When comedian Jim Gaffigan takes his young brood on vacation, it’s usually in a giant tour bus between stops on his North American touring circuit. The sleep-deprived father of five, with kids ages one through eight, is best known for his riffs on iconic American food products. But these days it’s his daily observations on parenting that draw the biggest laughs.
“Every night before I get my one hour of sleep, I have the same thought: ‘Well, that’s a wrap on another day of acting like I know what I’m doing,’” he writes in a new memoir, Dad Is Fat. “I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not. Most of the time I feel entirely unqualified to be a parent. I call these times being awake.”
From their brimming two-bedroom apartment in New York City, Gaffigan and his wife, Jeannie, do their best to do what all loving, working parents do—juggle family time with careers and seemingly every other demand in the universe.
Work-life balance, it turns out, is its own punch line.
But this isn’t a story about balance. Everybody knows that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, which is why Jack coaches Little League, takes his family to Disneyland, and never misses an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba! with his kids. Good job, Jack.
What this proverb misses is that family playtime—so critical to parents and children alike—is easier said than done.
For dedicated parents tied to a desk job, leisure is a luxury bought with seniority, high performance, and flexible work arrangements. Sometimes parents are simply too tired to shoot hoops after work, leaving Junior to break in that new basketball all by himself.
No, this is a story about spending time with your kids—and new research from the Marriott School can help you do it.
Facts of Life
It’s only natural. From birth, babies engage in a sensory process called protoconversation, becoming “little bonding machines” with their parents, writes David Brooks in The Social Animal, a fascinating narrative on human development. We’re wired to love our kids.
So it’s not surprising that a March 2013 Pew Research study on modern parenthood found that about half of all participants—48 percent of working fathers and 52 percent of working mothers—said they would rather raise their children at home than go to work, though dads say they are much more likely to work anyway. Additionally, more fathers than mothers say they are not spending enough time with their children (46 percent compared with 23 percent).
The study also noted that since 1965 the distinct roles of breadwinner and homemaker have converged. (What do we call them now? Breadmaker? Homewinner?) When it comes to paid work, child care, and housework, parents today are much more likely to share tasks than their parents did—and to want similar access to their children’s daily lives.
This societal shift was highlighted in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek story on working fathers who want more family time—“The Fraternity of Paternity,” as one group called itself. The magazine ran photos of a helpless dad tied, chained, strapped, and duct-taped to his desk while his offspring scrambled over him, starving for attention.
“You might call them ‘Alpha Dads,’ guys who are as serious about their parenting as they are about making partner,” writes Sheelah Kolhatkar of the men she interviewed for the story. “They don’t believe in ‘balance.’ They believe in getting what they want, even if it’s time to yell at their five-year-olds from the sidelines of a soccer game.”
Still, the Alpha Dads have some catching up to do. A movement for working women is already well underway, most recently aided by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. In her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sandberg describes how her first pregnancy opened her eyes to the needs of parents in Silicon Valley and beyond. “Too few workplaces offer the flexibility and access to child care and parental leave that are necessary for pursuing a career while raising children,” she writes. Given that 60 percent of two-parent households with children under age eighteen have two working parents, the issue has broad implications.
While employers can make things easier—and, to their credit, many do—it ultimately comes down to parents to get the ball rolling. Family leisure experts can help.
Power Play
If you want to track down an expert on surfing, go to the beach. If you want to track down an expert on gorillas, go to the jungle. If you want to track down an expert on leisure, just follow the fish.
That’s where you’ll find Marriott School professor Ramon Zabriskie.
“Dr. Z,” as he’s known in fly-fishing circles, recently hosted a tournament in sunny Baja, Mexico, hooking massive marlin, tuna, and roosterfish—a wily game fish he describes as “gorgeous and absolutely crazy ridiculously awesome to catch!” You might also find him bagging trout in the Uinta Mountains with any one of his four children, ages eleven to twenty-five.
When he’s not waist deep in ice-cold streams or bobbing over tropical waters, Zabriskie has another passion: family recreation. He’s studied populations across America, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, and Russia. He’s polled fathers, mothers, kids, couples, singles, and the elderly and published some forty papers on the impact and power of recreation.
One of his latest studies, led by graduate student Lydia Buswell and coauthored by professors Neil Lundberg of the Marriott School and Alan Hawkins of BYU’s School of Family Life, looked at the importance of daily playtime from the perspective of dads and teens—a typically under-studied subject set.
