The stories that are being collected about the unique talents that dads have has me, frankly, pretty inspired. We let children take risks! We keep them safe! We let imaginations run wild! We keep everyone grounded!

But that's a hard role to balance when a dad is doing the 9-to-5 thing, and it's especially hard when mom is doing the 9-to-5 thing, too. So I'm grateful to Andrew Moravcsik for pulling the curtain back on the reality of being a working dad who is also the "lead parent." Moravcsik's wife, Anne-Marie Slaughter, wrote compellingly a few years ago how tough it is for a women to have it all. Now, Moravcsik is telling his story.

Moravcsik uses the phrase "lead parent" a lot, which sounds a lot better than its synonym: "trailing spouse," but the two reflect the same reality: there is no such thing as 50/50 parenting (and that's OK!). Even in two-career families, one career is always going to be more important, and the other spouse is going to end up with more of what Moravcsik calls "being on the front lines of life."

There are a lot of ways that being father in the role of lead parent is tough, and Moravcsik nails some of them, but he also nails the benefits of playing that balancing act job that so many women have described.

But something was missing. The elements that made it possible for Moravcsik to be the lead parent--flexible, progressive gigs at Ivy League universities--tend to be a lot harder to find for the rest of us. I've been lucky enough to have understanding employers, but Moravcsik and I are still outliers.

Working parents will also fall into that gap between what they want to accomplish as parents and what they can actually do, and it would be great if we could do a better job of making that gap smaller. More flexible work policies would help, both official and unofficial. So would a world in which we measure work by something other than hours spent at a desk during the daylight hours.

It's depressing to note that the best blueprint for balance involves subterfuge: Harvard Business Review suggests that a lot of dads who are the "lead parent" and succeeding at work are going so by essentially fudging elements of their work life.

My hope is that more guys experience the life that Moravcsik champions in his piece, so that we can even expand the list of things that dads are the best at. But we have a lot of work to do to make the life of a "lead parent" easier, for moms and dads.