave after a child is born, and 80 percent of them take it, often combining it with vacation time. Parents get a total of 480 days off after they have a child, with 60 days reserved for mothers and 60 for fathers. The rest can be divided according to the wishes of the parents. Of those days, 390 are paid at 80 percent of the parents’ incomes, with the remaining 90 days paid at a set rate. In 2006, 20 percent of fathers took their share of extended leave. That might not seem like a lot, but it compares very favorably to the minuscule number of American fathers who take advantage of the paltry amount of leave available to them. And after Swedish parents go back to work, high-quality day care is available to all parents, regardless of ability to pay.

The reforms had a sweeping impact on the culture of fatherhood in Sweden. “By international standards, Swedish fathers take on a good deal of the day-to-day care of their children,” writes the Swedish feminist Karin Alfredsson. “Mothers still stay home longer with newborn children, but the responsibility for caring for sick children—while receiving benefits from the state—is more evenly divided between mothers and fathers. It is almost as common for fathers as it is for mothers to pick up and leave the children at pre-school and school.”

The upshot: We know from the northern European (and Canadian) experience that men will take more advantage of parental leave if policy, workplaces, and culture support them. In America the culture is changing in advance of workplaces and public policy, and a new generation of fathers is more willing to take advantage of leave and rebel against workplace cultures, even at the expense of careers. When the American University Program on WorkLife Law studied sixty-seven trade union arbitrations in which workers claimed to have been punished for meeting family responsibilities, they discovered that two-thirds of the cases involved men taking care of children, elders, or sick spouses.

In the meantime, more and more fathers are filing complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), claiming that their employers have discriminated against them because of their caregiving roles. In some cases, says the EEOC, “employers have wrongly denied male employees’ requests for leave for child care purposes while granting similar requests to female employees.”

“I expect that the number of men coming forward to claim caregiver discrimination will increase,” says EEOC attorney Elizabeth Grossman. “Men are deciding to fight the stereotypes. Men are deciding they want to have a work/ family balance.” And a warning to their employers: Jury verdicts in their favor have reached as high as $11.65 million.

As a result, more and more companies, large and small, are offering family leave benefits to men. “A few years ago, I would have told you that paternity leave wasn’t that beneficial in terms of recruiting and retaining,” Burke Stinson, a spokesperson for AT&T, tells HR Magazine. “But today, I would say these 20-something men are far less burdened by the macho stereotypes and the stereotypes about the incompetent dad than their predecessors. They are more plugged in to the enrichment of their children and more comfortable taking time off to be fathers.”

Men today have caregivng as well as breadwinning responsiblities, but government and corporations act as though American men are robots. Want that to change, dads? Take the leave available to you, encourage other dads to do the same (especially if you’re their supervisor on the job), participate in MomsRising’s campaign for paid parental leave, organize in your community to educate people about the issue, and, if you’re denied leave, think about changing jobs…or perhaps even suing the bastards. You’ll help make the world a better place.

This entry was adapted from my book, The Daddy Shift.

“I’m thinking about writing a series for my Mothering blog,” I told my wife, Olli.

“Cool,” she said. “Do you have a title?”

“‘Fifty Ways Dads Can Change the World,’” I said. “Or maybe twenty five. Fifty is a lot. Anyway, it’ll be about the personal and political ways dads can make a difference in their communities.”

“Like what?”

“I was thinking the first item should advise dads to attend every doctor’s appointment.”

“Really?” said my wife, as her eyebrows rose and an amused little smile creased her face. “Do you remember that Liko has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at one?”

I stared at her. “Um, no. Really?”

“Yes, really.”

She had told me weeks before; I had completely forgotten.

“Shit,” I said. “I scheduled a meeting tomorrow.”

It’s a sorry fact: Over the years my wife has become the one most responsible for managing our son’s relationship to the medical industry, from buying cough drops to making appointments, and I do a so-so job of keeping up with her.

