Half Changed World

As I mentioned in Why blog? I frequently find myself wondering “where are the men?” in reading stories about parenting issues. So I was pleasantly surprised to pick up the new issue of Brain, Child, my favorite parenting magazine, and see that the feature story is about fathering, with a long discussion of stay-at-home dads.

[9/23 edit: The article is now available online. It’s also discussed today by RebelDad.]

I eagerly read the article, frowned, read it again and then brought it over to my resident SAHD for his opinion. His comment: “If I were the editor, and assigned someone a story about SAHDs, and she brought this article to me, my first question would be ‘how many stay at home dads did you talk to?’ And if the answer were ‘none,’ I’d tell her to go back and try again.”

That’s not quite fair, but close. The author, Stacy Evers, mostly seems to have talked with men who aren’t SAHDs about why they wouldn’t want to be SAHDs (concluding that it’s mostly lack of respect from other men) without ever talking to any SAHDs about why they would.

* In a sidebar article on magazines, she mentions that her brother in law is a SAHD, but he’s not quoted in the main article.

* Evers quotes from author Austin Murphy’s book about being a stay-at-home dad, . She then inserts in parentheses a comment from Peter Baylies, the founder of athomedad.com, that the book is a “venting tool.” I read this as his polite way of saying that the guy is a jerk and shouldn’t be taken as representative of at-home-dads. She doesn’t ask Baylies anything about his experience as a SAHD.

* Evers discusses her friend Dan, who she identifies as “a freelance photographer raising two young children.” She says that he’s “shifted his focus from career to children” but never outright calls him a stay-at-home dad. She talks about three things that made it easier for him to make the shift — that he was already working from his home, that his wife made more money than him, and that he had a role model — but not about anything that made him want to do it.

My more fundamental complaint is that the article doesn’t seem to take the SAHD option seriously. What Evers really wants is for working fathers to take on more family responsibilities — and to fight for the workplace flexibility that is needed to do so. Towards the end of the article, she writes:

“No one’s really suggesting to merely swap stay-at-home mothers for stay-at-home fathers. But why not a more reasonable sharing of all responsibilities and tasks, whether it’s working or caring for children?”

It’s hard to argue against a “reasonable sharing” — but does that have to mean 50-50? Or even 60-40? In the author’s note, Evers comments that she and her husband are “both surprised sometimes at how traditional our arrangement has turned out to be, even though it’s what best suits our personalities.”

I’m arguing that we ought to be fighting as much for a world in which there are options open to both men and women — including being a full-time parent — as for a world in which all responsibilities are shared equally.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2004 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Magazines and Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.