From projo.com
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Rhode Island news
7.29.2001
Single Dads
• Juggling jobs, laundry and naptimes, more men than ever are parenting solo
BY ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
Daniel Gonzalez ranks among an elite group of dads: those who do nails.
Not long ago, before his daughter, Christina, bounced off to a middle-school dance, he painted her fingernails electric blue and sculpted her hair with styling gel.
"I try to be as funky as possible," Gonzalez says of his still-evolving experiments in cosmetics.
Some days produce more Vidal Sassoon-like results than others, says Christina, 11. But she cuts her father some slack. After all, he also cooks and cleans and does laundry and irons and clips coupons and hosts sleepovers and helps with the homework.
"He's doing good for a single father," she says.
Gonzalez, 38, is part of a small but fast-growing group of Rhode Islanders: single fathers with primary custody of their children. Whether divorced, widowed, or never married, they are reshaping traditional gender roles and quietly learning the sort of daily juggling act that mothers know well.
Mountain biking? Downing a beer with the guys? Rarely even an option anymore. Since his divorce, three years ago, Gonzalez says that his daughter and his son, Daniel, 7, have taken center stage in his life.
He drives them to their tai-chi practice and basketball games. He takes vacation days from his job, as a GTECH engineer, when they are too sick to go to school. He posts his daughter's perfect test scores on the refrigerator.
"I feel I'm playing the mom's role and the dad's role," Gonzalez said the other day, in a rare moment of calm when his children were in their yard in North Kingstown playing hide-and-seek. "It's nonstop -- it really is nonstop. It's rare that I can sit down."
According to the 2000 census, the number of single-father families in Rhode Island grew 76 percent over the last decade, to more than 7,300 today.
And single fathers are increasingly at the helm of single-parent households. In 2000, nearly one in five single-parent families in Rhode Island was headed by a father -- up from one in 9 in 1980.
Experts say that the massive entry of women into the work force since the 1960s has led to a re-evaluation of men's role in the home. Many fathers, whether inspired by feminism or the men's movement or something else, want a bigger role in their children's lives than their fathers had in theirs.
And, say lawyers, with more cases of both divorced parents working outside the home, judges have grown more willing to set aside the longstanding preference for maternal custody.
Though many say it was no more than a coincidence, the 1990 Rhode Island Supreme Court decision that set the criteria for "the best interests of the child" awarded custody to a father.
ACROSS THE country, the number of single-father families now tops 2 million -- up from 393,000 in 1970. That means that 22 percent of single-parent households nationwide are headed by a father.
"There's been a noticeable change in men's ideas of what the role of fatherhood constitutes," says David J. Eggebeen, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University. "It's more than just winning bread and showing what it is to be a man by hitting a ball around in the yard.
"There's a cultural shift to see fatherhood as more varied and more subtle -- the cultural demands on men [now] are to spend time with their kids."
The results are visible in everything from the number of fathers seen toting infants in parks to the advent of paternity leave and of diaper-changing stations in men's restrooms.
Single dads of various stripes have long populated television and the movies. From the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons, about a widowed father, to Silver Spoons, My Two Dads, and Mr. Mom , Hollywood has found a wellspring of humor in the cliché of fathers' fumbling with diapers, setting the kitchen ablaze while cooking, or hemming and hawing about the birds and the bees.
But off-screen, single fathers were scarcer. And in many cases, they were viewed less as lovable blunderbusses than as downright strange.
"It was definitely odd," says Tracey Manni, 35, a state worker who recalls the one friend from her childhood, in Coventry, to be raised by a single father. "We didn't talk about it at all -- I think maybe it would have made her feel funny."
Single fathers with primary custody are still rare, of course -- they make up just 6 percent of all Rhode Island families with children. But over the last two decades, attitudes have shifted.
"It's more acceptable for a father to say, 'I want to be the primary parent of my children' for the right reasons," says Peter M. Oppenheimer, a Barrington psychologist who has counseled single parents for 20 years. "They think they can do it well, and they're committed and involved -- and it's not just to get the kids from the wife and beat them out of her."
CHRISTINA AND Daniel Gonzalez are bursting through the front door after their game of hide-and-seek. "Dad, can we have a Coke?" says Christina.
Daniel whines about being teased by his big sister and her friend. Dan senior says he will have a talk with the girls. But right now he wants Daniel to do something about the big wad of gum in his mouth.
"Take some out," instructs Gonzalez.
Such attention to the unending details of child rearing, more commonly associated with mothers, has become second nature to Gonzalez.
It's also exhausting. Gonzalez is grateful that GTECH, his employer, has a day-care center on its corporate grounds. And he says his bosses have been understanding about his fatherly duties, allowing him flexibility in his schedule.
Normally, when the school buses drop the children off at the end of the day, Daniel goes to a neighbor's and Christina goes home and calls her father, to say they've arrived safely. But sometimes Christina stays after school for Chess Club, or Daniel's babysitter can't work late, and then Gonzalez goes home early.
All of this leaves him little time or energy for his old hobbies -- mountain biking and gardening. He is studying for an acupuncture degree, but he often manages only a few minutes of reading at night before his eyes grow heavy with sleep.
On Saturday nights, when the children stay with their mother, Gonzalez's plans for going out with friends often dissolve into passing out, from fatigue, on the couch. So it's perhaps not surprising that he says he has no time to date.
Still, he says that his three years of single fatherhood have furnished rewards.
"I've learned a lot about myself," Gonzalez said in his living room one Friday evening. "I've developed more patience, more sensitivity. Above and beyond everything else, my listening skills have blossomed."
AS A GROUP, single fathers are older than single mothers, have higher incomes, are taking care of fewer children, and are more likely to have been married.
Though single-father families make up nearly 19 percent of all single-parent families in Rhode Island, they make up just 3.5 percent of the single-parent families on welfare. And the Rhode Island communities with the highest ratio of single fathers to single mothers are some of the state's most affluent and most rural; Little Compton and West Greenwich top the list.
In addition, say the experts, single fathers are more likely than single mothers to have someone helping at home with the children -- whether a companion, a relative, or a nanny.
Researchers have found that children living with both parents are better off financially, educationally, and emotionally than those in single-parent homes, but the jury is out on whether children in single-father families fare differently from those in single-mother families. Two studies in the 1990s found few differences in self-esteem, social skills, and behavior problems between the children raised by single fathers and those raised by single mothers of equivalent income.
A recent national survey of 75,000 6th to 12th graders found that those in single-father homes were more likely than those in single-mother homes to use drugs. An earlier study, however, came to the opposite conclusion.
A 1994 study by an Ohio State University researcher suggested that children raised by single fathers may suffer from less parental attention than those raised by single mothers, but that they benefit from the fathers' generally higher income.
"There's no question that single fathers have more money, and money matters a lot," says Frances Goldscheider, a Brown University sociologist who studies families.
In the debate over the relative merits of single fathers and single mothers, the experts point out that single fathers are primarily a self-selected group. In most cases, they have actively sought custody of their children -- they had to persuade a judge that they were the fitter parent. By contrast, the population of single mothers includes a high proportion who had no choice about becoming single parents -- their children's father simply left the family.
RAY STACHELEK is a rarity: there was no messy Kramer vs. Kramer legal battle over his son, no nasty custody fight.
His son, Scott, who is now 15, had at first lived with his mother, Cheryl DiPalma. But a few years ago, when she left East Providence for Johnston, Scott moved in with his father. Scott was an 8th grader in the East Providence schools, and both his parents felt he should stay in his hometown.
"We agreed from the start not to go to court," says DiPalma. "Ray has been a good father. He has made sure that Scott has been really well rounded."
The parents never married, but they share a strong attachment to their child. Neither wanted to subject him to a legal fight over custody.
DiPalma says that Stachelek, a 53-year-old schoolteacher and former Little League coach, is sometimes too hard on Scott -- nagging him to apply himself to his studies and his sports. But the three say that they are comfortable with their arrangement.
The outside world, however, is sometimes less accepting.
In an emergency room once, after Scott had hurt himself in sports, Stachelek recalls that a nurse asked, "Are Mr. and Mrs. Stachelek here?"
Parent-teacher conferences and other school activities can draw similiar questions. "And when you meet someone for the first time," says Stachelek, "they ask, 'Where is your wife?' or 'Where is Scott's mother?' "
MOST DECISIONS about child custody are settled in the courts, and lawyers and judges say that the traditional bias toward maternal custody has waned in the age of the professional woman.
"When I was a lawyer and a father came in and said, 'I want custody,' we would say, 'The court's not even going to consider that,' " says Family Court Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr., of the years before his 1986 appointment to the bench. "It was said that the mother could be a prostitute but she could still be a good mother."
