Reporter's Notebook

I’ve encountered people who run the gamut on their feelings about a man staying at home. I have encountered people who haven’t taken me seriously, have put me down, or saw me as a threat at the playground because I was a man.

On the other side, I have found moms who are accepting of me because we are all parents in the end. When I lived in Rochester, NY, I had a group of moms that I was very close with and they included me. They saw me as an equal and weren’t hung up on labels. That acceptance is everything to us stay-at-home dads.

That’s why The National At-Home Dad Network puts on an annual convention, which seeks to create support, education, advocacy, and community for stay-at-home dads who feel like they are alone. Depending on where we may live geographically or depending on our community’s traditional roles, we may not know of any other stay-at-home dads in our area. NAHDN helps dads find each other.

National At Home Dad Network President @ChrisRoutly opens #HomeDadCon with a message that we are not alone. This is community. @homedadnet pic.twitter.com/50IBBqajYB

— Chris Bernholdt (@DadNCharge) October 8, 2016

Take the isolation of being at home as the primary caregiver and add to that things like: when classes are called Mommy and Me; when you go to change your baby in the men’s restroom and there isn’t a changing table in there—only in the women’s restroom; someone asks if you are babysitting or if you are giving mom the day off. You can feel like less of a parent when those things stack up.

Last day to snag one of these for your kid! Also comes as baby onesie. #DadsDontBabysit https://t.co/JKlwv3Mocc pic.twitter.com/ekxJiWyy8j

— At-Home Dad Network (@homedadnet) May 17, 2016

All too often, the bar for expectations is set far too low so, when a dad is seen doing things that moms do everyday, we get overly praised for it. We aren’t Superdads; we are just fathers doing what is nature and taking care of our children, which is what stay-at-home moms are doing and have been doing for us for a long time.  

If anything, staying at home has shown my children that you can be anything you want to be. Traditional roles aren’t so traditional anymore. Families are finding ways to balance working and caregiving in new and creative ways. The important thing is to find out what works for your family and embrace that role.

That sort of husband sounds like a better fit for this reader:

I know you want to hear from men—but they won’t tell you the truth because they don’t understand what parenting and housekeeping are all about.

While I worked three jobs—nurse practitioner at Kaiser, ER nurse (12-hour night shifts on weekends), and managed to teach one day a week at a college, he stayed home. He didn’t “want” to work; he’d rather be playing golf, tennis, or scuba diving.

He NEVER cleaned anything. He only shopped if I made the list and wrote out meals for the week. He NEVER did the laundry or changed all the sheets. He figured that staying home was “hard” enough. I cooked evening meals and breakfast and packed lunches. On weekends I worked 6pm-to-6am ER shifts, that way I could care for the kids while he spent the weekend playing golf or tennis.  He watched football or other sports during the day and NEVER took the kids out … and we lived in Hawai’i.

He REFUSED to clean anything. If a child threw up, he left it in the clothes and left the cleanup for me. After all, I was the nurse. If I tried to teach him how to use the washer and dryer, he would screw it up. I spoke with other women who said “They do it wrong so you’ll do it.”

Men don’t have a clue what it means to keep a house or care for kids. My husband called it “babysitting.” It’s NOT babysitting when it’s your own kids!

Here’s a stay-at-home dad in Alabama who also resented his spouse:

Being a mommy daddy wasn’t a decision I made. It was, like seemingly everything else in my life, thrust upon me. I was a real estate lawyer in 2009 with two kids, ages 15 and 12, when my oldest relapsed with leukemia. Due to market conditions (remember the crash?), my practice had shriveled to practically nothing.

The wife had decided a couple of years earlier to restart her career after having taken a several-years sabbatical with the first episode of leukemia. She had a job, while mine had practically disappeared. She took off the first time, so it was my turn. I shuttered my practice and set about being a homemaker and a bone-marrow-transplant-patient’s caregiver.  

