Reading the stories by so many moms about how they have been discriminated against at the workplace is unsettling at best and horrifying at worst, but it’s not surprising.
First, I think what companies are doing is very typical of ego-oriented human behavior. We all like to think that we’re important, that what we’re doing is a priority. It brings me back to High School where I recall nearly every teacher expecting that we’d treat his/her class with the highest priority. Children in particular have difficulty understanding that the world doesn’t revolve completely around them. Why should it be different with companies as they are paying people good money to be dedicated to their jobs. Shouldn’t they deserve nothing more than complete devotion? (And by the way, this isn’t purely directed at women but at anyone who seems as though they may not put the company first: ie Stay-At-Home Dads returning to the workforce. )The stockholders are expecting massive profits, so the pressure is extreme to produce with maximum efficiency. There’s a lot of insistence on paying the fewest people to do as much work as possible. How can moms expect to be treated without discrimination in such a company-centric environment?
The answer is that moms (and dads, too) shouldn’t accept this corporate behavior and should demand more family/work balance. What’s wrong with most companies today stems from our I-ME-MINE consumer cultural values. It really goes to the core about what is wrong with our culture at this point – that greed and personal interest trump all else. It’s not about moms or dads or families anymore, but about how we treat ourselves. It goes deep into the core of our societal values.
The good news is that there is a greater awareness of these issues thanks to people like Joan and her army at MomsRising and I’m optimistic that we are currently going through a turning point in terms of how people see gender equity and family/work balance. Old models of business are becoming obsolete by the powers of the internet, more people able to work at home and more women in the workforce than ever before; and with this, things will change. Things are also changing because the upcoming new generation of moms and dads are becoming more expectant of a greater balance – likely a reaction to having been put into daycare when they were kids and not wanting to feel as detached from their kids as they may with their parents. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s on the way.
Lastly, as a concerned father and a filmmaker moving through the process of documenting the evolving role of dad, it seems to me once again that the only way to hasten change in family/work balance is to get dads into the mix. The more this becomes a women’s issue, the more resistance we’re going to see with things changing. Only when moms and dads alike demand increased work/family balance will change really kick in.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Love That Binds
Hey out there. The holidays are over. The New Year has begun and the Evolution of Dad marches onward. There's really so much to do.
I had the greatest luck while in Boston to go to a Celtics game and not only watch the team trounce its rival but also that I happened to be sitting next to a very lovely family of four, the Mosley's, in which the father was a SAHD circa 1990. One doesn't come across too many families from that far back who fit this. What makes this particularly helpful for the film is that their son and daughter are both old enough to really talk about their experience. Ally is 22 and George is 19 and plays football at Georgetown. What immediately came across was the love that binds this family. I don't know what was more fun, continually switching seats so to get to talk to each of them throughout the game or the game itself.
Several days after Christmas I snuck away from my own family and interviewed the Mosley's on film. The experience was incredibly moving for me and for them. There was something truly deep going on and it was a privilege for me to record it. After filming concluded they graciously gave me some old home movies shot on VHS tapes. Today, I watched them and watching Ally and George when they were little kids added an even greater appreciation for their journeys. Their dad, Wayne, who looks remarkably the same as he did Seventeen years ago, is such a gentle but powerful force in the family. He and his wife, Robin, are still as much in love as from what I watched from 1985.
With so much misery out there, it's always reassuring to meet a family like the Mosley's or the Vachons or the Knussmans (see prior posts.) These are families that aren't stuck in old ideas of how families should be defined. Each in their own way have found unique ways to balance their families. It may not be the high drama that sells on TV but there is something spiritually cleansing and affirming about being in their midsts.
On a personal note, I keep reflecting about why, psychologically, I was drawn to making this film in the first place. There are many reasons, I suppose: to create something meaningful. To inspire dads to get more involved with their kids. To connect with more people. To feel validated as a father. However, I think the biggest reason is to find balance - something which seems to elude me more than I wish it did. Somehow, someway, my greatest hope is that buried in the hours of all this footage, balance may be found.
I had the greatest luck while in Boston to go to a Celtics game and not only watch the team trounce its rival but also that I happened to be sitting next to a very lovely family of four, the Mosley's, in which the father was a SAHD circa 1990. One doesn't come across too many families from that far back who fit this. What makes this particularly helpful for the film is that their son and daughter are both old enough to really talk about their experience. Ally is 22 and George is 19 and plays football at Georgetown. What immediately came across was the love that binds this family. I don't know what was more fun, continually switching seats so to get to talk to each of them throughout the game or the game itself.
Several days after Christmas I snuck away from my own family and interviewed the Mosley's on film. The experience was incredibly moving for me and for them. There was something truly deep going on and it was a privilege for me to record it. After filming concluded they graciously gave me some old home movies shot on VHS tapes. Today, I watched them and watching Ally and George when they were little kids added an even greater appreciation for their journeys. Their dad, Wayne, who looks remarkably the same as he did Seventeen years ago, is such a gentle but powerful force in the family. He and his wife, Robin, are still as much in love as from what I watched from 1985.
With so much misery out there, it's always reassuring to meet a family like the Mosley's or the Vachons or the Knussmans (see prior posts.) These are families that aren't stuck in old ideas of how families should be defined. Each in their own way have found unique ways to balance their families. It may not be the high drama that sells on TV but there is something spiritually cleansing and affirming about being in their midsts.
On a personal note, I keep reflecting about why, psychologically, I was drawn to making this film in the first place. There are many reasons, I suppose: to create something meaningful. To inspire dads to get more involved with their kids. To connect with more people. To feel validated as a father. However, I think the biggest reason is to find balance - something which seems to elude me more than I wish it did. Somehow, someway, my greatest hope is that buried in the hours of all this footage, balance may be found.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The Eviction of Eloise
Okay, I know this isn't about writing about Darfur or what's going on in Iraq or New Orleans, but I have to let it out.
Every morning I read to my boys while they drink their milks. It's a gift, really, to be able to do this. The experience has made me a sort of connoisseur of children's literature. One of Charlie's favorite books (and mine as well) is Eloise by Kay Thompson. For those not acquainted, Eloise is the story about a precocious, fast talking six-year-old girl who lives with her nanny at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The story was written in the Fifties and has sparked several subsequent Eloise books as well as movie and cartoon adaptations. The drawings are as fantastic as the writing.
Anyway, I recently had the brainstorm of bringing Charlie to The Plaza, where we'd sit in the hotel lobby and I would read the story to him where it theoretically all takes place. You have no idea how excited my little four-year-old son was at the prospect of this literary adventure. In the numbing December air we trekked all the way to the hotel only to learn that the Plaza Hotel, that mainstay of New York opulence and the setting for so many different movies, had become, aside for a small sliver that's still being renovated, condominium-ized.
The doorman who stopped us at the revolving doors into Eloise's Mecca had the forlorn look of a man whose children had been snatched from him. He explained in somber terms the endless parade of other parents with their excited young Eloise fans that he had been turning away. Why couldn't the lobby at least have been left for people to come see, even if the rest of the place could be private? Why couldn't a child be allowed a few happy moments to fulfill his or her fantasy of standing in the lobby where this beloved character had played? There was no use in complaining to him as he was just a self-described 'door pusher' and not the one in charge.
All we could do was peer past this pathetic gate keeper at the empty, lifeless, gold-adorned lobby, where never an entranced child would be able to linger, unless he or she lived there. The life had been sucked from the place. It was as if Eloise and all that is vivacious about her character, had been tossed out.
My son was bewildered from that point on all the way to tucking him into bed tonight. He kept asking the same question over and over.
"But why can't we go there, daddy?"
I can't tell you how many different ways that I tried to explain it to him: that things sometimes change. That sometimes the special things in this world can come undone even if we don't want them. That there are people out there who want things all for themselves.
"But why, daddy? Why?"
After a certain point I realized there was no way his four-year-old mind could understand why he couldn't go into this place and I just acquiesced, telling him I just didn't know. And honestly, emotionally, I don't either.
I know that some of you reading this are thinking that this particular blog is a bit sentimental and perhaps even a nary trite - and you're probably right. But to me at this moment, the idea of children not being allowed into the Plaza lobby is indicative of all that is wrong with our American culture, where money is always more important than people, where greed is king. My film focuses on how dads suffer in this culture, but truly, it impacts nearly everything, from the pesticide-laden food we eat, to the environment that we are destroying to the lead-covered toys our kids play with....
"But why, daddy? Why?"
Every morning I read to my boys while they drink their milks. It's a gift, really, to be able to do this. The experience has made me a sort of connoisseur of children's literature. One of Charlie's favorite books (and mine as well) is Eloise by Kay Thompson. For those not acquainted, Eloise is the story about a precocious, fast talking six-year-old girl who lives with her nanny at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The story was written in the Fifties and has sparked several subsequent Eloise books as well as movie and cartoon adaptations. The drawings are as fantastic as the writing.
Anyway, I recently had the brainstorm of bringing Charlie to The Plaza, where we'd sit in the hotel lobby and I would read the story to him where it theoretically all takes place. You have no idea how excited my little four-year-old son was at the prospect of this literary adventure. In the numbing December air we trekked all the way to the hotel only to learn that the Plaza Hotel, that mainstay of New York opulence and the setting for so many different movies, had become, aside for a small sliver that's still being renovated, condominium-ized.
The doorman who stopped us at the revolving doors into Eloise's Mecca had the forlorn look of a man whose children had been snatched from him. He explained in somber terms the endless parade of other parents with their excited young Eloise fans that he had been turning away. Why couldn't the lobby at least have been left for people to come see, even if the rest of the place could be private? Why couldn't a child be allowed a few happy moments to fulfill his or her fantasy of standing in the lobby where this beloved character had played? There was no use in complaining to him as he was just a self-described 'door pusher' and not the one in charge.
All we could do was peer past this pathetic gate keeper at the empty, lifeless, gold-adorned lobby, where never an entranced child would be able to linger, unless he or she lived there. The life had been sucked from the place. It was as if Eloise and all that is vivacious about her character, had been tossed out.
My son was bewildered from that point on all the way to tucking him into bed tonight. He kept asking the same question over and over.
"But why can't we go there, daddy?"
I can't tell you how many different ways that I tried to explain it to him: that things sometimes change. That sometimes the special things in this world can come undone even if we don't want them. That there are people out there who want things all for themselves.
"But why, daddy? Why?"
After a certain point I realized there was no way his four-year-old mind could understand why he couldn't go into this place and I just acquiesced, telling him I just didn't know. And honestly, emotionally, I don't either.
I know that some of you reading this are thinking that this particular blog is a bit sentimental and perhaps even a nary trite - and you're probably right. But to me at this moment, the idea of children not being allowed into the Plaza lobby is indicative of all that is wrong with our American culture, where money is always more important than people, where greed is king. My film focuses on how dads suffer in this culture, but truly, it impacts nearly everything, from the pesticide-laden food we eat, to the environment that we are destroying to the lead-covered toys our kids play with....
"But why, daddy? Why?"
Sunday, December 16, 2007
To War or Not To War
There’s been some activity recently in the media revolving around the ‘Daddy Wars’ term and I’ve been hesitant to support it, but the tide for me seems to be turning in my mind.
My hesitancy stems from the whole bloated ‘Mommy Wars’ thing which from my vantage point is a trumped-up concept by the media to rile women up and further cloud what the real picture is in terms of family/work balance. Every time I hear that phrase, I just shake my head in disgust. Frankly, it’s comparable to the ‘Stay-At-Home Dad as a growing movement’ articles and segments that keep cropping up. These are media pieces that focus on the wrong things with the (intended or not) effect of maintaining the status quo of people finding themselves torn between jobs that demand complete commitments and spending time with their families.
So, now the ‘Daddy Wars’ concept is starting to appear more and more in print and my initial reaction was to discourage the phrase as it seemed a thankless sequel to ‘Mommy Wars.’
However, something altogether more interesting seems to be occurring with the ‘Daddy Wars’ concept. The conflict isn’t being perceived between Traditional Dads and the Stay-At-Home Dads (which would be obvious manufactured companion to the ‘Mommy Wars’) but between dads who desire to have more of a work/family balance and their bosses, who are more typically dads themselves at a slightly older age and bred more on being more of a dedicated breadwinner. This idea was most recently written about in USA Today; and for a deeper analysis, please check out a commentary blog about it by Brian Reid, aka Rebel Dad. I’ve argued with Brian in the past against the ‘Daddy Wars’ idea but he seems to be winning me over on it. Thank you, Brian.
What this speaks of are two things: first, that the generation after mine (Gen Y) is gearing up for settling down and they seem to be wanting more family/work balance than any generation previously. This is caused mainly by changes in technology and more women in the workforce and with higher paying jobs; and I think these trends are only going to be intensifying as the years unfold. Second, as sociologist Michael Kimmel said to me quite succinctly in a filmed interview, “The ones who are holding back men from being more involved with their families are primarily other men and that the only way dads are going to be making more headway is by men being more supportive of each other at work when it comes to demanding flex time, a shortened work week and other creative work proposals to cause more family/work balance.
Let the first cannons be heard. The war has begun.