Jeremiah says he has seen substantial growth over the past decade in the number of fathers seeking custody, as well as in the number of mothers with professional careers. "There has been a trend now to consider the father equal to the mother as far as who should get custody," he said recently, on a day in which no fewer than three fathers had petitioned the court for full custody of their children.
Nevertheless, said the judge, women and men lose custody battles for different reasons. The most common reason that women lose, he said, is alcohol or drug abuse, whereas the most common reason for fathers is absence from the child's life, often because of career demands or a relationship with a new family.
THE PAST DECADES' shifting of gender roles -- the evolution from Father Knows Best to Murphy Brown -- is a historic watershed. But the changes in women's roles have been more striking than those in men's role; the number of single-father families is still relatively small, and few men have given up their careers to stay home with their children.
"There are more books written about househusbands than there are househusbands," says Eggebeen, the sociologist at Penn State. "It isn't like we're getting a reversal of roles. The shift [among men] hasn't been nearly as dramatic and revolutionary as the changes among women."
The experts say that though the number of single fathers will doubtless keeping growing, it will probably never equal that of single mothers.
"The fathers doing it now are the ones strongly committed to physical custody," says Eggebeen. "For it to become more common, you have to reach for people not considering it and ask, 'Why are they not considering it?' "
The subject of single fatherhood cuts to the marrow of the culture wars. One camp argues that men don't deserve hero status for doing what women have done for millennia; another camp accuses some women of refusing to acknowledge that men can be as good as women at nurturing.
Warren Farrell, a San Diego researcher, has written the recent book Father and Child Reunion, a compilation of studies that he says show children do better with single fathers than with single mothers. But, he says, "in the social-science and social-work world, just to present demographic data that shows men in a positive light is absolutely not tolerated."
Goldscheider, the Brown sociology professor, says that men have further to go before the broader culture recognizes them as equal partners in child rearing. "Men don't live in a social world that reinforces the importance of understanding family skills," she says. "When was the last time you read an article in GQ or Esquire about the best way to toilet-train?"
IT'S 6:30 on a Monday morning and Paul Verrecchia, 50, is awoken by the sounds of his baby daughter, Olivia, stirring from sleep. "Daddy," she cries from her crib. "Daddy."
Before long Olivia, 21 months, sits in her high chair at the kitchen table, streaking an orange crayon across a coloring book. Her brother, Lucas, almost 4, stands on tiptoe to help his father stir milk and eggs into a bowl of Bisquick pancake mix.
Verrecchia works the pancake griddle with surprising grace for someone more accustomed to issuing orders from the president's office of Lianna Inc. -- the jewelry factory not far from his house, in Cranston.
He removes strips of bacon from the microwave and slices the floppy pancakes into nibble-sized pieces. He serves breakfast on a plate decorated with choo-choo trains.
Lucas has to go to the bathroom, but wants his father to come, too, because the other day there was a bee in the bathroom, and Lucas is scared. "I'll go with you, honey," says Verrecchia, ambling through the kitchen in bare feet.
A few minutes later, Lucas's dash through the house ends in teary eyes: he has a tiny cut on his heel. His father peels open and applies a Winnie the Pooh Band-Aid. Then he lifts his son's foot and plants a kiss on the booboo.
Verrecchia says that gaining primary custody of his children, in May of last year, launched him on a crash course in parenting's finer points.
"I was a working dad who went off to work at least five days a week," he says of his four years with his former wife. "I'm definitely a parent first now."
Having reached middle age, he says, he doesn't worry about missing out on the social scene. "Things that I might have seen, when I was younger, as a burden" -- the duties of caring for the children -- "you end up embracing.
"When I come in the door," says Verrecchia, "they're all over me. There's a feeling of being needed, a sense of fulfillment. It seems so natural."
Verrecchia is decidedly a busy man, but he is one of the many single fathers who are in a position to get help with the daily work of child rearing. When he won primary custody, his mother moved in with him, and he also employs a nanny.
Every weekday, the nanny arrives at 8:15 a.m. to bathe the children and look after them until Verrecchia returns from work, in the evening. Last weekend, when Verrecchia took Olivia and Lucas to a Charlestown beach for the day, he brought a babysitter with him -- because, near the water, he wanted one adult to look after each child.
For Verrecchia, single fatherhood is still something of a high-wire act.
"When she's not here, on the weekends," he says of the nanny, "it's a scary thing."