Outside of caring for the transplant patient, i.e., during the times I was just a homemaker, I found the whole thing boring and lonely. There’s no one to talk to. Guys aren’t like women; we don't socialize so much, except when there’s a purpose behind it beyond just the socializing, and no guy wants to get together to talk about what works best for cleaning bathroom tile.  

I found that housework is incredibly easy. I could clean the whole house in an hour. I could do all the laundry twice a week or so without breaking a sweat (or bitching about it like the wife did when she had to do it). I could cook breakfast and dinner every day without blinking an eye. I could get everyone wherever they needed to be without drama. I began to see why women needed a “little helper” (e.g. Valium) to make the drudgery bearable in the Sixties.

It was boring, but I also did all the home and vehicle maintenance and repairs (the guy stuff I did before becoming the homemaker), including lawn care, exterior and interior painting, improvement projects, washing cars, etc.  

The wife, on the other hand, had nothing to do that was more challenging than driving herself to work and home everyday. So, of course, she cheated on me and ultimately left. Which worked out well, freeing me from having to serve a bunch of surly, unappreciative, selfish people. I’m much happier now.

Update from a reader:

It concerns me that the comments have been consistently “I” stories. What about the children focus? Why are these people not sharing stories about “what works best” for their kids?  It seems that those would be more helpful.

If you have any input along those lines, please let us know.

1) My wife’s income is alright, but it would be tight for a family of three to live on alone. My wife is very smart and talented (full ride at Harvard) and had offers at very remunerative employers, but she chose to go into a caring profession.

2) I want to keep my resume current and maintain some career momentum. I do intend to reenter the workforce eventually. We plan to have more children, but inevitably the youngest will enter first grade.

3) It would be tough to go to a 15-year high school reunion and say that I am just a SAHD.

4) I greatly enjoy nannying and reasonably enjoy the other jobs.

As much as I enjoy childcare, my wife decided to only feed our child breast milk for the first six months. This means that my wife handles several late-night feedings and shows up to work every morning with five hours of sleep. Six months is not forever, but is also not insignificant. We have a pump and bottles, but our daughter finds nursing much more pleasant and soothing.  

So even with open-minded parents, biology does exert some influence.

Another SAHD:

Having been a work-from-home/stay-at-home dad, one of the toughest things is getting frozen out by that group of cool moms. Not that I want to talk about cute boots or anything. But my son has come to me in tears asking why he was the only kid in his preschool class who didn’t get invited to these play-dates the whole class was talking about.

I finally confronted the head-cool-mom about it (hopefully non-confrontationally, using the kind of apologetic talk that Alexandra Petri recently illustrated on how women talk in meetings). I asked that they not hold it against my kid that he gets picked up by his dad and not his mom. That was super-awkward, and I think I frightened her despite my tiptoeing, woman-in-a-meeting approach. (See? Not just women in meetings!) However, my kid did finally get to play-date. Yay!

I took a 12-week maternity leave and we hired my husband’s sister as a nanny. We thought that we had the best childcare arrangement possible. Our daughter would receive one-on-one care from her aunt, and since my mom is retired, we even had free, readily available backup care when my sister-in-law needed the day off.

Our setup worked for about two months. My sister-in-law got pregnant, immediately began having complications, and was told to rest and stop lifting anything heavier than ten pounds. She told us that she didn’t plan to continue to nanny after she had her baby. My husband quit his job.

I specifically want to comment on the following paragraph from Li’s piece on The Mindy Project:

The assumption that Danny wouldn’t even consider being the stay-at-home parent—all other things equal—captures the prevailing nature of existing norms about parenting and the need for a fundamental shift in perspective. The question shouldn’t by default be, “Will Mom stay home?” if parents decide this would be best for their child, but rather: “Which one of us will?”