She’s not alone. “I see way more moms in doctor’s offices than I do dads,” says one San Francisco pediatrician, who asked that I not use her name. “And way more moms ask questions and do the follow-up work.”

It’s tempting, as always, to blame this disparity on the innate perfidy of men and the long-suffering, overcompensating virtue of women, but I wager that the roots of this division of domestic labor lie elsewhere.

Men in general don’t go to the doctor nearly as often as women—I didn’t go to the doctor for almost nine years, until a violent mugging drove me into Kaiser for treatment of a concussion. In other words, as is the case with many guys, it takes a near-death experience to get me to set foot in a doctor’s office. My wife, meanwhile, voluntarily, proactively goes several times a year for various check-ups and tests.

Perhaps the reproductive division of labor also plays a role: for nine months, a child is a part of a biological mother’s body, and so it makes a certain amount of sense that moms would more carefully track the vagaries of their children’s bodies.

Whatever the reason, guys as a group avoid doctors’ offices even more than they avoid unpleasant domestic tasks like cleaning the toilet. Even so, the pediatrician says, over twelve years of practice she’s seen a steady uptick in the number of dads who come through her office: “Moms outnumber dads by about two to one in my office, but that number used to be four to one.”

This has to do with rising expectations. In my grandfather’s day, dads-to-be smoked cigars at the bar across the street, a shot of whiskey in hand, while their wives gave birth. My father, a baby boomer, was present at my birth, largely as a bystander.

Today, the dads of Generation X and Y are expected to play a part in the corporeal life of the child, from prenatal appointments to the day of birth to regular check-ups, and families and researchers alike have discovered that it can make a huge difference for their families, both mother and child.

One 2001 study by Columbia University researcher Julian Tietler, for example, discovered that father involvement in prenatal care has a positive effect on the mom’s health during pregnancy—and several other studies have suggested that father involvement might even improve birth outcomes, though results are not conclusive.

Beyond birth, a truly huge number of studies have definitively found that a father’s presence in the doctor’s office predicts better health and educational outcomes for the child—and helps form bonds that keep families intact over the long run.

The bonding starts long before birth. I remember our first sonogram, sitting there is a white, otherwordly room watching the technician ultrasonically surf the inside of my wife’s womb.

“It’s healthy,” said the technician, a young guy with close-cropped hair and a vulture-like nose. “And it’s a boy.”

The floor seemed to tilt under my feet, as the categorical hypothesis that was my “child” acquired, for the first time, some degree of individuality. “How do you know?”

“You see the penis?” he said.

I looked and looked, searching for a penis as I never had before. So did my wife. The technician insisted that our boy was hung like John Holmes, but all we saw was an androgynous sea monkey floating at the bottom of a pixilated, black-and-white pond.

“I’ll just take your word for it,” I finally said, feeling as if I had let my son down.

He printed out the sonographic image of our son. I framed it and brought it to work that very day, and hung the picture up to the right of my computer. It’s something I do to this day, two jobs later, though now the image is fading with age. Every time I look at that picture, I feel a kind of vertigo—but the vertigo I feel today if very different from the one I experienced that day back in 2004.

When I first saw that little sea monkey, I felt as if I was staring from the top of a lonely cliff, down into a murky future, and I felt myself about to jump; today, after having experienced the astonishing accretion of loving acts and frustrations and challenges that come with the package of parenthood, the perspective has reversed itself: now I am swimming at the bottom of an ocean with my family looking up at a blurry, half-remembered past life, one that was far more isolated than the life I now enjoy.

On the day I told my wife about this series and discovered that I had forgotten about Liko’s doctor’s appointment, I cancelled the meeting I had the next day (much to the annoyance of my colleagues, it must be said) and went to the appointment instead. Did this small action help make the world a better place? The research says it does; dads in the doctor’s office contribute to the health of both moms and kids.