-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog
Single Dads
• Juggling jobs, laundry and naptimes, more men than ever are parenting solo
BY ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
Daniel Gonzalez ranks among an elite group of dads: those who do nails.
Not long ago, before his daughter, Christina, bounced off to a middle-school dance, he painted her fingernails electric blue and sculpted her hair with styling gel.
"I try to be as funky as possible," Gonzalez says of his still-evolving experiments in cosmetics.
Some days produce more Vidal Sassoon-like results than others, says Christina, 11. But she cuts her father some slack. After all, he also cooks and cleans and does laundry and irons and clips coupons and hosts sleepovers and helps with the homework.
"He's doing good for a single father," she says.
Gonzalez, 38, is part of a small but fast-growing group of Rhode Islanders: single fathers with primary custody of their children. Whether divorced, widowed, or never married, they are reshaping traditional gender roles and quietly learning the sort of daily juggling act that mothers know well.
Mountain biking? Downing a beer with the guys? Rarely even an option anymore. Since his divorce, three years ago, Gonzalez says that his daughter and his son, Daniel, 7, have taken center stage in his life.
He drives them to their tai-chi practice and basketball games. He takes vacation days from his job, as a GTECH engineer, when they are too sick to go to school. He posts his daughter's perfect test scores on the refrigerator.
"I feel I'm playing the mom's role and the dad's role," Gonzalez said the other day, in a rare moment of calm when his children were in their yard in North Kingstown playing hide-and-seek. "It's nonstop -- it really is nonstop. It's rare that I can sit down."
According to the 2000 census, the number of single-father families in Rhode Island grew 76 percent over the last decade, to more than 7,300 today.
And single fathers are increasingly at the helm of single-parent households. In 2000, nearly one in five single-parent families in Rhode Island was headed by a father -- up from one in 9 in 1980.
Experts say that the massive entry of women into the work force since the 1960s has led to a re-evaluation of men's role in the home. Many fathers, whether inspired by feminism or the men's movement or something else, want a bigger role in their children's lives than their fathers had in theirs.
And, say lawyers, with more cases of both divorced parents working outside the home, judges have grown more willing to set aside the longstanding preference for maternal custody.
Though many say it was no more than a coincidence, the 1990 Rhode Island Supreme Court decision that set the criteria for "the best interests of the child" awarded custody to a father.
ACROSS THE country, the number of single-father families now tops 2 million -- up from 393,000 in 1970. That means that 22 percent of single-parent households nationwide are headed by a father.
"There's been a noticeable change in men's ideas of what the role of fatherhood constitutes," says David J. Eggebeen, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University. "It's more than just winning bread and showing what it is to be a man by hitting a ball around in the yard.
"There's a cultural shift to see fatherhood as more varied and more subtle -- the cultural demands on men [now] are to spend time with their kids."
The results are visible in everything from the number of fathers seen toting infants in parks to the advent of paternity leave and of diaper-changing stations in men's restrooms.
Single dads of various stripes have long populated television and the movies. From the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons, about a widowed father, to Silver Spoons, My Two Dads, and Mr. Mom , Hollywood has found a wellspring of humor in the cliché of fathers' fumbling with diapers, setting the kitchen ablaze while cooking, or hemming and hawing about the birds and the bees.
But off-screen, single fathers were scarcer. And in many cases, they were viewed less as lovable blunderbusses than as downright strange.
"It was definitely odd," says Tracey Manni, 35, a state worker who recalls the one friend from her childhood, in Coventry, to be raised by a single father. "We didn't talk about it at all -- I think maybe it would have made her feel funny."
Single fathers with primary custody are still rare, of course -- they make up just 6 percent of all Rhode Island families with children. But over the last two decades, attitudes have shifted.
"It's more acceptable for a father to say, 'I want to be the primary parent of my children' for the right reasons," says Peter M. Oppenheimer, a Barrington psychologist who has counseled single parents for 20 years. "They think they can do it well, and they're committed and involved -- and it's not just to get the kids from the wife and beat them out of her."
CHRISTINA AND Daniel Gonzalez are bursting through the front door after their game of hide-and-seek. "Dad, can we have a Coke?" says Christina.
Daniel whines about being teased by his big sister and her friend. Dan senior says he will have a talk with the girls. But right now he wants Daniel to do something about the big wad of gum in his mouth.
"Take some out," instructs Gonzalez.
