THE DADDY TRACK : Today, More and More Men Are Sacrificing Promotions, Pay Raises and Job Status for the Kids’ Sake

IT’S A WEEKDAY morning in Half Moon Bay, a quarter past 8, and Chris Fennie is getting ready to leave for work.

Two-year-old Willie, his blond, blue-eyed son, clutches a new toy football as he climbs into his toddler seat in the family Volvo. Buffer, Fennie’s wife, hops into the car, Fennie slides behind the wheel, and the family starts out on the 35-minute drive to Genentech, the biotechnology firm in South San Francisco where the Fennies work as researchers.

It’s an eventful ride. They cruise behind a truck loaded with redwood logs and answer Willie’s questions about trees and lumber and houses. They see a van on fire and quiet Willie’s fears. Coming over a hill, they watch jets take off from San Francisco International Airport. Driving into the industrial park that houses Genentech’s million-dollar day-care center, they pass a train depot, where an obliging engineer toots a whistle and Willie beams.

But the joy turns to trauma when Willie is reminded that he must leave his football in the car--no outside toys allowed at day care. The tantrum is still ringing in Fennie’s ears as he settles into his lab work around 9 a.m.

And so begins one more of the eight-hour days that for Chris Fennie, working father, constitute a career.

At 34, after nine years at Genentech, Fennie has new priorities. Like his lab partners in the cardiovascular department, he used to work long weekends searching for miracle drugs. But now on Saturdays and Sundays, he’s home with Willie, hard at play. While his co-workers stay late on weekdays, unlocking chemical secrets, Fennie is picking up his son from day care, exploring more personal mysteries.

“I can’t have my child in day care for a 12-hour day,” says Fennie, who took three months off during Willie’s first year to get to know him better and to let Buffer return to work. “He won’t be my child. When you’re all done, someone else will have raised him.”

So Fennie works from 9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. and resigns himself to treading water in his job--even as Buffer climbs past him on the career ladder at Genentech. “I’ll sacrifice the career,” he says. Then he corrects himself. “Not exactly sacrifice, but I’ll kind of put it on hold.”

Now meet Fennie’s boss. G. Kirk Raab is president and chief operating officer of Genentech. At 54, with three grown children from a previous marriage, he is due to become the father of twins early in December.

But Raab won’t be cutting back his hours when the children are born.

“Frankly, in my case, I think it would be irresponsible,” Raab says. “I have a tremendous responsibility that’s important to our shareholders as well as the health of mankind and our employees. That can’t be sacrificed.”

After all, Raab explains, “when you go into science, in particular, you decide to be a pretty committed person. Science can’t be 9 to 5 to be significant.”

Who’s right? What should be sacrificed? What qualifies as “significant”?

For men, the answers used to be so clear. They were the breadwinners. They did the important things. For every Madame Curie, there were a thousand Pasteurs. And their wives took care of the kids.

But now, for many men, it’s not so easy. Their wives work, so being a breadwinner is nothing special. Rather than taking macho satisfaction in bringing home the bacon, men face constant pressure to take on a share of the parenting and homemaking duties that had been their wives’ domain. Yet from whom are they to learn how to be dads? Their fathers’ approach--a pat on the head in the morning, a glance at a sleeping child at night, a game of catch on the weekends--wasn’t good enough when they were young, and it won’t do for their kids, either.

Meanwhile, their jobs want every ounce of them. And many of their peers at work, the competitors for raises and praise and promotions, remain fully invested in their careers. As if they didn’t have wives. As if they didn’t have kids. As if it were still 1950 and the whole world hadn’t changed around them. Moviegoers note: Gil Buckman, the devoted father Steve Martin plays in “Parenthood,” loses a partnership in his firm to the sleazy creep who wines and dines clients night after night, presumably at his unseen family’s expense.

“The old definition of success was pretty clear,” says Mark Gerzon, a Santa Monica screenwriter and peace activist who has written books about the changing nature of manhood in America. “If success is making it to the pros or making over $100,000 or being president of the company, that’s clear.

“Now this other thing is fuzzy, and men don’t like things that are fuzzy,” says Gerzon, a father of three whose sons are welcome to visit in the garage he’s converted into an office. “One hundred thousand dollars is clear compared to $80,000, but being involved in parenting your children is not clear at all.”