But did my son even notice? He probably didn’t notice anything different; the fact is, though I don’t always do a good job of keeping track of appointments, I’ve attended almost every one. He takes my presence in the doctor’s office for granted, as he should. It doesn’t matter to me if he doesn’t consciously appreciate it: it’s just one more step in a journey that we’re taking together, one filled with as many moments of boredom and annoyance as those of joy and tenderness.

Where are we going? Who knows? The important thing is that we’re taking the journey together.

Once upon a time, I rode a bike instead of driving to work, because that seemed better for the sky and the earth—not to mention my health. I read the newspaper every day and I voted in every election. I joined our friends in marching for peace in the Middle East and for gay and lesbian equality, even though I’m as straight as a ruler.

And it goes without saying that my wife and I enjoyed a habitually egalitarian relationship. Of course she worked and I worked. Of course we shared housework. Of course we talked through all decisions that affected both of us.

In short, I led a reasonably socially conscious, environmentally responsible life, just like lots of guys.

Then in July 2004, we became parents. The marching stopped. Instead I pushed a stroller. I struggled to change diapers, not society. And the issues I once cared about so much—peace, the environment, economic and racial justice—seemed suddenly irrelevant to my daily life. My values hadn’t changed, but everything else had: the demands on my time, my priorities, my view of the world.

For the first time in my adult life, I missed voting days. I simply forgot. Swept up in the daily grind, many parents I know forget to vote. This, I now realize, is probably why America still doesn’t have paid parental leave or universal health care.

But the deepest—and in some ways, most devastating—change happened at home, as the relationship between my wife and I was utterly unbalanced. The old egalitarian habits went out the window; everything took conscious effort, as if I’d had an intellectual and emotional stroke and needed to learn how to walk and talk all over again. For the first time in our eleven years together, our daily lives diverged and my wife and I started arguing. My baby son consumed his mother’s life, tethering her to home, and I was simply not as absorbed by the physical and emotional demands of parenthood, especially in that first year.

This added to my power and limited hers—meaning that I had more choices than she did. In the throes of becoming parents, when strain and sleeplessness can drive our ideals and aspirations over a cliff, I discovered that it is easy for both men and women to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission.

The damage isn’t limited to one couple; the accumulation of individual choices shifts the balance of social power between men and women, as women are pushed to retreat from paid work and public life while men feel compelled to excel in those areas. When it was happening, I had no idea how to negotiate this transition or how to make it fair for my wife.

The politics didn’t end at home; in the larger world, I discovered challenges that I’d never faced before. Work had become political in ways that I wasn’t at first able to recognize. For the first year of my son’s life, I worked at a nonprofit that offered six weeks of fully paid parental leave, which I took advantage of. Seven months later at a management team meeting, the executive director suggested we eliminate this benefit and simply meet the minimum required by law: six weeks at partial pay (a benefit unique, at this writing, to California; everywhere else in America, parental leave is totally unpaid).

My fellow managers had obviously already discussed it and I knew they were thinking of me; dads weren’t supposed to take the full leave, especially managers. I spoke up in favor of the policy, of course, but I sensed everyone expected me to, and, in truth, I was not forceful: it felt somehow selfish of me to argue for the policy, since at that point I was the only one who had benefited. I thought I was speaking only for myself, which I see in retrospect was a mistake. As a brand-new dad, I didn’t understand at that time that parental leave was a political issue, one that affects all parents.

We voted, and I was one of two dissenters. Six months after that vote, I was a stay-at-home dad. Do I regret speaking out? I regret not speaking out more passionately and persuasively. Uncertain and uninformed about the unique issues that faced me as a dad, I couldn’t be an effective advocate.

And that is why I am starting a new series here at my Mothering blog, “Twenty-Five Ways for Dads to Change the World”: to brief new dads on the political issues they’ll face as fathers and to suggest ways for them to stay socially engaged after parenthood.

