Fathers Face a Choice: Stay With Kids or Return to Office?
Being there for the family is the new normal created by the pandemic, and that’s changed the reckoning for heading back to the old 8-to-6 life, especially for new parents.
For many new parents, ‘normal’ is spending more time with your kids.
Photographer: Michael H/Digital VisionWhen we talk about workers going back to their offices, the goal for most people is to return to the normal routines of life. But there's at least one group of former office-dwellers who are viewing the return as uncharted territory: parents who had their first child during the past 18 months.
The back-to-office reckoning is often simpler for younger, single or childless staff. But new parents are having to figure out for the first time how to manage commuting, long hours away from home and parenting small children. All their experience thus far has been in a work-from-home pandemic world, where family interaction was part of the normal flow of their day. Particularly in the case of new fathers, the pandemic might have spawned a long-overdue cultural shift in how to balance workplace and family life.