If you are a parent of a teen (or a soon-to-be teen), your child’s relationship with screens and social media probably worries you. But should it?

Two Harvard researchers who have extensively studied teens and their use of technology will discuss their findings and how parents can offer better support and guidance on the subject during a talk in Brooklyn next week.

City Dads Group co-founder Matt Schneider will lead the discussion, titled Screens, Teens & Rattled Parents. It will explore this digital generation gap, unfounded assumptions about the evils and benefits of social media, and a “reset” for adults.

The talk is scheduled for 6:30 to 8 p.m., Tuesday, Sept .13, at the Center for Brooklyn History, 128 Pierrepont St., in Brooklyn.

Emily Weinstein and Carrie James recently published Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing). The book explores the complex digital universe that teens inhabit and the often misguided efforts of adults to intervene. Based on a multiyear project surveying more than 3,500 teens, their findings look at social media phenomena that prompt concern if not outright panic on the part of well-intentioned grownups. These include sexting, “comparison quicksand,” and “digital pacifying.”

Weinstein is a research director at Project Zero at Harvard, which has a mission to understand and nurture human potential. She is also a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. James is a sociologist and principle investigator at Project Zero. Major publications, including Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, have discussed their work.

Reservations are required for Screens, Teens & Rattled Parents. They can be made online. Guests must provide proof of vaccination and are encouraged to wear masks while onsite at all times. In-person capacity is limited and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

The modern dad took center stage last week in anticipation of Father’s Day 2017 with a one-day summit in New York City on the role of fathers around the world and with the release of the latest annual “new dad report” from Boston College Center for Work & Family researchers.

The first-ever Dads + SocialGood conference on June 13 brought to Manhattan leading experts, public figures, activists and parents to discuss men, their families and how to support their livelihood. Father and family health as well as the ongoing battle to improve parental leave policies in the United States proved key topics.

Health and family

Leaders from UNICEF, the United Nations’ humanitarian program for children and families, discussed their Early Moments Matter campaign. The 6-month-old effort aims to increase awareness worldwide about the importance of parents being engaged in their child’s first 1,000 days of life because these early experiences greatly influence brain development.

During those first 1,000 days of life, the health of the dad also happens to be a key component to the quality family life. For example, humans only have so much cognitive bandwidth to make decisions and lack of sleep can adversely affect parental decision-making, noted panelist Christina Lee, principal scientist at health products manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, one of the conference sponsors. The lack of sleep also plays a role in our success work as well as parenting.

Family health is an important topic for many modern dads, presenters noted. Zack Yaksic, a father and founder of Alana’s Foundation, talked about his mission to make sure parents and children are vaccinated from the flu after he lost his daughter to the illness in 2003. Strains of flu are capable of causing the next world pandemic, an infectious disease specialist noted at the conference, but one of easiest, most effective ways to prevent that by educating families. about the importance of annual flu shots and good hygiene.

Parental leave

While the United States lags behind the world in offering parental leave, one bright spot has been Johnson & Johnson which two years ago extended up to 17 weeks (eight paid) of parental leave to its U.S. employees. The  company announced at the Dads + SocialGood conference that it would expand that U.S. policy to its 90,000 employees in 65 countries worldwide.

In making the announcement, J&J Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Peter Fasolo asked dads to step up the work on the issue and for other companies to “join us.”

“I expect all dads to take advantage of this,” he said.

Fairleigh Dickinson University professor Scott J. Behson, author of The Working Dad’s Survival Guide, said during a presentation that parental leave needs to be a continuing conversation that expecting fathers need to have with their employers. Companies can and should use parental leave as a recruitment tool to bring in the best employees to their business, he said.

The Dads + SocialGood conference also focused on the positive things fathers are doing not just in their homes but on the global level. One panel discussion covered how fathers are handling the worldwide refugee crises. It lauded a 26-year-old Sudan man, for example, who took two kids who were fleeing the country under his wing, proving you do not have to be a dad to be a father.

Below are tapings of the Dads + SocialGood gathering presented by Johnson & Johnson, the United Nations Foundation and the online parenting site Fatherly.