My hesitancy stems from the whole bloated ‘Mommy Wars’ thing which from my vantage point is a trumped-up concept by the media to rile women up and further cloud what the real picture is in terms of family/work balance. Every time I hear that phrase, I just shake my head in disgust. Frankly, it’s comparable to the ‘Stay-At-Home Dad as a growing movement’ articles and segments that keep cropping up. These are media pieces that focus on the wrong things with the (intended or not) effect of maintaining the status quo of people finding themselves torn between jobs that demand complete commitments and spending time with their families.
So, now the ‘Daddy Wars’ concept is starting to appear more and more in print and my initial reaction was to discourage the phrase as it seemed a thankless sequel to ‘Mommy Wars.’
However, something altogether more interesting seems to be occurring with the ‘Daddy Wars’ concept. The conflict isn’t being perceived between Traditional Dads and the Stay-At-Home Dads (which would be obvious manufactured companion to the ‘Mommy Wars’) but between dads who desire to have more of a work/family balance and their bosses, who are more typically dads themselves at a slightly older age and bred more on being more of a dedicated breadwinner. This idea was most recently written about in USA Today; and for a deeper analysis, please check out a commentary blog about it by Brian Reid, aka Rebel Dad. I’ve argued with Brian in the past against the ‘Daddy Wars’ idea but he seems to be winning me over on it. Thank you, Brian.
What this speaks of are two things: first, that the generation after mine (Gen Y) is gearing up for settling down and they seem to be wanting more family/work balance than any generation previously. This is caused mainly by changes in technology and more women in the workforce and with higher paying jobs; and I think these trends are only going to be intensifying as the years unfold. Second, as sociologist Michael Kimmel said to me quite succinctly in a filmed interview, “The ones who are holding back men from being more involved with their families are primarily other men and that the only way dads are going to be making more headway is by men being more supportive of each other at work when it comes to demanding flex time, a shortened work week and other creative work proposals to cause more family/work balance.
Let the first cannons be heard. The war has begun.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Seasons Greetings From The Evolution of Dad Project!
This morning my elder son, Charlie, asked out of the blue if we could "make another movie of us on the couch." I wasn't even sure what he was talking about until he blurted out as he'd been trained, "Happy Father's Day!" And then it hit me that this would be another good opportunity to pull out the video equipment and create another couch message. So, here it is. Enjoy!
Saturday, December 8, 2007
An interview with Dr. Michael Kimmel
A couple of days back I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Michael Kimmel at his fantastic home in Brooklyn and film him in his private office. Dr. Kimmel is one of the leading experts on masculinity and having him in the film is absolutely essential. Dr. Kimmel is as engaging on film as he is insightful. Here's a brief snippet on how he sees fatherhood and parenting shaping up in the next thirty years. Enjoy!
Friday, December 7, 2007
EvoDads Align with MomsRising.org!
Hey there! Sorry for the lag in entries over the past few weeks - due mostly to pushing the film forward in every other conceivable way.
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Joan Blades, who is best known for being the co-founder of MoveOn.org. Joan is determined to change the world and my hat goes off to her. If anyone can do it, she can! Last year she founded MomsRising.org as the springboard for change in terms of how moms (and families) are treated by the country. Hillary and Obama have both mentioned the site subsequently and membership is growing at a ridiculous rate. My guess is the site will become as influential as MoveOn.org in no time, so be sure to check out their site and get The Mother Manifesto DVD/Book. When it comes down to it, all this relates to dads just as much as moms.
With all this in mind, it seemed a no-brainer to align the project with Joan and her growing force in the war for the family. Joan was gracious enough to allow room on her mom site for an EvoDad blog and it couldn't be more of a privilege to be on her site. Thanks, Joan!
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Joan Blades, who is best known for being the co-founder of MoveOn.org. Joan is determined to change the world and my hat goes off to her. If anyone can do it, she can! Last year she founded MomsRising.org as the springboard for change in terms of how moms (and families) are treated by the country. Hillary and Obama have both mentioned the site subsequently and membership is growing at a ridiculous rate. My guess is the site will become as influential as MoveOn.org in no time, so be sure to check out their site and get The Mother Manifesto DVD/Book. When it comes down to it, all this relates to dads just as much as moms.
With all this in mind, it seemed a no-brainer to align the project with Joan and her growing force in the war for the family. Joan was gracious enough to allow room on her mom site for an EvoDad blog and it couldn't be more of a privilege to be on her site. Thanks, Joan!
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