In other words, we’ll be tackling all the issues that the most parenting guides are afraid to touch. The best-selling What to Expect When You’re Expecting lists every possible illness and injury that can kill or cripple your child—but it doesn’t address the fact that 46 million Americans (possibly including your own family) don’t have access to health care. Health care, equality for gay and lesbian parents, paid sick time, peace in our homes and communities, environmental sustainability—these aren’t just abstract “issues.” Winning these battles will actually help us to take care of our children.

Of course, I reckon that I routinely, successfully practice only about half of the twenty-five suggestions I will make in this series; the rest I struggle with. I know perfection isn’t possible, and, as a parent, I know that perfection isn’t even desirable. As Chabon writes in Manhood for Amateurs, “A father is a man who fails every day.”

The failures are trivially personal—“I’ll buy you an ice cream if you just stop crying!”—and they can be profoundly political, as when we ignore poverty and homelessness in our neighborhood. Our daily failures as parents can even have global implications: Overwhelmed by our day-to-day duties, we cram everything into the trash instead of reusing, recycling, and composting—I know I do. We buy an SUV and drive the kids everywhere, because that’s a hell of a lot easier than getting them (and ourselves) to walk or bike or take the bus. All of us fall short in some area of our lives; as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see our imperfections are signs of our common humanity. If we speak out against human weakness, it must be with compassion and understanding, for others as well as for ourselves.

Some readers might be sighing in despair. We face so many pressures as parents—do we really need to add “changing the world” to the list? Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? But I’ve discovered that it doesn’t have to be that way. Making anti-war signs with my son is fun, like drawing castles or folding paper airplanes, and memories of the two of us marching for peace seem to stand out vividly in his mind. My small, personal efforts to help change the world are special memories for him, ones that will, I hope, shape his values over the long run. Raising my son this way helps him to live a larger life.

At the end of the day, changing the world ought to be a way of playing with our kids, meeting people, exploring the world. Social and political participation should be indivisible from good fathering. When we work (and play!) to improve our homes, neighborhoods, cities, countries, and planet, we are teaching our kids to do the same. If only through example, we teach them to live as fully as possible, to see the interconnections between human beings and between humanity and nature, to take action on behalf of others and on their own behalf. Trying to change the world isn’t just another pressure we face; it’s good medicine that helps us to cope with those pressures.

Fathers have always worked to improve the world, of course. Historically, their activism was built upon their roles as breadwinners. When fathers joined the labor movement and battled for pay, health benefits, and weekends off, they were, in many respects, fighting for better lives for their families and for all families.

However, as I argue in my book The Daddy Shift, the definition of fatherhood has expanded in recent decades beyond breadwinning, to include a capacity for caregiving as well. This has made many fathers conscious of how their caregiving is discouraged by economic, cultural, and even political forces—and today, we are seeing more and more dads advocate for changes in society, public policy, and the workplace that will allow us to be the fathers that we want to be. Only 12 percent of men have access to paid paternity leave. Many don’t take leave when it’s available because they fear for the future of their careers. That needs to change—and dads are the only ones who are going to make that change. If we don’t speak up for ourselves, who will speak for us?

Changing the world is not actually about changing the world; we as individuals are small and the world is large. In the end, taking action is about changing ourselves: opening our eyes, looking around, seeing the distance between hope and reality—and acting to close that unhappy distance.

That process happens in our homes, as we struggle to wash as many dishes as our partners—and thus live up to egalitarian ideals—and in every place we touch, from our cubicle walls to the earth under our feat to the sky above our heads. Change is intrinsic to life, and it is when we struggle to participate in that change—to strive to improve the world—that we feel most alive. And when we see that distance between hope and reality disappear—when we find ourselves, incredibly, living our values—the result is hard-earned happiness, happiness we deserve. This is one of the secrets to living a good life.

I’ll post each of my twenty-five suggestions every Monday, starting October 5. I hope you’ll join me, and I hope you’ll share your thoughts through comments to this blog.