The downsides of being a working parent are felt more keenly by women. When we were both working, I was always the one who took time off when my daughter needed to go to the doctor or when we had a childcare crisis. My bosses, having had past experience with women who came back from maternity leave only to quit a few months later, went out of their way to provide flexibility and incentives to keep me working.

When my husband made these types of requests, his bosses started to view him as unreliable and less of a team player. So despite our most deliberately equal of marriages, responsibilities started shifting to me—since, after all, my workplace allowed for it.

I spent an hour of my workday locked in the mothers’ room, pumping breastmilk. I handled all the nighttime parenting, since all my daughter really wanted when she woke up was to nurse. Since I was able to leave work earlier (see flexibility), I found myself handling the afternoon pickup, arriving home alone and immediately needing to settle my daughter and start dinner all at the same time.

The downsides to taking time off to care for a child are felt more keenly by men. Social isolation is a big one. My husband knows one other stay-at-home dad, whereas I know many stay-at-home moms who are constantly arranging play dates and lunch gatherings.

My husband would love to find some side work that could generate some income, but all of his useful skills (yard work? painting houses? trimming trees?) are hard to pull off with a toddler in tow. If I stayed home, I’d have gotten my sewing machine out during naptime and re-opened my old Etsy shop. My husband, too, is likely to have a more difficult time explaining his resume gap to a future employer.

Because of the differences in our careers and our health, these factors weren’t enough to change our decision for my husband to stay home. It was, and is, the right thing for our family. But if all else was equal, I’m certain that they would have tipped the scales toward me staying home instead.

I don’t know exactly how I feel about all of that. Is it something that workplaces need to change? Are all of these things just social assumptions that will gradually shift as more women enter STEM careers and out-earn their husbands? Are women biologically designed to be the primary caregiver, and we’re doing something unnatural by outfitting them with breast pumps and sending them back into the workplace after 12 short weeks?

The only thing I can say definitively is this: The question by default won’t be “will Mindy or Danny stay home?” until Danny is also shown dealing with a childcare crisis by stashing the baby in a supply closet, fretting about the nanny’s qualifications, and having to cut his workday short to go home and take a sick child to the pediatrician.

Your reader expresses surprise at her husband’s hesitance to make parenting decisions on his own, and notes that in situations where she was taking more of the lead, she was “expected” to be comfortable and capable. I think she answers her own question here; it’s the expectation that leads to different behaviour.

My wife and I are experiencing all of these tensions around parenting and balancing two careers. And on decisions like seeing the doctor, childcare options, feeding options, etc, my wife is just expected to know more despite the fact that we have precisely the same amount of parenting experience. It is this expectation that traps both of us a little—my wife is burdened with expectation but also empowered (in the sense that she feels she can make decisions without consulting me) while I don’t have the burden of expectation but would always check with her before making any key parenting decision.

It’s the different expectations we are held to, and to which we hold ourselves, that lead to different outcomes. Societal pressures still make it seem odd when a man takes the lead with parenting, and it’s very hard for any of us to counteract our own societal biases.

A mother’s perspective on this kind of parenting:

I’m a female breadwinner with a husband who stays home with our three- and one-year-old daughters. I’ve noticed two big differences, compared to a more traditional arrangement.

1) My husband’s isolation from traditional support systems for parents of young children. The lack of playdates and moms’ groups has been well documented in the articles written about stay-at-home dads, such as Moravcsik’s. But I find that it’s even the isolation from female gossip. People complain a lot about the judgments that are lobbed at new mothers by welling-meaning and not-so-well-meaning old ladies. But you boil it all down, and that childcare knowledge is transmitted to the next generation. My husband, on the other hand, had no one but me, and I wasn’t home full time with a baby, so I couldn’t possibly know.

On paper, we should have been equally (un)prepared for our firstborn; both of us were the youngest in our families, neither of us had changed more than five diapers in our lives before bringing a baby home. But I was constantly surprised by the things that nobody had ever told him … because why would a man need to know how to take care of a baby?