Big things aren’t clear. Can a man say his family is the most important thing in his life, act accordingly and hope for any advancement in his career? Small things aren’t clear. Can a man take time off to stay home with a sick child without inviting questions about his commitment to the firm?

The dilemmas are old news for women, who, despite their historic assault on the working world during the past 20 years, still are expected--by society, by most husbands and, often, by themselves--to retain primary responsibility for children and home. It is women whom employers are thinking of when they build child-care centers and extend parental leaves. It was a “Mommy Track” that was debated last spring when Felice Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a women’s research group, proposed that companies make it possible for women to maintain careers through the child-rearing years by working part time or in jobs with fewer demands.

Schwartz’s critics, mainly feminists, protested that the proposal falsely implied that professional ambition and motherhood could not coexist. Her defenders said the tension between career and family direly needed the attention Schwartz focused on it.

It was only in the fallout from the controversy that Schwartz and other commentators began to acknowledge that working fathers increasingly are becoming embroiled in the same conflict as working mothers.

Women may be more fully engaged in the struggle, fighting daily to find the time to both nurture and provide. Men, for the most part, are just beginning to recognize that they have choices to make.

But some men in California, without much notice and certainly without much help from their employers, have gone further. They have wandered onto a “Daddy Track.” Professional men, corporate men, single fathers, manual laborers--not a lot of men, but more all the time--have discovered a flip side to the women’s movement. Where women found new identities and self-respect in jobs outside the home, these men are finding that what really matters to them is life outside the job.

So Chris Fennie puts his career on the back burner. Martin Sweeney quits his job as a magazine editor, in part to spend more time with his disabled daughter, Eva, 6. John Romero, an account executive for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, forgoes promotions because John, 5 1/2, and Adrianna, 4, require more attention the older they get. Robert Hale, personnel director for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, turns down job offers, despite his ambition; his first priority is Brian, 12, who has lived with Hale since a divorce.

These men are not abandoning work. The breadwinner is not staying home to be the bread baker. Nor are they superdads, the male equivalents of those working women who advance to vice presidencies, attend PTA meetings and put a home-cooked meal on the dinner table each night. Mostly, their wives still bear more than 50% of the burden at home.

Rather, in Gerzon’s term, the Daddy Trackers aim to be “companions”--literally, those with whom bread is broken. They work and provide, but they want, too, to be home to enjoy with their families the fruits of their efforts. Urged on by their wives, haunted by their fathers’ example, they are stumbling toward a new balance between work and family.

THE HARD CHOICES

THE SEARCH exacts a price.

For Julian Weissglass, a mathematics professor at UC Santa Barbara and the father of 6-year-old Keith and two grown children from a previous marriage, the price is confusion.

“There’s a tension between my work and my family life,” he says, sitting on the brick deck in his back yard one recent starry night. “The university is not the place where you make a lot of money. But to do something significant in my field, versus (being) the best parent I can”--he pauses, thinking--”I still feel torn.”

Since Keith’s birth, Weissglass, 48, has given up the conferences and traveling that helped establish him as an authority in mathematics education. But he misses that milieu. “So, (do) I write this grant, which would mean more travel, and it would be a big thing if I got it? Or do I say, ‘No, I’m happy to do my little thing and spend more time at home?’ I haven’t resolved that yet.”

For John Romero, 36, the price is the uncomfortable awareness that co-workers are surpassing him. “There are individuals who have had children during the same period, and you can clearly see they have not made their choice as I have,” says Romero, who ends his workday by picking up his daughter at a DWP-subsidized day-care center. When Romero turns aside invitations to apply for promotions, these colleagues, he says, ask, “Why? We don’t understand it. What’s happening here?”

For Keith Griffith, 34, an emergency-room nurse at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, the price is a schedule that wears on his marriage and his well-being. Griffith and his wife, Arleen Blank, who also is a nurse, don’t want other people caring for their two children. So Griffith works seven 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. shifts every two weeks--shifts that sometimes stretch as late as 6 or 7 a.m. if the ambulances keep rolling in--and Blank fits her work time around his.

“We have sacrificed a lot of our relationship working opposite schedules,” says Blank, sitting with Griffith in the living room of their Long Beach home as Sam, 5, plays in the yard and Hannah, 10 months, fidgets in her lap. “The kids are used to one or the other of us, but they rarely see us both together.”