Data gleaned from 647 households, a representative U.S. sample, showed that families function better when fathers are involved in family leisure. The single strongest predictor, the study showed, was satisfaction with regularly occurring home-based activities—dinner, hobbies, games, informal sports, yard activities, television, and even video games—in which Dad participated.
Researchers call these kinds of activities core family leisure because they meet the need for familiarity and stability. That would explain a recent Time essay, “Why I Watch Reality TV with My Kids,” by television critic James Poniewozik, who says his family bonds over episodes of MasterChef. “Pioneer families had the evening taffy pull; we watch people caramelizing sugar on Fox,” he writes.
The other category is balance family leisure—activities such as vacations, outdoor concerts, and other novel experiences that meet the need for challenge and change. This is where that Disneyland trip fits in, unless, of course, you experience the Magic Kingdom on a daily basis. Hey, your kids can dream, right?
Both forms of leisure are important, and one without the other cannot fulfill every family need.
House Rules:
To make the most of your family time, Ramon Zabriskie recommends implementing these playtime tips:
- Plan and carry out core and balance family leisure. Healthy families need both, he says.
- Do more with less. Can’t take a vacation? Take a mini-vacation. Quality matters more than quantity.
- Don’t forget the little things. Roughhouse. Tell bedtime stories. Jump on the trampoline. These are simple, spontaneous, and fun.
- Communicate. When you watch TV or movies together, interact. Most TVs these days have a pause button, he quips.
- Finally, play around to see what works for your family. We learn by trial and error, he says. The important thing is to get started.
A Vacation to Remember
Dave Kinard, an executive at Eli Lilly, oversees human resources operations in Japan, Australia, Europe, and Canada. In his sixteen-year globetrotting career with the company, the 1993 MOB grad has banked a lot of SkyMiles. And he’s always wished his family could be there with him.
Two years ago he surprised his wife and four teenagers by booking a getaway to
Florence, Italy, where he had meetings. After weeks of sleepless anticipation, the big day came, and the family, nearing hysteria with excitement, gathered their things for the drive to the airport. Only then did Kinard realize, to his horror, that a passport was missing—his own.
After a frenzied, fruitless search, desperation set in. Kinard insisted that his family journey ahead. His wife refused. In anguish, he cancelled the trip—on what must have been the hardest Father’s Day of his life.
“My gift that year,” he says, “was to see how forgiving my children could be. They were extremely gracious.”
The passport, it turned out, had been left in a hotel two weeks earlier. After calling the airline and securing what refunds they could, the family eased into a relaxing “staycation,” watching sports and movies at home. They also spent several days at the family lakehouse an hour and a half away.
Though Kinard did some work to make up for the missed meetings in Florence, he spent the bulk of the time with his loved ones. Together they simply celebrated summer—and on the Fourth of July, their grande vacanza italiana literally ended in fireworks.
“It was a lot of fun,” says Kinard’s daughter Emily, now twenty-one. “There was a big soccer match on TV, and my dad and I were fanatical during that game, just ranting and cheering. We’ll always remember it as one of our best family vacations.”
Good things come to families who spend time together, even for just a few quality minutes each day. The BYU study, published in Leisure Sciences last year, reports that family cohesion and adaptability improve and communication channels open up.
“Family leisure—that’s where communication happens,” Zabriskie says.
It’s also a defense mechanism against potential parenting pitfalls. Children who feel neglected at home may act out in school, stealing from others or starting fights to attract attention or fill an emotional void, family practitioners point out. And wellness managers say unengaged parents may experience stress or depression, marital strife, or poor concentration at work. Short-term solutions, like medication, counseling, or legal measures, can be costly or ineffective.
Kinard, who eventually delivered on his promise of a family vacation abroad, knows something about employee wellness from his observations at Eli Lilly. He says families can have a significant impact, both positive and negative, on worker productivity.
Zabriskie agrees—but don’t wait until a Friday afternoon to ask him about it. “Sorry, gone fishin’ with my boy,” he writes via email. “I’ll be around next week.”
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Article written by Bremen Leak
Illustrations by Scotty Reifsnyder
About the Author
Bremen Leak studied journalism at BYU before joining BusinessWeek in 2005. He now lives and works in Washington, D.C.
