Spending more time with the kids

Fact: I like spending time with my kids. I go swimming with them, I take them to their doctor’s appointments, I make every effort to get to school events and I coached my 6-year-old son’s baseball team this spring. But I must confess that as much as I love him and my 9-year-old daughter, I don’t want to spend every spare minute with them.

I suspect that blogger Sasha Brown-Worsham might say that makes me a bad dad. Writing for cafemom.com’s The Stir on Friday, she inveighs against the idea that dads should want to spend time off golfing or doing anything else that doesn’t involve their children.

“The way I see it, my husband should WANT to spend every down minute with his kids,” Ms. Brown-Worsham writes. “He works 50+ hours a week, so when he IS home, there is nowhere else he should want to be.” She goes on to note that her husband makes it to all of their children’s school plays, often takes them to the store and usually handles bedtime and wake-up duties. “He is their father and just as much of a parent as I am.”

Ms. Brown-Worsham’s musings are framed around the idea of bring-home-the-bacon dads and stay-at-home moms, but I would venture to say that my bring-home-the-bacon wife has no desire to spend every down moment with the kids, either.

For one thing, we’re both athletic, and while we enjoy knocking the tennis ball around with the kids or going on family bike rides, we also like grownup-level exercise and competition that the kids can’t participate in. Sunday morning, for example, after receiving my Father’s Day cards I went out for 90 minutes of tennis drills and then played a match with a friend for 90 minutes more. But I was quick to join the kids in the swimming pool when they came to our country club later on—and they promptly got bored of me and went off with their friends.

Ms. Brown-Worsham links approvingly to a similar post on CNN.com by Jeff Pearlman, an author, blogger and sportswriter (and, full disclosure, a friendly acquaintance and crosstown neighbor of mine who’s written for the Journal). He lists some advice to checked-out, distant dads, most of which I find unassailable—from entertaining your kids solo and playing girl stuff with daughters to waking up with the kids on weekends and, of course, telling them you love them. But I quibble with Jeff’s point No. 1:

“1. No golf on weekends: Seriously, it’s ludicrous. Your spouse is home with the kids all the time, and you think it’s OK to take five hours on a weekend day to pursue your own pastime? Selfishness, thy name is Father.”

I think the key is balance. If you’re a dad (or a mom) who never takes time off work for the kids’ activities and leaves all household duties to the spouse, golf or other marathon out-of-home indulgences might not be the best way to go. But expecting involved, conscientious parents never to take an extended break from home on a weekend seems too rigid.

Readers, how do you feel about spending every last minute with your kids? Is it a pleasure, a chore, or simply the right thing to do? Does playing a round of golf on the weekend make me a bad dad?