Comparing your role as a man to your father’s depends a great deal on your age. If your dad was an adult in the 1950s, chances are he worked to support your family while your mom tended the home front and waited for you and your siblings after school (70 percent of women did).
If you’re in your 30s, your mom may have ridden the wave of feminism into the work place and your parents may have been among the millions struggling to figure out how to arrange their lives in a changing society.
Those changes continue today.
· Household structure has changed radically to the point that traditional nuclear families make up les than 20 percent of households today. Growing in number are households of single men (12 percent today compared with 5.6 percent in 1970).
· In 1950 women made up 30 percent of the workforce. After the 2008 economic collapse 80 percent of workers who lost their jobs were men, pushing women into the majority of the workforce for the first time. By 2050 economists predict that change will be permanent.
· Men who have been displaced from their jobs long term are responding in a new way today. In the past men’s support for each other was primarily focused on finding work but there is a rising number of support groups for unemployed men aimed primarily at addressing their feelings about being unemployed.
· Women’s greater employment has brought a number of social changes – higher divorce and remarriage rates, higher numbers of single parents (38 percent of births in 2006 were to unmarried women, six times as many as in 1960). Of course that means an equal number of unmarried men are trying to define their role as fathers outside of marriage.
· More men who are married are stay-at-home fathers, a number that jumped 50 percent between 2003 and 2006.
· The number of families where the mother is the primary breadwinner has quadrupled since 1960. While most of those are single mothers, 37 percent are married mothers who earn more than their husbands.
We Americans seem to be pretty accepting of the changes. In 1977, 74 percent of men and 52 percent of women said they supported the traditional roles of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. Today, the numbers are 42 and 39 percent.
Working or not, you’re almost certainly spending more time with your children than your dad did. In 1977, fathers spent a little less than two hours with their kids on a workday. Today, it’s a little more than three hours a workday and even greater for fathers 29 and younger, who average 4.3 hours a day with the kids.
You may also believe you’re really stepping up on household chores, but does your wife agree? Fifty-six percent of men today say they do at least half the cooking for their family; only a quarter of their wives say that’s the case.
Although a greater share of household work still falls on women, their time spent on household duties has dropped, indicating some of your family income is going to pay for outside help.
Whatever the exact breakdown of chores in your home, you’re likely feeling the same work-home pressure women have been grappling with for decades. In 1977, just 35 percent of family men said they experienced conflict between work and home. By 2008 the number was 59 percent in homes where their spouse also works. Interestingly, only 45 percent of women now report the same stress.
Beyond the statistics of daily life looms the larger issue of who men are in today’s society – breadwinner, unemployed, caregiver, single or family man. Your father probably had more confidence in his answer. You, along with most American men today, are in the position of defining a new role for yourself within the shifting dynamics of life in 2014.
Click here for more information on Men’s Counseling.