Word: asianized
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...Fifty years ago, parenting was so much simpler for Asian men. As the sole breadwinner, a dad's responsibilities typically ceased the moment he crossed the threshold of his home and flopped into his favorite chair, while mom dealt with the dinner and the children. "The father in the previous generation was more aloof, removed from the family and emotionally more detached," says Daniel Wong, a University of Hong Kong professor of social welfare and author of a 2003 study on the stresses faced by dads. Says Benjamin Naden, a client manager at Microsoft in Singapore who sometimes snatches...
...many fathers find there's less of it to give. Asian men are becoming fathers later in life, when they tend to have less time for their children. "Career responsibilities increase with age," says Raphael Chan, a director of a fast-food chain in Singapore who became a first-time father at age 41. "But this was the point at which I had a child, and it was hard." Multitasking and an accelerated workflow present other challenges for the single-task-oriented male brain. And technological advances-from vibrating Blackberries to the addictive allure of high-speed Internet access...
...unlike their fathers, Asian men today face an epoch-shifting change: the entry of women into the workforce. Having two incomes has brought economic benefits to countless families, and given women rich opportunities for fulfillment, but it has left men scrambling to become the fully fledged co-parents their wives now need them to be. In fact, many men are experiencing, for the first time, the conflicting pulls of career and home that have long bedeviled working women. These overstretched fathers are still getting used to the idea that they're no longer excused from taking on a wider family...
...cities-or overseas-to find work, they had very little contact with their sons. Those sons, with educations paid for by their fathers' remittances, were able to advance up the socioeconomic ladder. But the jobs they took-many of them white-collar jobs at the heart of the Asian economic boom-robbed them of a family life, too. Today, their sons-the third generation and the present crop of fathers-are the product of two previous generations of absent dads. "The pattern of fatherlessness can be passed down," says Wong Suen Kwong, who says he started the Centre for Fathering...
...This may explain the varying degrees of success Asian companies have had with programs aimed at fathers. In Japan, cosmetics firm Shiseido introduced an enlightened scheme in April 2005 whereby employees with children under 3 are offered a one-time benefit of an additional two weeks of paid leave. Since the scheme's adoption, says spokesman Tatsuyoshi Endo, only 28 men have taken advantage of the offer. (At Shiseido's Tokyo head office 1,780 of the 3,300 employees are men, but the firm doesn't keep a tally of how many are fathers). Other companies are offering similarly...