Questioned about their values, most men say they are prepared to pay almost any price to play a bigger role in their families’ lives. In June, when 1,000 men and women were surveyed by Robert Half International, a San Francisco personnel recruiting firm, 74% of the men said they would choose a Daddy Track--flexible jobs that offer slower career advancement but more time to give attention to family--over more-rigid jobs on a faster track.

Yet only one in 10 Southern California personnel executives in a July survey of 440 companies by William M. Mercer Meidinger Hansen, a human-resources consulting firm, were convinced that creating a Daddy or Mommy Track would give their company a competitive advantage.

Other studies, however, suggest that family demands already take a toll on large numbers of working men.

Nearly three-fourths of fathers in a study of AT&T; employees said they had to deal with family issues while at work. Almost half of DuPont’s male workers reported difficulties making child-care arrangements. At the DWP, men constituted more than half the employees who claimed similar problems. A national study in May by Opinion Research Corp. of Princeton, N.J., found that male managers under 40 are the group in the work force least satisfied with the amount of time their jobs leave for family life.

A fundamental change during the past two decades in America’s economic life--women’s headlong entry into the working world--and the upsetting of traditional sex roles that has followed go far in explaining the new demands on men to assume a bigger role at home. Today, only 10% of American families follow the Ward and June Cleaver model, with husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. Even among the shrinking portion of families in which two parents are present, both husband and wife are working in 80% of households.

So what’s expected of men has changed. The Fennies, for instance, can’t afford to have Buffer stay home. But her economic contribution to the family means that Chris must contribute his time to their home and son.

After the drive home, it’s Chris who cooks dinner while Buffer entertains Willie. Then it’s Buffer who cleans up while Chris gives Willie a bath. “We switch on and off who does stories after bath time,” Chris says. “And then if we’re lucky, there’s a half-hour for us before it’s bedtime, and then it all starts again at 6:15 the next morning.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while mom is at work, no one--grandparents, baby-sitters and day-care providers included--looks after more preschool-aged children than do fathers. Men in the Daddy-Tracking vanguard split children’s trips to the doctor with their wives, occasionally stay home with a sick kid, hunt out child care and flinch when grandmothers at the park offer fawning praise that dad is “baby-sitting” his children.

When his 16-month-old daughter is sick, Claude Organ, 35, drives 75 miles from his office at Security Pacific National Bank in Costa Mesa to Cindy’s day care in La Jolla. Organ’s wife, Judy Koperski, works just a few miles away, at Scripps Clinic, but she is a physician, and for her to leave work would undermine a carefully crafted patient schedule. Organ’s day as a regional mortgage banking manager is more flexible, so it’s he who tucks Cindy into a sickbed at their Del Mar home.

“If that means Claude Organ doesn’t become president of Security Pacific Bank,” he says, “that’s just something that I do. Family is important to me.”

By itself, recognizing the importance of family does not put a man on the Daddy Track. In “The Second Shift,” a newly published study of the lives of 50 two-earner couples in the Bay Area, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that men talk a far better game than they live when it comes to sharing the responsibility for children and the home. Only 10 of the husbands took on a full 50% of household duties. Others were more likely to help with child care than housework. Hochschild’s findings confirm studies that indicate that in two-earner families, women, on average, work a full month more each year than men, counting work in and out of the home.

Indeed, most men--whatever their professed attitudes--remain more committed, in practice, to job than home life. A San Francisco Chronicle survey in June of 700 Bay Area residents found that 40% of men said they had substantially compromised child-rearing and family for their careers; only 29% said they had compromised their careers for their families.

LONG HOURS, NO SHORTCUTS

IT’S NOT AS IF employers give fathers many options.

In most organizations, bosses are of another era and policies still assume a world where mothers stay home and fathers practice more-or-less benign neglect.

Lawrence Del Santo, 55-year-old chairman and chief executive of Lucky Stores, can’t imagine, for instance, how a man seeking advancement in the grocery business could do anything but devote himself to the trade. Now that he’s in charge, Del Santo, the father of 12 children ages 7 to 32, has stopped working weekends. But he still puts in 11-hour days. And for younger men, he says, the hours are longer than ever.

“I don’t see how there are any shortcuts,” Del Santo says. “When I started, the stores were open 9 to 9. Now they’re open 24 hours.” To stay current “and to stay successful, you have to be here.”

Under those conditions, how does one parent 12 children?

