like those on "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" - would have been mystified by something that makes James Levine want to cheer - signs on men's room doors reading "Baby-changing area inside."
Levine, author and researcher on fatherhood issues, sees some signals that American society is getting around to recognizing a significant role for fathers.Examples: Johnson & Johnson is using men in its ad campaign for baby shampoo. St. John's-Mounds Park Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. led the medical community 11 years ago in holding seminars for fathers and their babies. Corporations from Time Inc. to American Express are exploring how better to meet the needs of employees who are fathers. Child-rearing manuals are no longer written only for mothers.
"Signals in our society are changing," Levine said. "Men are being given permission to express their interest in their children. The norm (for men) used to be that you went to work in the morning and came home at night, not thinking much about your kids in between."
Now corporate America is beginning to discover working fathers, he said: A number of companies have opened on-site day-care centers as a convenience to fathers and mothers, who can then be closer to their young children and infants during the work day; a growing number of men are taking a parenting leave when their child is born; some men have left their jobs and stayed home full time to care for children while their wives continue to work full time.
As a preschool teacher in California in the late 1960s, Levine frequently was asked a question that the female teachers weren't: "What do you really do for a living?"
Child care was definitely a women's issue then, he said. He remembers a 1969 survey about fathers' participation in rearing infants; the researchers went to the mothers to ask if the men were involved.
By 1973 Levine was writing and speaking on his theory that the nation will not solve child-care problems "unless we see it as a family issue that involves women and men."
Men in government and business had to understand and acknowledge their impact on their families and on society.
Levine now is director of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute in New York City. He is researching what society's idea of fatherhood will be in the 1990s and the implications of changes for employers, fathers, mothers and families.
Despite the advances for fathers, notes from many schools still begin "Dear Mothers" and conferences about children are timed for the mothers' advantage, not the fathers', Levine said.