Such attention to the unending details of child rearing, more commonly associated with mothers, has become second nature to Gonzalez.
It's also exhausting. Gonzalez is grateful that GTECH, his employer, has a day-care center on its corporate grounds. And he says his bosses have been understanding about his fatherly duties, allowing him flexibility in his schedule.
Normally, when the school buses drop the children off at the end of the day, Daniel goes to a neighbor's and Christina goes home and calls her father, to say they've arrived safely. But sometimes Christina stays after school for Chess Club, or Daniel's babysitter can't work late, and then Gonzalez goes home early.
All of this leaves him little time or energy for his old hobbies -- mountain biking and gardening. He is studying for an acupuncture degree, but he often manages only a few minutes of reading at night before his eyes grow heavy with sleep.
On Saturday nights, when the children stay with their mother, Gonzalez's plans for going out with friends often dissolve into passing out, from fatigue, on the couch. So it's perhaps not surprising that he says he has no time to date.
Still, he says that his three years of single fatherhood have furnished rewards.
"I've learned a lot about myself," Gonzalez said in his living room one Friday evening. "I've developed more patience, more sensitivity. Above and beyond everything else, my listening skills have blossomed."
AS A GROUP, single fathers are older than single mothers, have higher incomes, are taking care of fewer children, and are more likely to have been married.
Though single-father families make up nearly 19 percent of all single-parent families in Rhode Island, they make up just 3.5 percent of the single-parent families on welfare. And the Rhode Island communities with the highest ratio of single fathers to single mothers are some of the state's most affluent and most rural; Little Compton and West Greenwich top the list.
In addition, say the experts, single fathers are more likely than single mothers to have someone helping at home with the children -- whether a companion, a relative, or a nanny.
Researchers have found that children living with both parents are better off financially, educationally, and emotionally than those in single-parent homes, but the jury is out on whether children in single-father families fare differently from those in single-mother families. Two studies in the 1990s found few differences in self-esteem, social skills, and behavior problems between the children raised by single fathers and those raised by single mothers of equivalent income.
A recent national survey of 75,000 6th to 12th graders found that those in single-father homes were more likely than those in single-mother homes to use drugs. An earlier study, however, came to the opposite conclusion.
A 1994 study by an Ohio State University researcher suggested that children raised by single fathers may suffer from less parental attention than those raised by single mothers, but that they benefit from the fathers' generally higher income.
"There's no question that single fathers have more money, and money matters a lot," says Frances Goldscheider, a Brown University sociologist who studies families.
In the debate over the relative merits of single fathers and single mothers, the experts point out that single fathers are primarily a self-selected group. In most cases, they have actively sought custody of their children -- they had to persuade a judge that they were the fitter parent. By contrast, the population of single mothers includes a high proportion who had no choice about becoming single parents -- their children's father simply left the family.
RAY STACHELEK is a rarity: there was no messy Kramer vs. Kramer legal battle over his son, no nasty custody fight.
His son, Scott, who is now 15, had at first lived with his mother, Cheryl DiPalma. But a few years ago, when she left East Providence for Johnston, Scott moved in with his father. Scott was an 8th grader in the East Providence schools, and both his parents felt he should stay in his hometown.
"We agreed from the start not to go to court," says DiPalma. "Ray has been a good father. He has made sure that Scott has been really well rounded."
The parents never married, but they share a strong attachment to their child. Neither wanted to subject him to a legal fight over custody.
DiPalma says that Stachelek, a 53-year-old schoolteacher and former Little League coach, is sometimes too hard on Scott -- nagging him to apply himself to his studies and his sports. But the three say that they are comfortable with their arrangement.
The outside world, however, is sometimes less accepting.
In an emergency room once, after Scott had hurt himself in sports, Stachelek recalls that a nurse asked, "Are Mr. and Mrs. Stachelek here?"
Parent-teacher conferences and other school activities can draw similiar questions. "And when you meet someone for the first time," says Stachelek, "they ask, 'Where is your wife?' or 'Where is Scott's mother?' "
MOST DECISIONS about child custody are settled in the courts, and lawyers and judges say that the traditional bias toward maternal custody has waned in the age of the professional woman.
"When I was a lawyer and a father came in and said, 'I want custody,' we would say, 'The court's not even going to consider that,' " says Family Court Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr., of the years before his 1986 appointment to the bench. "It was said that the mother could be a prostitute but she could still be a good mother."
