When Brian Spano looks out his work window and sees a beautiful summer day, there’s a bit of a tug on his heart.
He can’t run outside and play.For the last two summers while he was on an extended job hunt, he might have hit the neighborhood pool with his son. Now, back to work, he again has to wait for evenings or weekends.On this Father’s Day weekend, he’s one of millions of American dads readjusting their family lives as the economy picks up and they find work again. For many, it’s a work and family balance different from before the “mancession” hit working men particularly hard.Some have finally, gratefully, found full-time jobs, but not without a dose of wistfulness for lost time at home. Others have carved out at-home careers but found new family stresses. Still others continue to juggle job searches with daddy duties.Most have re-assessed what it means to be a father and a wage earner.Spano was let go in late 2008 from American Century Investments. He landed temporary work now and then, but it wasn’t until last month that the 40-year-old Lee’s Summit dad got a full-time job at The Research Foundation.He says that’s exactly where he wants and needs to be.“No regrets,” he said. “Sure, I really enjoyed my time at home. It was almost like going back to my childhood. I did a lot of stuff I hadn’t done since I was a kid. We had a good time.”A CareerBuilder survey released this week found that 84 percent of working dads who were laid off in the last 12 months have found full-time employment.While about 8 million men nationally continue searching for employment, the job market ever so slowly is re-embracing the 5.2 million men it jettisoned from November 2007 to December 2009.Some have assumed different, but still traditional, bread-winning roles. Many are earning less than they used to, or less than their wives. Some are cobbling together two part-time jobs. Or learning how to be freelance or contract workers.Even before the recession, the number of stay-at-home dads was growing, a trend fueled as much by choice as necessity. But job cuts hastened that trend. There are still five stay-at-home moms for every one stay-at-home dad, but “house husbands” aren’t too unusual anymore.A year ago, Jim Howard was handed a retirement package from Hallmark Cards and started to work at home. A creative writer, Howard immediately began a seven-day-a-week routine of freelance writing — turning out a book, a movie script and taking on a science writing contract.“My son came into my home office one day while I was typing away,” Howard recalled. “He was just standing there and finally said, ‘You really don’t have weekends any more.’ I got an instant pang of guilt. At Hallmark, at least, I had weekends.” As an at-home dad, Howard said he now has more time with his 10-year-old son. But one of the most interesting things to him was the change the last year brought in his relationship with his two older children, who now live in other states.“Their whole lives were spent with me as a Hallmark employee,” Howard said. “I’d been there 30 years. So this was a whole new world for them, watching me put one foot in front of the other and create a new work life. They started calling home more and asking me how I was. That was a plus.”Despite not having well-defined weekends off, Howard relishes the flexibility his freelance and contract work gives him.“The routine isn’t as set,” he said. “If it’s a nice pool day, I’ll try to arrange my time around it. Now, I can be a part of my son’s soccer practice, his drum practice. It’s different than if I’d found another office job like at Hallmark.”Geoff Ristau of Shawnee is one father who was happy to have a little more face time with his kids, but he’s far happier now to be one of about 1.7 million adult men who’ve become employed so far this year.“My kids were in fifth grade and second grade when I lost my first job,” said Ristau, who was let go from a reinsurance company in December 2007. “I did temporary things and looked for work for three years, pretty much the whole time my daughter was in middle school. It wasn’t until January this year that I got a full-time job.”Ristau’s return to the daily workforce is marked with caution and a different sense of the bread-winning demands on him.“My role has changed in the family. I don’t feel like I have to be ‘the guy.’ But I think it’s changed me more in the workplace than at home. I don’t want to rock the boat. I want stability. But, in the end, I know that my family is going to be around a lot longer than my job.”In a survey released this month by Workplace Options, more than two-thirds of working fathers said they’ve run into conflicts or problems with their current employer when they try to balance work and family needs. And a majority of fathers — 56 percent — said they’re likely to take time off to deal with family issues.That emphasis on family rings true for John Feldman, who has been looking for work since August, when he lost a manufacturing management position. He now has a part-time, flexible position that allows him to work out of his Shawnee home, and for that he is grateful.“I’m honestly wondering if I want to have a full-time job,” Feldman said. “I have an elderly father who’s needed my attention. I have a 13-year-old son still in the home. I guess I’d say my outlook has changed.“I probably spent too much time early in my career on my career and not on my family. They always say that on your deathbed you don’t say, ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time in the office.’ So it really makes me do a double take. There are job leads I probably could have responded to but didn’t because they weren’t perfect.” For Adam Keller, a Leavenworth father of two young sons who had a series of hires and layoffs in the last three years, the times between jobs were eye-opening.“When I was caught up in work, home, dinner, bed, I didn’t realize that my wife was carrying a large load,” Keller said. But while unemployed, “I was able to see my boys do things I’d missed at work and help them along more with growing up. Money was tight, but being able to see my boys every day and walk in my wife’s shoes was a relationship-builder on all parts.”Indeed, a study by WFD Consulting, released in May, found that “the gender stereotype that men derive their identities largely from work and women largely from family and relationships, was not supported by the study. For the most part, men and women reported comparable work identity and personal/family identity.”George Uko is going the extra mile to reinforce family identity on Father’s Day. For 13 months, the former Bayer Animal Health employee has been commuting each week to Omaha, Neb., where he got work after a seven-month search.“I leave Omaha on Friday night to get home about 8 p.m., and I leave at 5 a.m. Monday to get back to work,” said Uko, 42, whose family stayed in Overland Park, waiting for their house to sell.With flood waters closing part of his Interstate 29 route home, Uko expects this weekend’s trip to take longer, “but it’s definitely what I want to do. I definitely want to provide for my family. But I want to spend more time with them, too, and this whole thing has taught me the value of that time.”
A Father’s Day snapshot of working dads
•22 percent are working an average of more than 50 hours a week, compared to 19 percent last year.•39 percent spend two hours or less a day with their children; 16 percent spend one hour or less.•20 percent bring work home from the office at least three days a week.•34 percent missed two or more significant events in their children’s lives in the last year because of work.•33 percent said they’d quit their jobs if their spouses made enough money to support the family, down from 44 percent a year ago.
•22 percent are working an average of more than 50 hours a week, compared to 19 percent last year.•39 percent spend two hours or less a day with their children; 16 percent spend one hour or less.•20 percent bring work home from the office at least three days a week.•34 percent missed two or more significant events in their children’s lives in the last year because of work.•33 percent said they’d quit their jobs if their spouses made enough money to support the family, down from 44 percent a year ago.