“Well, realistically, my wife was a big participant in this process,” explains Del Santo, who paid tribute to his wife, Becky, in a speech when he accepted a Father of the Year award in June from the West Coast Father’s Day Council. “And frankly, not all these kids are alike--not all of them need the same amount of affection and attention and everything else. So you learn how to spend the time with those that need it and, frankly, you spend less time with those who don’t.”

Not surprisingly, no male employee at Lucky has sought a leave to spend time at home when a new baby was born. Even Chris Fennie stitched together vacation and sabbatical time rather than request paternity leave from hard-charging Genentech when Willie was born. In the only large-scale survey on the subject, Catalyst found that while one in three large companies said they offered paternity leaves, 90% of those firms made no effort to inform male employees that the leaves were available. Asked how much time off it was appropriate for men to take when a baby was born, 63% of companies responded “none.”

“As long as less value is placed on men’s participation in daily family life, cultural barriers will make it very difficult for men to alter the current imbalance in their approach to work and family,” a Ford Foundation report concluded this spring.

Some corporate executives--fathers who have spent time with their kids and still managed to advance at work--argue that it is up to men, one by one, to overcome the stigma that, in many organizations, looms as the primary obstacle to making a place for family in a budding career. Men, they say, must take a stand: declare themselves unavailable for business dinners, cut short meetings, take off a month when the baby arrives.

“You’ve got to test the waters and see if it’s acceptable,” insists Irving Margol, executive vice president of Security Pacific Corp. and the father of three.

John Isham stuck in his toe and found the waters chilly. The Santa Barbara engineer, white-haired at 51, quit a job with an Orange County defense-contracting firm, where it seemed as if the men who worked the longest hours got the most respect. Unhappy with memories of his own childhood, Isham vowed that his daughter, Laura, 10, and son, Paul, 7, would come first in his life.

He made his stance clear to his new employer, an aerospace firm. “I will not waste weekends working up a folder,” he says, an edge of bitterness in his voice. “I’ll come in and do my hours a day. I’ll put in my time for the company and that’s it. And they all know that.”

But it’s not as if his choice is without consequences. “There’s no opportunity,” admits Isham. “You know that you have basically nothing to work for other than just to go to work everyday and do your job and then go home.”

Such employers as Isham’s salt an open sore for many of today’s working dads. Subliminally or outwardly, they ask men to be slaves to the same system that so often stole their fathers from them when they were young. Gerzon, the Santa Monica writer, calls this aching space “the father wound.”

“For men who are aware of the father wound,” he observes, “they are saying to themselves, ‘I’m not going to do to my kids what my dad did to me. I’m going to be more present for my kids than my father was for me. I don’t want to just be a paycheck to them.’ ”

Jeff Mirkin’s father, Morey, was bigger than life--the flamboyant founder of Budget Rent-a-Car, a horse breeder, real-estate tycoon and promoter of high-tech gimmickry. But he never played as big a part in Jeff’s life as his son would have liked. So Jeff, his father’s successor as president of Budget’s franchise in Southern California, struggles every day to make sure his business does not rob his three children of their father.

He makes their breakfast every morning. He brushes their teeth and gets them ready for bed every night. Their artwork covers a corner of the opulent, walnut-paneled office he inherited from his dad. Even as Mirkin, 36, overhauls his company--he spent the summer closing multimillion-dollar deals that made him the owner and operator of more than a third of Budget’s local fleet--he takes an afternoon off each week to help coach 6-year-old Matthew’s soccer team.

“I always wanted more,” Mirkin says, thinking back to his childhood. “As you have kids, you start to see your life being played out again. And I want to be there. I want to coach my son. No, I don’t want to take another afternoon off of work. I can’t afford to take it. But I do.”

BEYOND ‘QUALITY TIME’

THEIR FATHERS leave wounds. Their wives go to work. But if any single impulse merits the most credit for propelling men onto the Daddy Track, it is the profound love they feel for their children--and a changing social climate that gives men new opportunities to express it.

Looking back, Marty Sweeney sees now that when his daughter, Eva, was born six years ago with cerebral palsy, he lost himself in his work as editor of the Writers Guild of America West monthly magazine rather than fully acknowledge the situation at home.

It was easy to justify. “I assumed in America, in Los Angeles, if you’re a young adult trying to survive, no matter what job you have, you work a lot,” says Sweeney, 35, a handsome man with unkempt blond hair. So he worked 6 1/2 days a week.

