New Rules For Moms & Dads - changing parental roles

Ebony, June, 1999

Parenting

REMEMBER when parental roles were assigned along relatively rigid gender lines? Mothers did the cooking and cared for the children; fathers were disciplinarians and home-repair specialists.

In the African-American community--unlike the unrealistic fantasy purported by White television shows of the '50s and '60s--Black women have, with rare exception, always worked outside of the home, pioneering the concept of the superwoman who juggled job and family responsibilities. But when Black fathers and mothers returned from their day jobs, their roles around the house followed age-old, gender-based patterns.

"Mothers traditionally were the nurturers and individuals involved in the caring of the home and family," says William Turner; professor of marriage and family therapy at the University of Kentucky. "Fathers primarily meted out punishment and did the handiwork on and around the house."

But a generation of new millennium parents--mostly middle-class professionals--is blurring the traditional lines and writing new rules for child-rearing. In these new-age households, Dad handles many of the daily child-care chores, while Mom often lints in long hours at the office. "Today there's a whole new set of norms and mores," says Turner. "With more and more dual-career families and more middle-class, highly educated women delaying having children until after they've launched their careers, we see that many couples have interchanged what were once seen as the traditional roles of mother and father."

Take, for example, the Conanan family of Spotsylvania, Va. Chris Conanan, an attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), and his wife Jonnise, an attorney in private practice, have been married 22 years and maintain a household where both are actively involved in the rearing of their three children--Courtney, 17, Chris John, 14 and 13-year-old Chelsea. Yet, because Jonnise's demanding law practice requires that she work much longer hours, many of the mundane, day-today child-care concerns--the carpooling of kids to and from their myriad after-school activities, as well as rustling up dinner and supervising homework--fall to Chris.

"I think that when you have two working parents, everyone has to pitch in and do what it takes to keep the household running," he says. "Being in a private practice, my wife doesn't have the flexibility at work that I do, so I take on a lot of things that some moms might traditionally do. But we don't really concentrate on the traditional lines distinguishing what fathers do from what mothers do. Our house doesn't mn like that."

Nor does the household of Allison and Ellen Brown of South Orange, N.J. The Browns have been married 11 years and have three sons--Nicholas, 9, Aaron, 6, and Hampton, 3. In tree modern couple fashion, their family life has largely revolved around Ellen's high-powered career as a program officer for the Ford Foundation. Though Allison, an architect with the New York finn of Davis, Brody & Bond, also has a demanding job, it is Ellen's exhausting travel schedule--she is away from home 7 to 10 days of each month--that sets the family's pace. The Browns even lived in Johannesburg, South Africa (where Hampton was born), for five years while Ellen worked on economic development issues in the first blush of the country's post-apartheid era.

To keep their home running smoothly, the Browns take what Ellen calls "a tag-team approach." They share in the cooking responsibilities and both tackle after-school homework and the shuttling of children to cultural activities (museums and plays). As time and energy permit, each pitches in to tame the clutter and tackle the dust bunnies around their home, but they confess that a housekeeper handles a lot of the big cleaning jobs.

But even with outside help, "we have much more of a sharing situation than the one I grew up with," says Ellen. "When I was growing up, my mom was a stay-at-home mom who had dinner ready at 6 o'clock and always kept the house clean. And before we had children, we tried a more traditional division of labor, but it became clear to us very early that this would not work out. With two working people, you really have to share and trade off responsibilities."

Still, with Ellen on the road so much, Allison steps in to fill the breach, giving his sons lots of time and attention. "That was especially true when we were in South Africa," he says, "because when we first moved there I didn't have a job, so I was free during the day to spend a lot of time with the boys."

Though his work schedule--now that the family is back in the U.S.--does not afford him as much time with the children as he had during their South African odyssey, he still is a highly involved Dad. The difficulty he has is balancing his new-age role as a caring, sharing father of the '90s with the more traditional role he's also assumed--that of family enforcer.

"It turned out that I was the one who got drafted for the position of disciplinarian in the household," he says. "And we're definitely not a `spare the rod ...' kind of family. But what makes fatherhood more difficult these days, I think, is trying to maintain that balance between instilling discipline and showing love. Sometimes I worry about how being the one who does most of the spanking will ultimately affect my relationship with my sons."