Do-it-all dads struggle with the balancing act

Terry Frank considers himself a realistic, ambitious, white-collar father who wants to climb the ranks at his company and be a super-involved parent. He cringes when he recalls the time he had to travel for work and missed his son’s baseball game — the one when his 9-year-old son William pitched a complete game.

“I heard all about it from another dad and I felt bad that I wasn’t there to see it,” said Frank, father of two boys and senior vice president at BankAtlantic.

Today’s dads want to do it all, rise up in their organizations, cheer on their kids, supervise homework and do the morning drop off. As an estimated 70.1 million dads prepare to celebrate Father’s Day, new research shows that balancing it all is not proving as easy for many of them.

A significant majority of the engaged fathers see their responsibilities to their children as both caring for them the study by Boston College’s Center for Work & Family of 1,000 white-collar managers in large corporations with children under 18 at home.

Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family, said just a decade ago more fathers would have described their role as traditional breadwinner. This makes Harrington raise a question normally pegged to working mothers: Can men obtain professional growth in the workplace and equality in their home life?

Fathers may still be grappling with the definition of being a good father. Researchers discovered a huge gap between what dads think they should do at home and reality. In the survey, 70 percent of the dads said they and their spouses should equally share caregiving for their children, but only 30 percent said they actually do.

Most white collar fathers earning more than $75,000 a year worked more than 45 hours a week, described job pressure as high and said they spend about 2.5 hours a day with their kids. When asked if they would like to spend more time interacting with their children on a typical work day, 77 percent of the fathers reported that they would. At the same time, nearly 60 percent want to climb higher in their workplaces.

“Women faced up 10 years ago that they have to make tradeoffs. Fathers haven’t confronted that dilemma,” Harrington said.

Frank’s situation mirrors that of working women who not too long ago began to face for the first time work/life balance concerns. Frank admits it is challenging to be a successful professional and involved dad. His wife works as a teacher and that means he has to take on responsibility at home, too. She has less flexibility than he has in his workday. He must prioritize what events he attends or tasks he takes on at home and at the office. “I can’t do it all, but I look at what’s important.

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