In August, though, he quit. In part, it was burnout. In part, it was knowing that his wife, screenwriter Deena Goldstone, could provide the family’s primary support. But Sweeney also recognized that he was losing touch with his daughter, a ponytailed blonde. Eva cannot speak, but by using an adaptive computer she is able to write at a level well beyond her first-grade peers.

“As a father, my life largely has been to get up with my daughter four days a week to make breakfast,” he mused a few days after leaving his job.

That was no small commitment. He must feed Eva every spoonful of Rice Krispies. Like so many basic events in a disabled child’s life, breakfast, Sweeney says, is “an emotional experience that is overwhelming.”

Still, as he develops the desktop publishing venture that will be his new work, Sweeney knows he needs more time with Eva. Otherwise, he says, “I’ll be the stereotypical person who looks back 10 years from now and says, ‘I wish I’d spent more time with my daughter.’ ”

As with Sweeney, society probably would have thought nothing if Bob Hale had drifted away from his child. Many men do after a divorce. Yet Hale cracked the mold. A tradition-minded workaholic--he was accustomed, as a married man, to staying late at the office while his wife cared for their son, Brian, and the home--Hale sought and obtained sole custody of the boy four years ago. Nationwide, 1.2 million men are single dads, nearly four times as many as in 1970.

Although it isn’t easy, Brian and his father are a team. As a top official of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, 37, Hale still can’t confine his workday to a reasonable length, so most nights he opens a briefcase after Brian goes to bed. If Hale is in a meeting when school lets out, it’s sometimes up to his secretary to assign Brian his chores over the telephone. Friends take Brian to Little League; Hale catches up later. One year, Brian’s uniform was a different color from those of his teammates. Dad, an inexperienced launderer, messed up the wash.

Brian’s love for his father remains secure. When he gets home from work and at bedtime, Hale gets a hug and a kiss. Boy and father exchange “I love yous” when they talk on the phone.

“He is very astute when I have a bad day,” says Hale, his gray eyes intense. “He will back away a little bit in his own way and know that I need a little bit of time.”

Hale is lucky. An executive, he can draw on resources unavailable to the average worker. And his bosses have been supportive. “There have been compromises made on both sides,” Hale says. “People in my organization understand that he is very special to me.”

NEW IDEAS TAKE ROOT

WHAT DOES the future promise working fathers?

Some say the Daddy Track phenomenon peaked even before it was noticed. Nancy Guttenberg, who has taught parenting courses in Long Beach for almost two decades, is doubtful that large numbers of men will choose to break out of time-honored social roles. Fewer men are putting their families ahead of their jobs today, she says, than five years ago.

Men who pamphleteered for greater male involvement in child-rearing have gone on to other interests. In a popular mid-’80s book, “The Birth of a Father,” Martin H. Greenberg, a San Diego psychiatrist, reported his research on the bond that forms between fathers and infants and chronicled the ways his life was transformed by the birth of his first son. Now Greenberg, drawn back into longer working hours by financial necessity, says work and breadwinning for too long have been denigrated, regarded as a drain on men’s participation in the family rather than a contribution to the family’s well-being. Already the revisionism has begun.

But the picture is not all bleak. Men and women with new ideas about balancing work and family are climbing into powerful jobs in organizations. Ever so slowly, older executives are awakening to men’s changing needs. They are listening to their younger employees, acknowledging the implications for men of women’s expanding presence in the workplace, becoming grandfathers and watching their own sons try to find their way as dads.

Some signposts: A group of Southern California business people, led by Pasadena architect Adolfo Cruz, has established a quarterly magazine, That Balance, dedicated, its motto says, “to successful business people who realize that a truly meaningful life is a balance of one’s professional and personal activities.” Even Lucky’s Del Santo says he can imagine a day “in the very near future” when paternity leaves, for instance, “become part of our normal development process.” And the Department of Water and Power has started to give expectant fathers a copy of Greenberg’s book, whatever his current thinking.

The more men recognize that they have choices about the roles they play in their children’s lives, Mark Gerzon argues, the more they will realize the advantages of making a commitment to family.

He needs only to think about the magazine publisher he once worked for in New York--a man who kept long hours, scolded Gerzon for getting in late and scowled at him for leaving early.

“Well,” Gerzon says, “he’s still the publisher. He’s making more money than I am. But he’s divorced. He doesn’t see his kids. And I’m married and have a good relationship with my kids.

“Who’s richer?”