Jeremiah says he has seen substantial growth over the past decade in the number of fathers seeking custody, as well as in the number of mothers with professional careers. "There has been a trend now to consider the father equal to the mother as far as who should get custody," he said recently, on a day in which no fewer than three fathers had petitioned the court for full custody of their children.
Nevertheless, said the judge, women and men lose custody battles for different reasons. The most common reason that women lose, he said, is alcohol or drug abuse, whereas the most common reason for fathers is absence from the child's life, often because of career demands or a relationship with a new family.
THE PAST DECADES' shifting of gender roles -- the evolution from Father Knows Best to Murphy Brown -- is a historic watershed. But the changes in women's roles have been more striking than those in men's role; the number of single-father families is still relatively small, and few men have given up their careers to stay home with their children.
"There are more books written about househusbands than there are househusbands," says Eggebeen, the sociologist at Penn State. "It isn't like we're getting a reversal of roles. The shift [among men] hasn't been nearly as dramatic and revolutionary as the changes among women."
The experts say that though the number of single fathers will doubtless keeping growing, it will probably never equal that of single mothers.
"The fathers doing it now are the ones strongly committed to physical custody," says Eggebeen. "For it to become more common, you have to reach for people not considering it and ask, 'Why are they not considering it?' "
The subject of single fatherhood cuts to the marrow of the culture wars. One camp argues that men don't deserve hero status for doing what women have done for millennia; another camp accuses some women of refusing to acknowledge that men can be as good as women at nurturing.
Warren Farrell, a San Diego researcher, has written the recent book Father and Child Reunion, a compilation of studies that he says show children do better with single fathers than with single mothers. But, he says, "in the social-science and social-work world, just to present demographic data that shows men in a positive light is absolutely not tolerated."
Goldscheider, the Brown sociology professor, says that men have further to go before the broader culture recognizes them as equal partners in child rearing. "Men don't live in a social world that reinforces the importance of understanding family skills," she says. "When was the last time you read an article in GQ or Esquire about the best way to toilet-train?"
IT'S 6:30 on a Monday morning and Paul Verrecchia, 50, is awoken by the sounds of his baby daughter, Olivia, stirring from sleep. "Daddy," she cries from her crib. "Daddy."
Before long Olivia, 21 months, sits in her high chair at the kitchen table, streaking an orange crayon across a coloring book. Her brother, Lucas, almost 4, stands on tiptoe to help his father stir milk and eggs into a bowl of Bisquick pancake mix.
Verrecchia works the pancake griddle with surprising grace for someone more accustomed to issuing orders from the president's office of Lianna Inc. -- the jewelry factory not far from his house, in Cranston.
He removes strips of bacon from the microwave and slices the floppy pancakes into nibble-sized pieces. He serves breakfast on a plate decorated with choo-choo trains.
Lucas has to go to the bathroom, but wants his father to come, too, because the other day there was a bee in the bathroom, and Lucas is scared. "I'll go with you, honey," says Verrecchia, ambling through the kitchen in bare feet.
A few minutes later, Lucas's dash through the house ends in teary eyes: he has a tiny cut on his heel. His father peels open and applies a Winnie the Pooh Band-Aid. Then he lifts his son's foot and plants a kiss on the booboo.
Verrecchia says that gaining primary custody of his children, in May of last year, launched him on a crash course in parenting's finer points.
"I was a working dad who went off to work at least five days a week," he says of his four years with his former wife. "I'm definitely a parent first now."
Having reached middle age, he says, he doesn't worry about missing out on the social scene. "Things that I might have seen, when I was younger, as a burden" -- the duties of caring for the children -- "you end up embracing.
"When I come in the door," says Verrecchia, "they're all over me. There's a feeling of being needed, a sense of fulfillment. It seems so natural."
Verrecchia is decidedly a busy man, but he is one of the many single fathers who are in a position to get help with the daily work of child rearing. When he won primary custody, his mother moved in with him, and he also employs a nanny.
Every weekday, the nanny arrives at 8:15 a.m. to bathe the children and look after them until Verrecchia returns from work, in the evening. Last weekend, when Verrecchia took Olivia and Lucas to a Charlestown beach for the day, he brought a babysitter with him -- because, near the water, he wanted one adult to look after each child.
For Verrecchia, single fatherhood is still something of a high-wire act.
"When she's not here, on the weekends," he says of the nanny, "it's a scary thing."
-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog
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