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After the tidal wave of books with advice for working mothers a few years ago, it was only a matter of time before the male version emerged. Marathon Dad: Setting a Pace That Works for Working Fathers by John Evans (Avon) leads the charge with advice directed at the father who wants to take part in parenting without giving up his career. Evans, a psychotherapist, sees Marathon Man as the natural partner of Super Mom: "another breathless man trying to juggle the demands of a full-time career and hands-on, involved parenting in a two-working-parent home." But the struggle to be a good father is worth it, says Evans, because we are engaged in nothing less than "a fundamental shift in the history of men."
A man may want to be a better father for less epochal reasons as well, says Evans: loving his children, wanting to give them more than just his name and his money, believing that it is not fair for his working wife to do the lion's share of the work. Evans attempts to show fathers how to juggle their professional and personal responsibilities without dropping the ball.
OPHELIA'S BROTHERS: FOCUSING ON BOYS
"A couple of years ago, everything was girls, girls, girls," says Times Books editor Rapoport. She is referring, of course, to the phenomenal success of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Ballantine) by Mary Pipher and the many copycat books that followed. Pipher, a clinical psychologist in Lincoln, Neb., argues that many girls lose themselves in adolescence, just as Ophelia, the tragic figure in Shakespeare's Hamlet, did. Popularizing the work of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, Pipher urges the parents of adolescent girls to help their daughters avoid emotional traps like depression, eating disorders and suicide attempts. The book spent nearly three years on the best-seller lists, and continues to be popular.
But, says Rapoport, "now we're seeing--rightly--boys, boys, boys." In fact, says Howard Cohen, a marketing manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio, "there have been so many studies done on girls. I think this is, I won't say a backlash, but it's coming back around." One popular title is Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood by William Pollack (Random House). It is boys who are in serious trouble, says Pollack, including many who appear at first glance to be doing just fine. Writes Pollack: "New research shows that boys are faring less well in school than they did in the past and in comparison to girls, that many boys have remarkably fragile self-esteem, and that the rates of both depression and suicide in boys are frighteningly on the rise."
Pollack, a professor at Harvard medical school, argues that boys are hamstrung by "the old Boy Code--the outdated and constricting assumptions, models and rules about boys that our society has used since the 19th century." Parents, he says, must "get behind the mask" and find out their sons' real feelings.
FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CRIB: GAY PARENTS GET GOING