“The most fulfilling part of being a Lead Dad is the fact that it’s taken so much of the tension out of the family dynamic,” said Ed Barker, our Lead Dad of the Week from suburban Boston. “We can have fun with one another. My wife doesn’t feel like she’s coming down from a mountain of work and has all this other stuff to manage. We have a lot of free time at the end of the day. Of course, some times that’s just as exasperating.”
Ed, who worked for environmental nonprofits out of Washington, D.C., made the call to be a Lead Dad who devoted all of this time to his family during Covid. His daughters, now 9 and 6, were thrust into Zoom school and he had shifted to a consulting role, and his wife was rising up at a biopharmaceutical company.
“We had both reached substantial places in our careers,” he said. “We had really small kids when the pandemic hit. Our younger had respiratory issues. The economics are such that the biopharma mom isn’t going to stay home and the nonprofit guy is.”
A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy, Ed had a career trajectory in which stepping back to lean into parenting wasn’t on his radar. It didn’t have to be until it did. He became a father late, on the cusp of 50.
But then he took the pragmatic route. “As a strategic and necessary need, I stepped into a Lead Dad role,” he said. “It just turned the whole level of stress down. I could take the kids out after school and go to the beach or to the playground. My kids are old enough now that I could go find a full-time job, but it’s way better for us to have someone manage the logistics of life. We have a lot more resilience in the system.”
It’s not always easy and not without a feeling of missing out on what he had before. “Are there moments when I wish I had a professional role?” he asked. “Yes. But I filled it in other ways.”
He ran for town office and won. He is helping to raise money to build a new library.
There are challenges. “I do really well in world that has some structure to it,” he said. “In the way I’m living this Lead Dad role I could have lots of time with little structure. So I’ve worked to impose structure to make the time that I have productive and rewarding.”
Check out the photo of Ed and his girls on a cargo bike, which he would ride to take them to school. It combined getting exercise and making going to school fun.
Welcome, Ed, to The Company of Dads!
