Buying Time

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

A couple of years ago Mike, one of my local at-home dad buddies, received a burst of attention when he was featured in a couple of national media outlets detailing his theory on at-home parenthood. It's a simple theory: If you decide that you are going to leave the workforce and stay home with the kids, raising the kids should be your prime concern. Not the cooking. Not the floors. Not the toilets.

So Mike outsourced pretty much everything he could. Dinner, most nights, was takeout. And the soap or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach was someone else's problem -- he happily paid for housecleaning. After all, his logic goes, if both spouses are dog tired after a long day, why should at the at-home parent automatically be saddled with assembling the chicken cacciatore?

The big objection to this kind of thinking, of course, is that the great mass of American families simply can't afford to have cleaning people or eat Boston Market three times a week, but Mike claimed it was all about priorities. There is always a little more money if you're willing to forgo your iPod or your trip to Disney or your cellphone or your nights out with the boys (or girls). So, if time with the kids is the really the absolute, primary goal, you should be able find the cash for a quick Chipotle run. (A family of four can probably feast on a single burrito, anyway.)

I admire the logic, but I just can't make it work in practice, at least not to the degree that Mike did. Maybe it's because my iTunes habit is worth chopping up carrots every once in a while. Maybe it's that -- by 5 p.m. -- a little change in focus is welcome. Maybe it's my deep suspicion of the nutritional value of take-out food.

Still, it's a great and provocative way of looking at things. Mike believes that if more parents understood child-rearing shouldn't automatically commit them to cleaning toilets, parents would spend a lot more time with their kids. Is that a fair way of looking at things? Is buying out of household tasks to hang with the kids a good investment?

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

By Brian Reid |  June 14, 2007; 7:00 AM ET  | Category:  Childcare , Division of Labor
Previous: Pro-Choice or No-Choice? | Next: Happy Father's Day, Dad

Name:

Comments: