Kurt Mackey might seem like just your average dad. But this 39-year-oldOak Park father of three is part of a growing group of fathers who are juggling the demands of work and home in ways their fathers before them never did.
When his first child was born six years ago, Mackey scaled back on, and finally left a lucrative full-time job with a local real estate firm to start his own business so he and his wife Kate Gallagher (a nurse) could spend more time with their daughter.
“When Michaela was born, my wife was working full time–seven 12-hour shifts every two weeks. I’d drop Michaela at day care around 7:30 in the morning and pick her up between 6 and 7 p.m. She was in day care 10 to 11 hours a day and that was unacceptable to us,” Mackey recalled. “That first year we said, ‘This is crazy. What can we do different?'”
The temporary solution was to piece together a schedule by taking advantage of the family medical leave each of their employers offered. When that ran out, Kurt started working part-time at the realty firm and began putting the pieces in place to start Mack Advantage, an Oak Park-based human-resources and consulting company that specializes in training and development, employee relations, recruiting and policy development.
Today, Kurt runs a thriving business from his home, helps chaperone school field trips, and spends every weekend watching Michaela, sister Mary Kate, 4, and brother Liam, 3, while mom works. “When Mary Kate was born, we were paying so much for day care that Kate was really making about 30 cents on the dollar. There’s flexibility in nursing, so she’s just been working weekends ever since,” explained Kurt, who admits to being “exhausted” by Sunday evening.
Women have been juggling work/life issues–and feeling exhausted–for decades. And traditionally, it’s women who either have abandoned, or put on the back burner, career aspirations in favor of family. But today, men–driven by economic demands and a desire to be involved parents–are starting to become better “jugglers” where work and family life are concerned.
“Men are getting better compared to the [fathers of] their parents’ generation,” said Lesley Jane Seymour, who as editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine monitors and writes about family and parenting issues nationwide.
“I think men have realized that their fathers lived very shallow emotional lives. They’re saying, `Wait a minute. I don’t have to be an emotionless creature and sacrifice everything for the almighty dollar.’ Men are partly being pushed by women, and are partly being lured into it in answer to the question, `Is this all there is?'” she said.
Statistics underscore Seymour’s assertion.
“Fathers becoming more involved is absolutely a trend,” said Martin Malin, professor of law and director of the Chicago-Kent Institute for Law and the Workplace. “The gap in the amount of time fathers and mothers spend with and care for kids is narrowing.”
A 1997 National Study of our Changing Workforce by the Families and Work Institute, for example, looked at dual-earner couples with children under 18. That study showed moms averaged 3.3 hours per week day caring for their kids in 1977, compared with 1.8 hours for dads. But in 1997, moms averaged 3.2 hours and dads 2.3 hours a day, Malin noted. “We’re way ahead of . . . 1993 when the Family Medical Leave Act was passed.”
A recent drugstore.com survey by Harris Interactive found that today’s dads spend more time with their children than their fathers spent with them. When asked to compare their experience to their memories of their fathers, the dads polled said they spend more time helping with homework (69 percent); playing with their kids (68 percent); making decisions about education (60 percent) and making health-care decisions for their children (57 percent) than their fathers, the survey showed.
And a 1997 national survey commissioned by the Council on Family Health found that 35 percent of dads interviewed say they missed at least one day of work in the previous year to care for children 12 and under when those children have been sick.
Not all dads want to or are able to chuck corporate life in favor of work-at-home arrangements like Mackey did. But more and more, fathers are juggling work and family time so they can–in various ways–do their part at home.
For 45-year-old Jonathan Levine of Northbrook, simply seeing 11-year-old Esther and 5-year-old Philip off to school every morning has added balance to what had become a too-hectic lifestyle.
“I’ve been working on a special project for a while, which has entailed trips to Minnesota in addition to other business travel,” said Levine, the director of strategic marketing for a legal publishing company. “I’m gone virtually part of every week. And before that, I would leave the house for my Deerfield office around 7 in the morning and I wouldn’t get home until just before 7 [p.m.].”
That schedule had begun to wreak havoc on the home front, Levine said. “My son might be non-communicative and my daughter might flash her temper at something stupid when what she was really mad at was me not being there,” he said. “So I decided that when I am in town, I’m going to hang around in the morning, help them get ready, see them off on the bus. Before, I was up and out before they were awake.”
“He’s always helped–my husband does more laundry than I do,” said Levine’s wife, Leslie, a writer. “But now that he doesn’t go to work until after the kids are on the bus, that’s sent us a message: `I care about you, you’re important to me, I want to see you.'”
Jonathan Levine also attends as many after-school activities as possible, and will leave work early to go to his son’s tae kwon do class, for example. “Jebrail Jendo, a Chicago Police Department employee who works the 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. shift as a traffic-control aid at O’Hare International Airport, is another dad who handles what was once known as “woman’s work.” This 41-year-old father is in charge of mornings for his 5-year-old son, Jacob.
“He does the whole morning routine all by himself–I flee!” said Jebrail’s wife Tracy, who owns TJS Design, Inc., a graphic-design firm in Chicago.
“I really love it, to tell you the truth,” said Jebrail, who grew up in Syria where, he admits, dads just weren’t involved. “I get him up, fed and dressed, then take him to school or to my mom’s. I don’t have to rush him out. . . . and I still see him before he goes to bed.
And while Tracy orchestrates many details–checkups and shots, for instance–Jebrail has taken Jacob to the pediatrician’s office to accommodate Tracy’s schedule.
Dallas attorney John Howie, 54, has always been an involved father. But hewas forced into an even more active role when his wife died unexpectedly last June.
“I was always involved. I have my own firm, so if there were athletic events, I could be there. And I was a room dad [at his kids’ school]. But I worked and traveled a lot,” he said..
Howie has two children, Ashley, 16; and Lindsey, 13. He also has an adult son, John, 29.
Howie has adjusted his schedule to accommodate his daughters’ school and extra-curricular activities. Three days a week, he’s up with Ashley at 5:20 a.m. to make sure she’s out by 6 for competitive drill-team practice. He exercises from 6 to 6:45; gets Lindsey up, fed and to school; and arrives at work between 8:15 and 9 a.m. His computers are networked to his home so he can work, get messages and e-mail there. The family has always had a housekeeper. And he has employed a nanny since his wife died. “She kicks in about 3 p.m., picks up the kids, takes them to tumbling,” Howie said.
He has also learned a lot about raising teenage girls. “I’ve learned about prom dresses and cup sizes,” he laughed. And he recently learned a lot about pantyhose when he spent a Saturday afternoon and evening searching all over Dallas for “Hanes, South Pacific, sheer-to-the-waist, size B”–the brand, color, style and size Ashley wears during drill-team competitions.
“We couldn’t find them anywhere,” Howie said. “I finally got online and ordered 10 packages. One package is back-ordered. I didn’t know there were three pairs to a package, so she now has 27 pairs.”
