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The More Time Dads Spend With Their Kids, The Happier They Are At Work

This article is more than 9 years old.

For most working mothers, the more time they devote to their children, the more conflicted they feel about the time they spend at work. But that’s not the case for dads, according to a new study.

Working fathers who spend more time with their children are likely to have a greater sense of satisfaction on the job, and less of a desire to move to another organization, says the study, to be published next month in the Academy of Management Perspectives. Less surprising: Dads who spend more time with their kids are less likely to experience conflicts at home. The study also reveals that the more time men spend with their children, the less central their careers are to their identities. But the authors don’t think that should hurt their careers.

The message for companies: You will have a more engaged male workforce and greater retention if you offer more liberal paternity leave and increase the availability of flextime and the number of personal days all employees can take to spend time with family. (Those policies would also go some distance toward making working moms happier.)

“Organizations need to recognize fatherhood, support fathers through formal programs like flexible work arrangements and through informal means, not questioning a man who comes in late and leaves early if he gets his work done,” says Beth K. Humberd, assistant professor of management at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, business school and one of the study’s co-authors.

Humberd and her colleagues ran an online survey of nearly 1,000 fathers employed as full-time managers or professionals at four big companies. Most worked more than 46 hours a week and made a mean of about $80,000 a year. All were married, including 62% with working wives. They spent a mean of 2.65 hours with their kids on a typical work day and rated the support they got from supervisors or family members at 3.79 on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).

The online questionnaire also asked respondents to rate the importance of six attributes of good fathering including “provide love and emotional support,” “do your part in the day-to-day childcare tasks,” “provide discipline,” and “provide financial security.” Doing day-to-day tasks was the lowest-rated (3.9) aspect of good fathering, suggesting that dads don’t feel they need to slog through all of the tedium of raising their kids. “Provide financial security” (4.0) ranked fourth behind “provide love and emotional support,”(4.6) “be involved and present in your child’s life” and “be a good model and coach.”

Why do men feel better about their work when they spend more time with their kids, while women feel worse? The study suggests that men “do not seem to experience threat [sic] to their work identities in the same way women do as mothers,” says the paper. “Perhaps men don’t experience the same level of guilt that working mothers feel and don’t view caring for children as a source of stress.”

Mothers aren’t imagining the threat to their work and their livelihood. This latest study follows plenty of other data showing that for men, having kids can boost their careers, while mothers pay a penalty. Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at U. Mass, Amherst, who has studied the parenthood pay gap, said in a paper published last year that high-income men get a hike in pay when they have children while low-income women who have kids experience a pay decrease. In general Budig found that women get a 6.7% cut for every child they have, though she acknowledges that many women take extended leaves and/or switch to lower-paying, less-demanding jobs so that they can devote more energy to their kids. By contrast, men tend to stay in the same jobs and the traditional perception is that once they have kids, they will be motivated to work even harder to provide for them. Budig calculated that men’s earnings climbed more than 6% when they had children. There are complicating factors, of course, like experience, education, hours and spouses’ income. But it seems that gender discrimination still explains at least part of the so-called “motherhood penalty.”

One more study that’s on point: Shelley J. Correll, a Stanford sociology professor who directs the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, co-wrote a 2007 paper at Cornell describing a study in which researchers sent fake résumés to hundreds of employers. The résumés were all the same except some had a line about being a member of a parent-teacher association. Women without the PTA line got calls back more than twice as often as those with the line. By contrast fathers with the PTA line were called back slightly more frequently than those without it. What’s more, in a laboratory study described in the same paper, mothers were offered an average of $11,000 less in salary than women with no children and $13,000 less than fathers.

There is an exception in Prof. Budig’s findings: Women whose incomes are in the top 10% lose no money when they have children and when they’re in the top 5% they can even get bonuses of more than 5% per child. Certainly women like billionaire Facebook COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg have not suffered economically as a result of having kids. Budig speculates that those high-earning women could be perceived as similar to male earners.

It’s good news that men who are spending more time with their kids feel better about their jobs. But it’s understandable that women may not, given the job and pay discrimination that mothers face.

It’s also not clear that men who take advantage of paternity leave will find unfettered happiness and support. Humberd’s paper recalls the recent story of Tom Stocky, the director of product management at Facebook, who took the full four-month paternity leave offered by the company. (Facebook is in a minority; only 15%-16% of US companies offer paternity leave, despite the fact that the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act requires it for companies with more than 50 employees.) Stocky blogged about what he considered a meaningful experience and he got a lot of positive feedback but he also heard comments from mothers on the playground who said things like, “It’s a shame your wife makes more money than you and she can’t stay home.” The authors also recall a 2013 Wall Street Journal query posted on several social media sites aimed at assessing current views on paternity leave. Among the hundreds of comments: “paternity leave is for sissy men!” and paternity leave is “another excuse to pay people for doing nothing.”

Hopefully this paper will shed some light onto the merits of paternity leave and other pro-parent policies.