Legal Commentary

If it's June, it must be PrawfsBlawg.  Thanks to all the Prawfs regulars for sharing their space with me for another guest stint.

I thought I'd kick off my visit by talking about my experience this past semester of life on paternity leave.

When we had our first son, two years ago, I was in my first year at Cornell, without tenure, eager to get to know people and make a good first impression.  The result was that, when my son, Sidhartha, was born in the middle of the semester, I missed just one day of class and never really took an extended period of time off to spend with him until the summer.

When we found out my wife was pregnant with our second son, J. Julio, who was due to arrive around the beginning of the fall semester, she pushed me to ask Cornell for a paternity leave in the spring.  That way, she would be able to take her leave in the fall, I would take a leave in the spring, and our son would have at least one of his parents around for most of the first year of his life.  I agreed to ask, and Stewart Schwab (our dean), approved.  I became, I believe (though I'm not 100% sure about this), the first father on our faculty to take advantage of Cornell's generous parental leave policy by taking off an entire semester from teaching.

I found the experience extremely rewarding. It was a lot of fun to spend so much time with our younger son.  I'm close to both my sons, but I think the time I spent during this past semester allowed me to bond with Julio.  On the other hand, I found the lack of the daily routine of teaching to be a little bit disorienting.  I did come in to the office several times a week, both for appointments commitee duties and for workshops, etc.  But Cornell is a place where there is an ethic of coming into the office, and I felt a little bit distanced from the school by my absence.  That was totally self-imposed -- no one did anything to make me feel that way.  But I did feel it.

I have to admit, I also felt a little bit insecure about the whole idea of paternity leave.  I think there's a lot to the notion that, in our culture, men derive a great deal of psychological satisfaction from going to work every day.  Being out and about, running errands, with or without my son, in the middle of day made me feel a little bit strange and somewhat marginal.  If I was with my son at the coffee shop in Trumansburg, for example, I was very likely to be the only man there.  Again, no one stared or made me feel uncomfortable, but, again, I have to admit that I did feel it.  I'm not particularly proud of that, but there it is.

Which leads me to my final observation.  Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame) has a new book out, called Home Game, in which he talks about his experiences as a first time dad.  I haven't yet read the book, but I heard an interview with him about it on NPR.  In that interview, he said something that I found very interesting.  He talked about the differences between his experience of fatherhood and his dad's.  He said, jokingly, that he thinks our generation of fathers has gotten a raw deal compared to our dads' generation.  His point was that we have more of a role in the domestic sphere, along with the same (or greater) demands outside that sphere. 

He seemed to recognize that, in large part, that raw deal is really just a rebalancing of things to rectify the even rawer deal that our mom's generation of women received.  But, even so, I think he does have a point.  Men today are expected to take a greater role in child-rearing and house-keeping.  And this is all for the better.  I enjoy spending time with my kids; and I even like cooking and (less so) cleaning up.  Plus, it's great to be married to a high-achieving spouse who contributes to the family income and in whose professional accomplishments I can and do take a lot of pride. 

The problem is that this reconfiguration of the American family has not been matched, in my view, by a reconfiguration of expectations in the American workplace.  I obviously don't have a great deal of standing to raise this point, because I work in a sector of the legal industry where this is the least true (see above, where the dean gladly granted me paternity leave).  Michael Lewis may also not be in a really good position to complain.  But if I were working at a law firm, or for the government, or really in any other corner of the legal profession, my wife would have the same expectations about my participation.  I would have the same desire to be involved in my children's lives, but I would have much less of an opportunity to do it.  In fact, I'd probably have less of an opportunity than men of my father's generation, because the hours have gotten worse.  One thing to note, though, is that Lewis is probably assigning blame to the wrong phenomenon.  Men's lives are harder today because we have more demands on our time, but that is due as much to things like stagntating middle-class wages that have forced a lot of families to rely on two incomes, as it is to the changing allocation of responsibilties within the family.

This has been a rambling post, and I apologize for that, but I'd love to hear in the comments from men (and women) who have thoughts on or experiences of paternity leave, both in the legal academy and in other areas of the legal profession. Is it available in your workplace.  Do people actually take it? How was it?  And how, apart from paternity leave, have you responded to the challenge of balancing work and family in your legal career?