Part 1

Part 2

The New Dad: The Career-Caregiving Conflict

Parental leave also played a role the Boston College Center for Work and Family’s eighth annual “state of the dad” report, released last week. The report centered on the work-life balance fathers face and their perceptions of and actions in child rearing.

The New Dad: The Career-Caregiving Conflict looked at three different generations of working dads — Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials — and broke down them further based on how they perceived and performed their caregiving role. It further discovered three different types of working fathers:  

• Traditional — Those who feel their spouse/partner should do more caregiving
• Conflicted — Those who believe caregiving should be 50/50 but the spouse/partner actually does more it.
• Egalitarian — Those who believe caregiving should be 50/50 and maintain that split in real life..

The study took special notice of conflicted dads, noting that what they are “experiencing is exactly analogous to the dilemma that working women have faced for years, ‘Is it possible to have it all?’”

“In that sense, this is not a new phenomenon. The struggle to have a professional career while also being an engaged caregiver is one that many if not most mothers would easily relate to. What is new is this struggle is being amplified far more for today’s working dads,” the report concluded.

To help ease this conflict, businesses need to respect today’s expanding role of the father in the family, the report stated. This includes offering father (or parent) support groups, paid paternity leave and striving to work with dads on schedules and workload based on their role in the family. On the plus side, companies are slowly recognizing this and offer more working parent flexibility and help, understanding that benefits like parental leave benefits not only the father but the company as well.

Despite these conflicts, the study noted that even though more fathers have started taking on more at work they are also making greater efforts to balance it with family responsibilities. These dads who achieve a balanced work-life situation tend to be happier not only with their family but also with their work.

I dreamed for years of owning a Harley Davidson motorcycle. I’d spend hours and hours flipping through a catalogue trying to figure which “Hog” I’d buy and which leather saddlebags I’d drape over it. My desire would peak whenever I happened by two Harleys passing one another in opposite directions on the road because their riders would inevitably nod or wave to each other as they zipped by. There’s a special connection, an unspoken Harley brotherhood, and – brother – I wanted to join.

My life did not take a path where I could throttle that Harley throne. Instead, I walk the New York City sidewalks pushing a stroller container one beautiful toddler while being flanked by two other great kids, one of whom usually holds my hand. This is how I found a brotherhood even more special than that of the Harley Davidson – the brotherhood of at-home dads.

Pew Research report on at-home dads

According to a new Pew Research report on at-home dads, our population in the United States has almost doubled in the past 20-odd years to two million strong. I joined them about a decade ago after my wife and I discussed, over her growing belly, what our career paths would be. We could have both continued being part of the workforce, but we were about to be first-time parents and wanted one of us to be there to take in every second of our baby’s life and nurture him through those early years. Luckily for me, my wife was about to graduate law school, so the lots fell in my favor to be one who cared full-time for our child at home.

When our second child was born a few years later, neither of us hesitated to continue on our paths – hers as primary breadwinner, mine as primary caregiver, together as caring and loving parents.

I would continue on, multiple kids in tow, with my usual rounds to the parks, libraries, museums and even to various “Mommy and Me” classes, often being lone man in a sea of estrogen.

Then, something happened.

At-home dads on the rise

There started to be more of us. No longer was I the only guy at the park pushing his child on the swing. The park was full of men laughing and happily chasing their kids. Bumping into another stay-at-home dad while strolling through Central Park became more routine than rarity. Sometimes we’d stop and talk as our kids played or we would simply pass and give one another the old Harley nod or wave.

In some cases, the sagging economy brought these men into the at-home parenting world. However, many others I met chose the route voluntarily for one reason or another. Regardless of how they got there, even if circumstances changed and they returned to a more “traditional” male head-of-the-household role than 24/7 child care, I found most of these men continued to be highly active participants in the raising of their kids and family life because, simply, they enjoyed it.

The at-home growth trend may be reversing. The Pew Research report shows that the number appears to drops as the economy gets better. But that’s OK. The greatest lasting effect of the Great “Mancession” of recent years may be how it has changed the way society and fathers view fatherhood.

