Balancing Work and Family

Balancing Work and Family I selected the Balancing Work and Family because I am a single mother with three children and two jobs as well as school. The article was mainly about fathers and the roles they take in the raising of their children. The article tells about more women joining the work force and the effects on families. The article talks about how men take a more active role in childrearing now than in past years. Also discussed are studies of the role fathers are having in childrearing that have been performed over the years and their out comes. Fathers are making themselves more available to their children. The article goes into natural fathers, stepfathers and blended families and the differences between races. The author, Joseph H. Peck, started studying the changes in family structure in the mid-70’s. Peck states that today American men spend less time working than their predecessors. Also they generally enter the labor force later in life. One of the studies discussed in the article is placed in Muncie, Indiana. Sociologists, Robert and Helen Merrill Lynd, studied parents in Muncie in the 1920’s, and reported that 10 percent of the working class wives stated that their husbands spent no time with their children, and 68 percent said that their husbands spent more than an hour a day. In 1978, Theodore Caplow and Bruce A Chadwick repeated most of the Lynds’ interviews in Muncie. They reported that only 2 percent of the working class wives said that their husbands spent no time with their children and 77 percent reported that their husbands spent more than an hour a day. Both studies used the similar types of working white-collar class families. In the 1920’s a technique of so-called time diaries was developed and was used until the 1960’s and again in later years. This method has the parents report in their own words what they were doing at each moment of a 24-hour period starting at 12 A.M. The parents list each activity, when they started and stopped, what they did next and when that ended and so on until they reach the following midnight. The answers were coded by whether they were with someone or if they had a radio or television on. These were then placed in categories such as indoor play, baby care or childcare. Other studies did not use time diaries, the fathers were just asked to estimate the time they spent with their children each day. To make sense of these studies two categories were proposed, parental engagement and parental availability. Parental engagement consists of direct interaction with the children and parental availability is when the fathers and children are in the same area but engaged in separate activities. These studies often interpret the same behavior differently. For example, talking with children can be interpreted as childcare in some studies but not in others. Using studies from the 1960’s and 1980’s, it has been found that fathers spend on average one third less time then the mothers’ and their availability was about half of the mothers. In the 1990’s fathers’ engagement had risen to 43.5 percent of the mothers’ and parental availability had risen to 65.6 percent. The fathers’ involvement has shown to benefit the children’s cognitive and social development. Studies show that men still perform less childcare than the mothers do. Divorced fathers spend less time with their children with half not seeing their children in the past year and high proportions not paying child support. (More than 80 percent of court ordered child support money is never actually paid.) This is caused by divorced fathers’ loss of interest in their children as well as many mothers not wanting the children to spend time with the ex-spouse. Two-parent families have become a smaller portion of all families. With single mothers being the head of more families becoming more common, meaning that more children have no resident father. Also many unmarried fathers - teen and adult - refuse to accept any responsibility for their children. The article talks about divorce and legal custody of children, with a large portion of fathers sharing custody but not having the children actually live with them. Robert E Emery’s studies point to divorce mediation, in which the couple negotiates a settlement instead of fighting it out in court. Emery found that fathers have more contact with their children 12 years after the divorce with divorce mediation. The article also talks about making divorces harder to obtain and some marriages impossible to end in divorce. Studies usually consists of two groups - resident, married fathers versus nonresident, never married or divorced fathers - but a there is a third surprisingly large group: resident, unmarried fathers. Nearly 60 percent of a sample of fathers were the children’s biological fathers residing with the biological mothers. Resident, unmarried fathers have several subtypes: cohabitating biological fathers, cohabitating stepfathers, and fathers raising children alone. This suggests that researchers need to broaden their studies to include all types of fathers. This article explained about fathers and the time spent with their children in the past and in the present. The reports from the surveys in this article are showing that father are spending more time with their child now then in the past. The fathers are spending more time playing and just being available than they are at work. I believe this article contributes to the cognitive and social development of the children. I believe this article is needed so father will spend more time with their children. I agree to a point that fathers are spending more time with their children. I also believe some men as well as women just do not know how to or want to spend time with their children.