Help! More Daddy Bloggers

Between the recession and feminism, we have reached the inevitable moment when the stay-at-home dad becomes a real, quantifiable phenomenon. Journalist Jeremy Adam Smith just published the Daddy Shift tracing this "startling evolutionary advance in the American family," and Lisa Belkin interviews him. Smith argues that our maternal lens causes us to miss the things dads do differently and well—encourage risk taking and independence, for example. I buy that argument. In general, moms could use a lesson from dads on how you can leave the house without individually wrapped snacks and still have a fine time. But there's one problem with the daddy shift argument. The more dads find their own voices the more they sound just like ... moms.

Neal Pollack started this lamentable trend with Alternadad and now there are dozens (and three new dad memoirs coming out this summer alone). Rice Daddies, DadLabs.com, and Mike Adamick's blog Cry It Out are three Smith praises. In his view, dads just need to keep "telling their stories" to inspire other dads. I'm not so sure. I read these blogs and I'm not finding so much risk taking. Instead, once again, I'm lost in the minutae of epidurals and homework and yes, snacks.

Though I don't share her worldview, I find myself recalling a snippet from Caitlin Flanagan's story on wives who won't have sex with their husbands.

The men who cave to the pressure to become more feminine—putting little notes in the lunch boxes, sweeping up after snack time, the whole bit—may delight their wives but they probably don't improve their sex lives much, owing to the thorny old problem of la difference. I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture.

Tags: jeremy adam smith, stay-at-home dads, the daddy shift

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Comments

Are yo sure?!!

By: kathyrnmolly | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 15:59

nothing to say :)

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By: Davidsmith7 | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 15:00

I think she was being sardonic and I took it literally, so... I'm redacting my little screed.
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Lol, what is the problem with

By: ninanina | Tue, 08/25/2009 - 21:31

Lol, what is the problem with that? As long as they keep earning money for the family, it's fine. I would love to have husband who can stay at home most of the time.
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By: Marlet | Mon, 08/17/2009 - 05:20

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By: acotas548 | Mon, 08/10/2009 - 05:27

I do not even have a cellphone and have never sent a text messgae in my life! I cannot seem to find a way to erase my account, name, etc, from this site. I have sent email twice to the doublex "contact us"address to no avail.
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A different daddy blog

By: praeburn | Sat, 06/20/2009 - 16:56

I've tried to sidestep this problem with my blog, Fathers and Families, by focusing on what researchers are actually learning about fathers. I call it the new science of fatherhood, for lack of a better term.

I comment on things I see in the news, and I bristle at stereotypes--such as the deadbeat dad, to take one particularly irritating example.

Let's stick with that example for a minute. Are countless men guilty of failing to pay child support, leaving divorced women and their children in desperate straits?

This isn't a question on which we should have an opinion. Instead, we ought to look at the numbers. In the U.S., non-custodial parents (usually fathers) owe a collective $105 billion in unpaid child support.

Before we conclude that that staggering figure makes the case, consider this other piece of research: Two-thirds of that debt is owed by fathers who make $10,000 a year.

It is this kind of information--which I try to report on my blog, and on my About Fathers blog for Psychology Today--that helps us understand what's happening with mothers and fathers today.

And I don't have to sound like a mother to report it.

Paul Raeburn
www.fathersandfamilies.blogspot.com

Yes, the current crop of

By: mcmechanism | Sat, 05/30/2009 - 06:12

Yes, the current crop of daddy bloggers sound too much like mommies, but that will evolve.

Think about how working women evolved over the 70's/80's - the first generation felt it necessary to emulate male dress codes (the infamous blue power suit) and male behavior. Over time, though, women developed their own style and put their own stamp on the business world. In other words, they changed the language with which they dealt with the world.

So also stay-at-home dads. Right now, the only language to express some of these child-rearing home-cleaning behaviors is rooted in the feminine. But as more dads choose this route, the more an authentice, male-based, snack-free voice will emerge.

I could be a daddy blogger

By: ESP0704 | Thu, 05/28/2009 - 22:12

I hold a unique position in the daddy blog wars - I'm a (mostly) stay-at-home dad with a full-time job. I work 37.5 hours a week (which amounts to full time), while my wife works about 50 hours a week and is finishing her college degree online.
But I'm working in a dying industry - newspaper journalism - while my wife is in booming one. She's a nurse, owns a massage therapy studio in our home and is a medical instructor and nursing instructor at two different institutions of higher learning.
Depending on the job she's doing at any given moment, my wife earns between $20 and $50 an hour, while I make $10. So everything, including my job, gets scheduled according to her work needs, which is as it should be.
And I know it's taken me a long time to get to the point, but here it is. My wife works way harder and many more hours than I do - that 50-hour a week total doesn't include her classroom prep time, her time studying to complete that college degree so she can make the jump to college nursing professor when she graduates.
While she's doing that, I'm watching our kids - and in many cases, keeping them out of the house (she's never worked in a chaotic newsroom and has a lower tolerance for noise than I do). I also do all the cooking (I took cooking classes in high school because I wanted to be able to eat my homework).
Our life sometimes lurches into that old 50s cliche where the husband berates his wife for not having dinner ready, only our few arguments focus more on cleaning than it does on cooking (I'll look at the living room and think it looks fine, while my wife will say "this place looks like a cyclone hit it."
All that said, I'm happy with being a mostly-stay-at-home-dad-with-a-full-time-job. My wife is extremely appreciative of my cooking and tolerant of my cleaning and I am extremely appreciative of her hard work.
And there are very few things that beat spending time with my kids. The only thing I would change is that I would pay myself a little bit more, but since the chain I work for has had three rounds of layoffs, clamped down on overtime, and issued a pay cut in the last 15 months, that won't happen any time soon.