For years we dads have been told to step it up in the child-rearing and household duties, and to not focus so heavily on making money or gaining power or other materialistic things. Now, we are. I see dads of both the at-home and at-an-office-job variety showing up to school events now as frequently and with as little resistance as they show up to sporting events. In the media, I see fewer and fewer commercials showcasing dads as incompetent parents who can’t figure out how to fasten a diaper or do laundry. Instead, I see dads driving their kids to school, making breakfast, and being involved in the day-to-day of running a household.

In real life, the fathers I know have a desire to be present in their kids’ lives, and that’s what’s most important. The number of stay-at-home dads may fluctuate with the market, but that desire to be a father that children can look up to, that they like being around, and they can count on continues to grow. Fathers are no longer held up as someone to be feared, as in “just wait until your father gets home.” He’s been home all day – either physically or in his children’s mind and hearts.

So maybe I ended up with a stroller instead of a Hog, but Harley Davidsons do not love back. That tyke in the stroller, he does.

Nearly seven years ago, I started my tenure as an at-home dad. Early on, I felt fairly isolated, but was comforted knowing that I wasn’t alone when I found websites like Jeremy Adam Smith’s Daddy Dialectic, and Brian Reid‘s now defunct Rebeldad. I often sent Brian articles about dads that I found, and more often than not, a few days later he posted his unique take on the dad news of the day.

Lance and I are now very lucky to be in the position of having people send us the news that they are finding about dads, and we’ve never received more e-mails and social media pings than we did for the revelation by Motherlode blogger, KJ Dell’Antonia, that the Federal Census Bureau counts moms as the “designated parent”, and dads as a “child-care arrangement.” 

I was hoping that it was merely an oversite that no one had bothered to change the labels to reflect the fact that families have changed since the 1950s, and recognize that dads are taking an increasingly active parenting role. Unfortunately, the laziness is not limited to a bureaucratic glitch, but rather the antiquated mindset of the bureaucrat in charge of the study. As KJ Dell-Antonia reports:

“Regardless of how much families have changed over the last 50 years women are still primarily responsible for work in the home,” said Lynda Laughlin of the Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch. “We try to look at child care as more of a form of work support.” A mother, said Ms. Laughlin, is “not only caring for the child only while Dad works. She’s probably caring for the child 24 hours and so Dad is able to go to work regardless.” (emphasis mine)

and goes on to report:

Ms. Laughlin assured me that the Census Bureau is just trying to collect accurate data on how “designated parents” arrange care for their children while they’re at school or at work based on “gender norms. 

As you can imagine, this has raised a few eyebrows from moms and dads that like to think that the parenting responsibility is held by moms AND dads. The good folks at Daddyshome, Inc., a non-profit advocacy group, has come up with a way to encourage the Census Bureau to update their report (and their mindset). As Al Watts, President of Daddyshome, said in an e-mail to dads around the country:

The Board of Daddyshome strongly disagrees with these assumptions and believes it is time for the Census to change them. Culturally, this assumption that dads are a “child care arrangement,” similar to babysitters, does not adequately define the dramatic increase in involved fatherhood in the 21st century. Methodologically, this assumption fails to provide an accurate picture of how families are navigating child care and financial responsibilities. 

They have created an online petition that will be sent to the Census Bureau and Congress that allows moms and dads to voice their encouragement for change. We hope you will consider signing and sharing the petition found here: http://www.change.org/petitions/dads-dont-babysit

From time to time, we get pitched by research experts as well as graduate students working on progressive research covering topics about all angles of fatherhood.  Regarding Most of the inquiries, we are happy to share them on our site as I think it exemplifies that more research experts are starting to put dad under the microscope to learn more about “the other parent.”  That is the case with this new parenting survey from a graduate student who spent a significant amount of time working/researching with the Kansas City Dads Group & now has the opportunity to cast a wider net.  Please feel free to participate. – L.S.

What are the personal values that drive your parenting? Do different types of parents, such as stay-at-home dads and working dads, stay-at-home moms and working moms, stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, hold different values sets? This research will examine the values of different groups of parents (related to working or staying home with children),and will specifically focus on how they compare with those of stay-at-home fathers.

