A dad's life

Happy Father's Day! As you savor your hours of Hallmark-sanctioned leisure -- the golf game, the beer in the Barcalounger -- you can relax, secure in the knowledge that cultural expectations for you remain low.

For reassurance, you need look no further than the popularity of the film "Knocked Up," in which a pregnant Katherine Heigl pines for her unemployed, pot-smoking baby daddy, even after he rescues his bong during an earthquake while leaving her asleep in the house. In a culture that's deeply invested in scrutinizing mothers, it seems you still have to do something spectacular -- let your daughter videotape you drunk, perhaps, like David Hasselhoff, or call your daughter a "rude, thoughtless little pig" on her voicemail like Alec Baldwin -- to be deemed a truly bad father.

And yet, given that fathers are taking on ever-more-active roles in child rearing, there's been surprisingly little discussion among men, at least in the media, about what it means to be a good father. For better or worse, women have authors like Judith Warner, who writes of the unreasonable demands placed on mothers, and Caitlin Flanagan, who has suggested that working mothers would be better off staying home and having sex with their husbands. Fathers have Homer Simpson.

A handful of recent memoirs deliver a more nuanced look at the experience of modern fatherhood (or, to be accurate, the experience of the upper-middle-class father who has the time and energy to write about his predicament). First came last year's "Crawling: A Father's First Year," quiet musings on fatherhood by children's book author Elisha Cooper. And now come a rash of high-concept entries to the field: Neal Pollack's meditation on hipster fatherhood, "Alternadad"; New York lawyer Cameron Stracher's chronicle of the year he made it home for dinner five nights a week, "Dinner with Dad"; Pennywise lead singer Jim Lindberg's "Punk Rock Dad"; and "America's Most Wanted" producer Philip Lerman's flippant tale of life as an older father, "Dadditude."

What's most striking about these books, beyond their very existence, is that they are free of the kind of polarizing discussions that dominate so much of the literature of the Mommy Wars. (Are you a good mother or a bad mother? Are you a feminist or an anti-feminist? Are you ruining your child's life by working? Ruining your own by staying home?) While the women who write about motherhood so often seem crushed by the weight of society's expectations, these men are neither fighting amongst themselves nor fretting about the larger significance of their choices. Instead, the fatherhood debates remain -- for the moment, at least -- largely internal ones.

Even the most self-flagellating of the authors, Stracher, seems unburdened by fears that he's damaging his children by working such long hours, or by a sense that there's a correct answer to how he and his wife should split household responsibilities. Instead, his conflict comes from a fear that he is risking the family finances because he wants to spend more time with his kids.

These men aren't very interested in comparing themselves to one another -- a staple of Mommy Lit -- but they do contrast their experiences to those of women. Lerman seems especially preoccupied with how he measures up to his wife, only half-joking when he argues that being a father is much harder than being a mother because fathers don't have the biological bond with their children that mothers possess. Meanwhile, upon hearing of Stracher's pledge to be home for dinner five nights a week, one female friend "expressed incredulity that it could even be considered a 'project.' 'It's what I do every day,' she said."

Indeed, it's hard to imagine a woman writing a comparable book, not because of the inner conflict on display, but because of the way it would be received. A woman in Stracher's position would be expected to justify why she wasn't already home for dinner every night, while a mother writing as smugly as Lerman about how hard she has worked to bond with her child would -- as Lerman's own comparisons reinforce -- come off as lacking an innate ability to mother. And although readers may deem Pollack a bad father for leaving his young son to take an extended tour with his band, a mother who made the same decision would likely be subject to a much higher dose of disapproval.

Our low expectations for fathers, like our high expectations for mothers, turn out to be both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because they leave men freer than women to make their own choices away from society's gaze. They are a curse because our society offers little in the way of wisdom for fathers who are struggling to balance the competing demands of work and home -- and because as long as we take fathers less seriously than mothers, it's unlikely that we'll move very far beyond the current state of the Mommy Wars.

Early in his book, Cooper recounts an anecdote in which a fellow father was talking to a woman in the supermarket when his infant daughter began to cry. "Ohh, she must want her mommy," the woman said.

Cooper interpreted this as a dig at the adequacy of fathers. But that comment could just as easily be taken as an implicit criticism of the mother for not being there when her child was crying. Most likely, the woman was just trying to be comforting. But imagine if we reached a point where we expected a little less of mothers and a little more of fathers, and a crying baby was just a crying baby.

Jane Rosenzweig teaches in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard.