Via The Good Men Project®: How To Encourage Men To Be Full-Time Caregivers
Where flexibility to care for one’s children is encouraged more men, not just women, will stick with and be loyal to companies.
The ‘Great Resignation’ is about more than money. Careers fade. Priorities change. The pandemic has made many of us focus on what matters most. Many of us have discovered that a happy life is not just about career. It is also about using the time we have to experience the simple things that bring us joy. This awakening has a lot to do with people leaving their jobs not to mention insisting on continuing to work from home. It would benefit business leaders to pay attention the underlying reasons for this besides demands for higher compensation.
Some business leaders have begun to be more accommodating to those who wish to continue working from home. Others have raised people’s pay. And some have pushed back against even the idea of men being caregivers. Joe Lonsdale, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says that men who take six months of paternity leave are ‘losers’ and that ‘in the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future’ which was ‘the correct masculine response.’ This comment was part of the raging debate sparked by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s decision to take paternity leave after he and his husband, Chasten, welcomed adopted twins into their family.
What business leaders who do not want to accommodate men taking time with kids have not yet done is to accommodate the massive reconsideration taking place of all of our work/life priorities. I know change is hard. I too am a latecomer to reconsidering my priorities. I’m a sixty-nine-year-old heterosexual hunting/shooting/fishing/testosterone-motivated grandfather, who wrote a bestselling book about becoming the proud father of my Marine son during his wartime service. But post-pandemic I’ve also discovered something surprising about myself: sometimes I’d rather be a full-time caregiver for my own grandchildren.
I’m using the word caregiver as a verb describing the practice of providing nurturing, creative, joy-filled childcare as a luminous gift given to children by a child minder of any gender. I’ve been doing lots of childcare for my Marine’s kids, Lucy (now thirteen), Jack (eleven), and Nora (seven)—ever since Lucy’s birth. This has been an enlightening life-changing journey. And I’m not alone in this journey. In “The pandemic has caused parents to slow down. Here’s how to preserve that pace,” Christine Koh (Washington Post, April 6, 2021) describes how many more parents have recently experienced child care:
For many parents, remote schooling meant looser schedules and room to experiment; embrace the routines that retain calm and foster independence. “I never realized how [stressful] our weekday morning routine was until we had to stop doing it,” says LaShawn Wiltz, a mother of an 11-year-old and an Atlanta writer and photographer whose work focuses on capturing everyday moments. “This past year, instead of rushing, there was time to talk a little, laugh more, and there has been no yelling, ‘We’re going to be late!’ I want to keep this slow . . . routine . . . “