On the Daddy Track : Men: Working fathers face the dilemma working mothers always have: family or career? More are making decisions based not on work but on how their kids will be affected.

By ELIZABETH MEHREN

June 30, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

For David Kipper, having a family was never a question.

He adored his parents, who stayed married until death did them part. He loved his two brothers. He treasured the remarkable feeling of closeness and connection they shared.

In his own life script, he could think of “nothing more creative, nothing more humorous, nothing more enlightening” than watching this cycle repeat itself in a family of his own. “I thought I would grow up to be Ward Cleaver,” says the 45-year-old Beverly Hills doctor.

But Kipper is a single father now, custodial parent to a son named Sam. He and Sam’s mother never married, and ever since the child came home from the hospital three years ago, Sam has lived with with his dad.

It’s meant an endless series of adjustments, placing Kipper among a tiny radar-screen blip of men who are realigning their professional lives to accommodate their families. Scaling back hours at work, turning down transfers, saying no to promotions, even spending hard-earned vacation time at home with the kids are dilemmas that routinely plague mothers who work outside the home. Slowly, some men are coming head-to-head with the same tough choices--and some of them are making decisions in favor of their families.

But Jim Levine, who has studied this phenomenon as head of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute in New York, cautions that it is by no means widespread. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution,” he says.

This still-emerging pattern came to light recently when Gary Hart, a Democratic state senator, announced he was leaving California politics to devote more time to his wife and children. “The amount of time away from my family has been enormous,” he said. “And the prospect of being an absent father . . . is just too high a price to pay.”

Mothers who work outside the home offer a near-universal lament of perpetual fatigue. There is simply never enough time to do it all, they complain. Almost always, their own needs are the first to fall by the wayside. Often, the juggling act of career and family means professional and financial compromise--part-time jobs, for example, and high-priced child care.

For many women, this conundrum often evokes an uneasy mixture of bitterness, anger and resignation. The situation’s not great, they say, but that’s the way it is. But with no road map to follow, men tend to find these complications startling and scary. Financial down-stepping, in particular, is difficult for most men--who, after all, are accustomed to defining themselves on the basis of job and income, not time spent with kids. Ward Cleaver, lest we forget, was the breadwinner not the bread baker.

And most men are still neophytes in the strange, uncharted world of work and family. “They are just beginning to struggle with the issues that women have been grappling with for years,” says Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the forthcoming book “The Myth of Male Power.” Their role remains ill-defined, compounding a sense of confusion and insecurity that is especially discomfiting to Homo Americanus, vintage 1993.

“Men,” says Farrell, “are in 1993 where women were in 1953.” And even in 1993, working father is barely a phrase in the national vocabulary.

But historical comparisons are of scant interest to Kipper, who has shaved his medical practice in half so he can be with Sam as much as possible. Without disclosing exact figures, Kipper explains that this has meant a commensurate cut in his handsome, six-figure salary.

A full-time housekeeper doubles as a baby sitter when Kipper is at work. But even with a reduced caseload, he sometimes struggles to meet the day’s demands. For instance, his insistence on tucking Sam into bed each evening means that he now makes hospital visits to his patients late at night.

His reconfigured schedule has piqued some male colleagues, whose wives wonder why they can’t manage to make it home to tuck in the kids. Meanwhile, he is so busy running play groups or driving Sam to swimming lessons that he has little time to do things like buy clothes for himself. And guess what, Kipper--like the working moms he meets at preschool--is constantly exhausted. “Whipped,” is how he puts it, to be exact.

“It has affected every part of my life,” Kipper says. “Yet for all of this, I wouldn’t have traded this experience for the world.”

He had the economic wherewithal to make a family-based job decision. Most men, fearful of financial impotence in the cheeriest of economic times, are especially insecure about reducing their salaries in a period of national economic uncertainty. Turning down a transfer or a position that requires extensive travel may mean a cost in career prestige as well as income. And in the current economic climate, most men don’t even have the opportunity to consider such an option.

For most men, the sentiments propelling pro-family job decisions are genuine, according to Robert L. Griswold, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of the new book “Fatherhood in America.”

“But for a variety of reasons, men have a hard time acting on these sentiments,” he says. “In part, men are blocked by their own selfishness. But the work culture is against them, too. Men like the rewards they get at work,” and the workplace does not always encourage decisions that put family first.

But Rick Clancy, a vice president at Sony Electronics in Park Ridge, N.J., says family matters come up more and more among his company’s 12,000 employees. Increasingly, he says, male employees cite “family commitments” as “the reason they decide not to move.” This is a contrast, Clancy agrees, from the not-so-distant days when “the man in the family” packed the wife and kids into a moving van and assumed they would follow him anywhere.

At IBM in Westchester County, N.Y., Jim Keller says he “traveled too much” when his first daughter was born four years ago. When his second daughter came along last year, “I took a job that would mean less travel,” handling corporate communications.

