Twenty years ago, a fortysomething man didn’t feel the immense pressure to be a great dad that he feels today. If you were a C-suite executive and had kids at home, taking care of them was the job of your wife, community, school, church, and the Little League coach. And people were OK with that. Societal expectations weren’t that you were going to spend thirty hours a week parenting. A great dad back then was around weekends and a couple of nights a week for dinner.
But today, men face social pressure to not let their personal lives interfere with their work lives. The unspoken truth may be that the modern workplace is more willing to forgive women for their decisions to place family over work in some instances, because the people who run the workplace continue to believe that women play a more essential role than men in their households. Until society concludes that men play an equally valuable role in child-rearing, men who make career tradeoffs to spend time with their children will be seen as somehow less focused, committed, and worthy than men who don’t.
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