Fathers say they want to spend more time with their kids, but are stuck working. Day-to-day demands -- and middle managers -- trump much ballyhooed work/life policies and paternity leaves, experts say.
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It may still be "a man's, man's world," as the old James Brown song goes, but the lyrics need some revision for working fathers.
As the nation prepares to celebrate Father's Day, two new surveys suggest that working fathers are feeling trapped -- yearning to spend more time with their kids but unable to do so without sacrificing their careers.
According to a new CareerBuilder.com survey, more than one-third (37 percent) of working dads say they'd leave their jobs if their spouses or partners made enough money to support the family, while about the same number (38 percent) would take a pay cut to spend more time with their kids.
The reasons are obvious: Nearly one in four of the working dads surveyed feel their work is negatively impacting their relationships with their children, while 48 percent say they have missed a significant event in their children's lives due to work at least once in the last year and nearly one in five (18 percent) have missed four or more such events.
However, the majority of working dads (59 percent) would not take paternity leave if it were offered, according to the latest Workplace Insights survey by Adecco USA.
Reasons cited included fear it would harm their careers (31 percent); being too busy at work to be away for an extended period of time (28 percent); and being depended on too much by co-workers and clients (28 percent).
The top reason: Nearly half (46 percent) say they simply couldn't afford to take paternity leave even if it did pay partial salary, which is rare in the United States.
According to the survey, the time working dads spend on work far exceeds the time spent with their children. More than one in four (27 percent) working dads say they spend more than 50 hours a week on work and nearly one in 10 (8 percent) spend more than 60 hours. Meanwhile, one in four (25 percent) working dads typically spends less than one hour a day with their kids.
Jim Bird, CEO of WorkLife Balance.com, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, says that although many companies offer work/life benefits, these policies are often undermined by managers, who fail to realize that giving their employees more flexibility often results in greater productivity and loyalty.
"Ten or 15 years ago, 90 percent or more of the working fathers would have said they wouldn't take paternity leave, so this is progress," he says. "Today, you have many more fathers who'd take this leave, but they're concerned that it wouldn't be well received by their immediate manager, and that's the biggest issue. A lot of this is self-induced work/life imbalance."
But you can't necessarily blame the managers, says Jeffrey Levine, a personal coach and owner of Executive Dads.com in Culver City, Calif. He says part of the problem is that while many CEOs like to trumpet their company's work/life benefits, many managers find it very difficult to actually implement these policies.
"Often, the managers are shorthanded -- they've got deadlines and sales quotas to meet, yet they have barely enough people to meet those objectives as it is, without giving fathers more time off to spend with their kids," he says.
CEOs must be made to understand that short-staffed managers will find it very difficult to accommodate those ballyhooed work/life policies, he says.
Another potential solution, Levine suggests, is for HR leaders to promote "mandatory" work/life policies.
"For example, companies can say 'If you have children at home, we expect you to go home before 7 o'clock,' or 'After your new baby is born, we expect you to take a month off,' " he says. "Unless companies say 'You've got to do this,' it's not going to happen."
Regardless of what companies end up doing, working dads will soon have a new voice added to the mix. Moms Rising, an advocacy group for working mothers, has launched www.familiesrising.org, a new Web site designed to encourage men who support family-friendly work policies to speak out.
The site will feature links to "daddy bloggers," including documentary filmmaker John de Graaf. "We all need time and support to raise our children," says de Graaf. "When I see what mothers and fathers in other countries take for granted, I know America can do better."
June 14, 2007
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