But Keller is by no means an isolated case in the labyrinth of IBM. “Even in the current work environment, I get the impression that this kind of decision is more common than it ever was,” he says.

Still, the comparative rarity of the decision makes isolation a common refrain. Even among a well-educated, largely affluent group of acquaintances, “I have nobody to relate to,” Kipper says. “That’s the loneliest part of my life.”

At a reunion of his Princeton University classmates not long ago, 33-year-old Jeff Bass of Boston says his undergraduate buddies didn’t know what to make of his decision five years ago to walk away from his fast-track job at Arthur D. Little in order to be more involved in rearing his two young sons.

“It was seen as way counter-culture,” Bass says.

In fact, he says, he gave up his “80-hour-a-week” position as a hazardous-waste-management consultant because he was on the road so much that he knew the Boston airport better than his own back yard. Bass and his wife, who does not work outside the home, scaled down by selling their single-family house and purchasing a duplex that would generate some rental income. Bass says the more-than-50% salary cut he took to become the part-time administrator of his church was well worth the odd looks from Ivy League classmates.

“I’m willing to work hard for 40 hours,” he says. “But I’m not going to sacrifice my family life for it.”

Dan Russell, a record producer in Merrimack, Ma., sounds a similar note when he declares that “50% less money is worth 100% more happiness.” Russell, 36, had been the tour manager for the group U2 until his son Jesse was born, eight weeks premature, last December.

“Somebody else can do this job,” Russell remembers announcing when he left the job that had taken him on the road an average of 10 out of every 12 months. “Right now I want to see as much of this kid as I can.”

In Fort Worth, Stephen Watson says he and his wife, Vivian, blanched nine years ago when they calculated how much they were spending on child care for their son and daughter. Watson, 40, says he had little problem giving up his work as a Xerox service representative, in part because his wife’s job as a school administrator had a greater possibility of advancement.

But he did not make a point of advertising his role as the primary care giver to Stephen Jr., now 11, and Ashley, 9.

“It wasn’t that it bothered me, being thought of as a wimp,” says Watson, who maintained his position as a reservist with the National Guard. “But I didn’t feel like answering questions and defending myself.”

Joseph H. Pleck, a psychologist at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and author of “Working Wives, Working Husbands,” says the kind of social disapproval Watson encountered stops some fathers from taking similar actions. Bombarded with the message that they should be more involved in family activities, men are also hampered by a “hidden proviso” that tells men “they should not be involved beyond the point that their involvement in any way reduces their success or career commitment--or their earnings.”

While he balks at the thought of himself as some kind of pioneer, Los Angeles television producer Tom Weitzel, 42, does admit that he was probably ahead of the curve in 1979 when he became the custodial parent of his two sons. Matthew Weitzel was not yet 4 when his parents divorced, and Nicholas was just over 1; Weitzel switched to free-lancing, taking a big cut in hours and income.

“It was unusual, and there was a certain cachet,” says Weitzel, now a producer at “Entertainment Tonight.” It was also an interesting study for Weitzel in how society continues to hold men and women to different standards.

“Nobody bats an eye about a woman staying with her children,” he says. “But as a single father, I could do anything. As long as the kids didn’t have visible bruises, everybody thought you were a saint. Which was hardly the case.”

Bruce Linton, a Berkeley psychotherapist, may also have been a bit avant-garde when he cut his practice--and his salary--by a third 12 years ago to spend time with his newborn son, Morgan. When his daughter Julia came along five years later, Linton continued to work two-thirds time, while his wife, Rita, worked three-quarters time as a nurse.

“We felt strongly that a child does need a primary caretaker,” says Linton, 43. “In our case, we weren’t able to do that individually, so we did it collectively.”

Counseling other fathers, Linton says many protest that they do not receive sufficient credit for the kind of pro-family decisions they do make. “Their wives are wondering why they’re not doing more. But a lot of men are feeling positive, because they are spending so much more time with their kids than their own fathers did.”

Or, says Bruce Rappaport, an adoption counselor in Pleasant Hill, Calif., “I think what you find is, men working 40 hours a week instead of 60 hours”--the path Rappaport, 50, took when his daughter Anna was born nine years ago.

He also rearranged his schedule so that he would work on Saturdays, but take Wednesdays as “Anna days.” That pattern has continued, Rappaport says, even since he and Anna’s mother divorced several years ago. Rappaport picks his daughter up at school, and “Anna and I are together on Wednesdays, no matter what.”

At the Families and Work Institute in New York, Jim Levine says these subtle adjustments should not be overlooked.

“It may not be as much as some women would like, but what is happening is that some men are beginning to juggle their schedule the way she does, and not just to assume that she’ll be the juggler,” Levine says.

To many women, these occasionally clumsy attempts to reach a balance between career and family sometimes take on an almost endearing quality. And some men seem equally mystified over why it should be a big deal for a guy to pay the kind of attention to his family that he does to his job.

As Tom Weitzel points out, “Listen, male sea horses take care of the children--and there’s millions of them.”