The Pandemic Is Making Dads Reevaluate Their Work-Life Balance

Zac Eash had originally planned to be home for two weeks when he became a father. But his daughter was born in early March 2020, and, well, you know. “We both got to spend a lot of time with her the first four months of her life,” Eash, a middle-school teacher living in Ames, Iowa, who finished out the school year remotely, told me.

When in-person classes resumed late last summer, Eash was acutely aware of how much less time he had with his wife and baby daughter, and he missed it. He started getting more protective of his hours at home, dropping his role as his school’s basketball coach and making a point of not bringing work home. “That time together at the beginning just set a [precedent] of a lot of time with all three of us in the house,” he explained.

By and large, the past