A Father’s Day assessment of recession-era dads.

Sarcasm aside, I feel for those—men and women—for whom a shift in roles due to an unexpected loss in income scrambles life in ways from which there is no easy recovery. But while there are many who are devastated economically, emotionally, and irretrievably by unemployment, there is also research showing younger men in particular are willing to forgo raises and promotions if it would mean they could spend more time with their families. Forgoing a raise is not the same as losing a job, but still. Role recalibration is not always a wash. Sometimes, as in our case, and as long as the job loss is temporary, the recalibration is a boon. Clearly there's a range. We'll see what happens when Marco goes back to work.

Amid unending speculation about how men are negotiating their layoffs and their masculinity, the only thing we know for certain is that not all families are affected the same. College-educated men have lower unemployment rates, and unemployment rates are highest among blacks and Hispanics. While Marco and I are deeply affected by our income loss, we are not in the dire straits that so many other families are, and I agree with Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who says in the Christian Science Monitor this week that this would all be an "incredible social experiment" if it weren't for so many so tragic.

Bottom line? We don't yet know how it will all shake out. And neither do the researchers studying the phenomenon, the journalists reporting it, nor those of us shamelessly mining our personal experience as data for a national trend. Given that we as a society are in a state of flux, however, it's frustrating how readily we expect our men to fail us on the domestic scene and to be undermined by women's (still uneven) power. In an era when fatherhood has already expanded from purely breadwinning to caregiving, can it really be true that laid-off men are so mal-equipped to adapt?

Forty-eight years ago this week, Marco made his father a father on Father's Day. His dad, a 20-year-old waiter living in a tenement in the South Bronx at the time, had as much preparation for the role as any other guy of his day. When Marco becomes a father, at more than twice the age of his dad, he will have had the uninvited experience of having had to rethink his orientation to work as well as to family life. It's not quite what we might have wished for, but it's what we've got. And the feminist in me thinks it ain't bad.