Life/Work - Issue 33

It was in the midst of talking with my sister's husband, a stay-at-home dad for the past 13 years, that I had an attitude adjustment. For the first time, I understood that Michael's choice to stay home was not his way of avoiding work, but rather a conscious, difficult, and ultimately courageous decision to do what he felt was best for his son. The fact that he didn't hold a regular job had always been an unspoken divide between us. But during this conversation, I realized that my attitude said more about me than it did about him.

For all of my commitment to being a good and involved father over the past 18 years, I would not have relished spending long, continuous hours each day caring for my young children. The truth is that it would have been very difficult for me to set aside my own ambitions in order to function as a full-time parent. My identity was simply too dependent on what I accomplished at work. I told myself that men (and women) who choose to stay home just don't have what it takes to be successful in the work world.

Now I know that it isn't that simple.

For the past several weeks, I've been talking to stay-at-home dads. Back in 1988, when my brother-in-law Michael Arnold, now 43, made that choice, he was something of a pioneer. He didn't know any other full-time dads. But things have changed: A 1993 U.S. Census Bureau report revealed that more than 1.5 million men had primary responsibility for their young children. Today, Internet sites with names like At-Home Dad and Slowlane.com are devoted to the concerns of full-time fathers, while iVillage's "parent soup" hosts a chat room for at-home dads. And the Fourth Annual At-Home Dads' Convention, which took place last fall in Des Plaines, Illinois, attracted 85 full-time fathers.

In addition, two recently published books focus on the value to kids of having fathers who play primary parental roles -- "Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child" (Free Press, 2000), by Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist at Yale; and "The Involved Father" (Golden Books, 1999), by Robert Frank, a psychologist who was a stay-at-home dad for more than a decade.

There's more than a little irony in all of this. In 1963, Betty Friedan helped spawn the women's-liberation movement by writing "The Feminine Mystique" -- a fiery treatise on the boredom, frustration, and unrealized ambitions of 1950s stay-at-home moms. College-educated women of my generation, raised in the feminist 1960s, are committed to having it all -- careers and family -- and they reject the notion that raising kids can be a full-time job. But suddenly, a whole group of men are embracing a role that many women have shunned! Just what is it that these men find so alluring about spending their days changing diapers, cleaning, shopping, cooking, and foregoing adult conversation, all in favor of the occasional game of Candy Land or Go Fish?

One answer to that question is practical, and it partly reflects the impact of the women's movement. The full-time dads with whom I spoke echoed research suggesting that men choose to stay home with their young children for two reasons: They are reluctant to turn over responsibility to outside child-care providers, and their wives have higher incomes than they do. But a third reason, I suspect, has to do with temperament. A half-dozen at-home dads told me that they are simply more patient and more easygoing than their wives -- and thus generally better suited to the primary parenting role. "It was just natural for me to be a nurturer," my brother-in-law Michael told me. "If that weren't true, making the choice would have been much harder."

That doesn't mean that the experience is all warm and fuzzy. Stay-at-home dads frequently feel more isolated from, and more devalued by, their peers than do stay-at-home moms. Women have always had the companionship of other women who are doing the same thing that they are. But, in the same way that women still struggle against a "glass ceiling" in the workplace, full-time fathers complain about encountering a glass wall -- on playgrounds and in other social settings.

"Now I can relate to what women go through at work," says Curtis Cooper, 37, who has primary responsibility for his two children, ages 5 and 6. "You go to the park, and it's filled with women. That really makes you feel like an outsider." Other men say that women actively avoid them. Cooper's response was to found Dad-to-Dad, a loosely organized group (with chapters all over the country) that aims to help at-home dads connect with one another -- to offer support, to set up play dates with their kids, and to plan the occasional dads'-night-out dinner.