I’m a graduate student in sociology at the University of Central Missouri doing research on moral frameworks and values of parents in general and stay-at-home fathers in particular. Please if you have a few minutes, check out the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDRXJLZ
Results appear at the end so you can see how everyone else responded too.
Thanks so much for your help! – Pam Rooks

The U.S. Census Bureau reported yesterday that “One-Third of Fathers with Working Wives Regularly Care for Their Children.”  Yep, you read that correctly!  Thanks to Al Watts & the Daddyshome, Inc. team for sharing this with us.  “Among fathers with a wife in the workforce, 32 percent were a regular source of care for their children under age 15, up from 26 percent in 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.”  Even more interesting were their findings among these fathers with preschool-age children: “one in five fathers was the primary caregiver, meaning their child spent more time in their care than any other type of arrangement.”

Is this significant increase based on the recession (termed “mancession”) or because fathers genuinely want to spend more time with their children?  The real answer is Both.  This topic forces me to dissect further and take a closer look at our small NYC Dads Group community of nearly 500 dads – including stay-at-home dads, work-from-home dads, teachers, entertainers, freelancers, and full-time working dads, etc..  Predominantly, the dads within our community become the primary caregiver as a result of choice (not the economic downturn)!

Bloomberg News/Businessweek decided to delve deeper with this new research and speak to a few fathers that were forced into their role as primary caregivers as a result of the recession as well as a couple of dads who chose their role to give the story some balance.  Jobless Dads Get Quality Time With Children as Caregiving Rises by Joel Stonington of Bloomberg/Businessweek reports that “The recession isn’t the only reason  (that dads spend more time as a partial or primary caregiver). Women are increasingly contributing more to family income than men, and there is a growing desire among men to take part in the lives of their children, according to Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the New York-based Families and Work Institute.”

Full Disclosure: Thanks to Joel Stonington for including us in this important article on fatherhood.

If you follow our blog, you will realize that RedBook Magazine published an article this month that confirms what we have been blabbing about for quite some time – communities of dads are forming across the nation in a big way!  And not just in the major metropolitan cities either.  Check out Happy to Be a Stay-at-Home Dad: Stay-at-home dads are forming groups all over the country By Douglas Quenqua (a talented writer based in NYC).

Quenqua takes a tour around the country by spotlighting four large groups of dads: Washington D.C., Austin, Kansas City, and Portland.  These groups vary in size from 75 – 500 members, but you will notice from the numerous dads quoted in the article that these fathers are confident in their role as being nurturing, active, and totally involved in their children’s lives.  For me, reading the article was entertaining because I would consider one of our coolest NYC dad Group outings as renting a Luxury Box at the Staten Island Yankees Game with our children….and that is so different than the Kansas City dudes who went as a group with their kids to NASCAR…and met Danica Patrick!

Quenqua writes, “There are support networks aplenty if you’re a stay-at-home mom, but if you’re a full-time dad, good luck gaining entry. “I know what an episiotomy is, but if you’re a woman, you probably don’t want to talk about it with me,” says Shannon Carpenter, a dad in Kansas City, MO, who, like a growing number of American men, stays home to care for his two kids. Feeling a bit out of place at local mommy-and-me classes, Shannon and other fathers have banded together into what might be described as fraternities for 30-somethings: stay-at-home-dad groups. Some form after guys meet at their kids’ school functions, others are born out of Facebook groups and Craigslist postings; most of them meet at least once a week, usually at a playground or one guy’s home. And memberships are rising.”

Sure, local park, playground, and museum outings and playgroup at someone’s home is covered in the article.  Yes, dads groups are a necessity for guys who like to do so much on their own for socialization and support as they navigate parenthood.  Other important things that dads groups are doing that was not mentioned are partnering with local parenting organizations to establish better resources for fathers like new dads classes as well as daddy & me classes, hosting workshops covering common parenting topics like preschool admissions, potty training, introducing solid foods, and discipline, hosting meaningful screenings and author discussions to equip us with tools and best practices on becoming a better dad, using websites and social media to share articles and resources, and working with their local community to move the conversation forward about fatherhood.   Additionally, I would like to add, that many of the dads groups these days are not strictly for Stay-at-Home-Dads…they are open to dads of all stripes including working dads who do not get enough credit.
Huge props to RedBook Magazine for recognizing the surge and necessity of dads groups as well as our friends in Kansas City, D.C, Portland, and Austin for providing such a positive image of fatherhood!