In the 23 years since our kids were born, I have made a conscious choice to lead a more balanced life, including a primary focus on wearing my parent hat. This choice led to a strategy of trying to carefully choose my jobs and career path to minimize work hours and job stress, while attempting to also maximize the flexibility of my schedule. Based on the common nickname for this sort of work strategy, I was a male parent on the “Mommy track”. (more…)

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. After 23 years of being a parent, including changing thousands of diapers when my kids were little, I have found no biological or psychological reason that men cannot be just as good parents and homemakers as women. Actually, there is one thing… men can’t breastfeed. Other than that, as far as I’m concerned, moms and dads are (to paraphrase the “Cone Heads” of Saturday Night Live) “interchangeable parental units”. (more…)

I don’t know if it was true for previous generations, but I got so much of my “ethical instruction” from songs that I would here over and over on the radio. Whether it was the Beatles telling me that, “All you need is love”, or The Supremes invoking the Golden Rule in, “Let me get over you the way you’ve gotten over me”, or a hundred different songs from a raft of insightful lyricists.

But of all the lyrics all those songs, I sometimes wonder how much the sad and ironic lyrics of Harry Chapin’s song has saved my generation of male-type parents from making the mistake that many of our dads made not playing a larger role in parenting and thus contributed to my own kids’ generation.

Chapin sings… (more…)