A Shift for Working Dads

In honor of Father’s Day this year, it feels appropriate to acknowledge the post-pandemic cultural shift going on: With hybrid and remote work on the rise, working fathers are spending more time caregiving and doing household tasks.

As a big supporter of equity in the home, I can’t help but cheer. But as a mental health professional, it would not be quite right to declare this an outright victory.

With the increase of responsibilities at home and ever-more diffuse boundaries between “life” and “work,” the fathers to whom I’m speaking are reporting how much they love their deepened connection to their family, absolutely. But they are also reporting increased levels of stress, if not outright burnout, as they juggle these new roles.

Individuals 

I see men only as part of my couples’ counseling, not as individual clients, so I want to take this opportunity to address the working dads who are negotiating new roles at home. First of all, I see you. It can be hard to support your partner and look after your own needs. I hear many new dads say they don’t feel like they can ask for help or have a right to complain about their own postpartum issues – which seem like nothing compared to what their partner went through in childbirth.

To that, I’ll state a statistic that bears repeating: one in 10 dads experience PMADs (perinatal mood and anxiety disorders), a number that has likely gone up since the pandemic. If you’re feeling stress, anxiety, depression, mood swings – please, absolutely, seek help. You can’t pour from an empty cup, so if you want to support your partner, put in the time and care for yourself.

Couples

Whether you’re brand new parents or further along your parenting journey, there’s always a benefit to committing to regular relationship check-ins. And, with all the changes in the current work environment, it can feel like there is no recipe that spells out how to handle all the new opportunities and challenges new parents are facing: the childcare crisis (increasing costs, infinite waitlists, hyper-strict sick policies), coupled with new work configurations can really make for a tangled knot of issues to comb through: What are the expectations for the work-from-home parent versus the outside-the-home parent? How do work setups, commute time, etc., affect who takes care of a sick child, who does daycare pickup, and who does certain chores?

The list of possible questions is infinite, and everyone has to solve them in their own way (and often solve them again and again as circumstances shift). So I’ll just echo my belief in the importance of communication exercises, specifically those advocated by the Gottman Institute. (This April I completed my Level 3 Gottman training in Tampa.)

Practices like the speaker-listener exercise, which involves having each partner talk around the same situation and their emotional experience, before going into the art of compromise: How do we construct this in daily life? How do we operationalize it while honoring each other’s feelings? Simple, but not easy. The more often you do these check-ins, however, the smoother they will become.