TRANSITIONING PARENTING ROLES AND WORKPLACE ACCEPTANCE

The articles keep piling on: Just this week the New York Times Sunday Styles section (August 12, 2012) big feature on the changing attitudes about stay-at-home dads; and sports pages in many newspapers and electronic media on professional athletes’ fatherly devotion (e.g., Eli Manning, elite quarterback, said he thinks he’s an “elite dad”). I wrote about this trend in sports several years ago, and I’m delighted to see young fathers in other occupations not only expanding their parenting roles, but also speaking publicly about it.

My big questions are:

1-    How much have attitudes in the workplace (not the sports arena) changed toward part-time worker/dads and stay-at-home dads?

2-    Will elimination of stigmas regarding work/life flexibility for men accelerate acceptance and new flexibility for everyone and help women in the workplace as well?

3-    Are the more open attitudes a generational thing, more prevalent with Gen X and Gen Y/Millennials?

Phyllis Weiss Haserot    www.pdcounsel.com

 

Comments

[K.C. Victor]

My experience, as a business advisor and teacher of rainmaking for lawyers, is that returning from significant full-time parenting severely injures one’s career options. In the space of this comment I will only address law firm practice.
At the partner level, a year or more off results in clients finding other lawyers. Without clients, reentry is much harder. For associates or counsel, if one or two important decision-makers ding you for lack of focus, wiser partners rarely fight for you. Lawyers want to practice law (or manage), not change attitudes. I have heard the word “dilettante” used.
As a result of this prejudice, often with a back against a wall, I have seen and helped excellent lawyers open smaller or solo firms. Being shut out of places where you were once welcome is ego-puncturing. Still, with caution, energy and a plan, launching a firm is a solution that makes a brick wall of reentry irrelevant.
Apart from crucial practical issues in opening one’s own shop, you must remember that you cannot keep looking back to make sure mommy is there. Mommy may no longer be on your side.
In-house situations are easier.

[Phyllis Weiss Haserot]

Thank you for your observations, K.C. In 25 years of consulting and coaching to
the legal profession, I have observed much the same as you described, though in
some firms it is getting better – too slowly. My point in asking the questions
I did was to get us al thinking about whether we may be seeing a tipping point
at the end of the tunnel (to mix metaphors) now that men are more opening about
their involved or stay-at-home dad status. I hope that will move the needle,
though I don’t expect the stigmas and other difficulties to vanish anytime
soon.A few years ago I asked a well-respected managing partner of
a major law firm who had been very public about taking a sabbatical to stay at
home when his children were born (and then was able to come back as managing
partner) whether he was encouraging male lawyers in his firm to do the same,
since he was going around speaking about the great experience he had as a
stay-at-home dad on panels and other platforms. He was not, he said, though he
spent time speaking with young lawyers who approached him to talk about it. He admitted
he was not initiating the conversations.

Phyllis Weiss Haserot
Practice Development Counsel
Consulting/Coach to the Next Generation
Author of The Rainmaking Machine: Marketing Planning, Strategy and Management for Law Firms and The Marketers Handbook of Tips Checklists

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