2) My husband’s (initial) expectation that he would get to “clock out” whenever I wasn’t at work. Evenings, weekends, and holidays—the assumption was that anything childcare related was in my domain (although he was willing to cook, clean, or do yardwork). It didn’t end up being sustainable, but I think it did push us into a more balanced arrangement than a traditional model with the mother in charge of the children 24/7.

The flip side of this, though, is that it’s created a need for a lot more negotiation. My mom was in charge all of the time, and so she set all of the parenting rules and expectations. I refuse to parent the way that comes most naturally to my husband, and vice versa, so we’re always having to work it out.

Overall, I feel like we’re fighting the good fight. It’s hard and imperfect, but our daughters, nieces, and nephews are growing up seeing more options for their future than they would otherwise … and so do the younger women I work with. Maybe it’ll be less hard for them.

Have a unique perspective to share? Drop me an email. Update: A daughter chimes in:

As a woman in my mid-twenties, I have realized since entering the workforce that my parents’ decision to prioritize my mother’s career, while my father took on a primary care-giving role (whether he held a full-time or part-time job or stayed home, all of which he did for parts of my childhood), was the best thing they could have done for me.

I have a confidence that many women say they lack, having avoided internalizing many of the harmful stereotypes about women that nag away inside you. Of course a woman—like me—can have a career, while her husband does most of the care-giving and all of the cooking. It’s the most natural thing in the world! That is, after all, how I lived the first eighteen years of my life.

I don’t know how I feel about the issue in the original article: Can a child-raising partnership ever really achieve absolute parity in each partner's contributions to caregiving? That said, I hope we eventually reach a world in which it’s normal for either the man or the woman to be the primary parent.

If one business offers both parents caregiver bennies that their competitor doesn’t, that gives their competitor an advantage that very likely will enable their competitor to survive and thrive while they go into bankruptcy and get bought out by that competitor. Laws have to be made to even the playing field without destroying the natural environment, like laws against pollution that ALL businesses must obey even though it is an expense for some businesses that hinders their competitiveness.

Giving mothers caregiver bennies is widely recognized as unavoidable because women are determined by biology to be the child bearers. Men carry no such gestational burden, and they are actually capable of continuing to “bring home the bacon” while women are incapacitated by child birth. Claims by feminists to the contrary, men didn’t decide that; biology did long ago, before humans even came on the scene.

But as long as the majority don’t find gender-neutral caregiver bennies to be quite the same urgency as pollution, they won’t enforce such laws, which would hinder business productivity and thereby raise the cost of goods and services that we all consume.

Another reader sighs:

Sadly, this proposal by Josh Levs will only gain traction when enough fathers have decided they want it. As is often the case with women’s issues, they don’t become legitimate until men say they are.

By the way, Levs’s is a great companion piece to an essay in this month’s print edition of The Atlantic, “Why I Put My Wife’s Career First,” by Andrew Moravcsik. His wife is Anne-Marie Slaughter, who wrote the controversial Atlantic cover story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Here’s Moravcsik:

[M]ost two-career families sooner or later find that one person falls into the role of lead parent. In our family, I assumed that role. To be sure, Anne-Marie was actively involved with our boys, taking responsibility for specific chunks of their lives, like dealing with teachers and planning college trips. She was—and is—emotionally close to both sons. And, as she described in her article three years ago, she broke off her government service to help our older son through his rocky transition into adolescence.

But none of this is lead parenting. Lead parenting is being on the front lines of everyday life.

Here’s a related passage from Levs:

[T]here is something about the idea that a child has one parent who is a “primary” caregiver and another who is secondary that is startlingly outdated. About 60 percent of families with children at home have two working parents who share caregiving responsibilities. Workplaces should be doing what they can to encourage an even distribution of those responsibilities, not encoding the idea that one parent will do more.

One parent who’s done more is this female reader:

I am almost content being the sole breadwinner. My only point of contention is that my husband doesn’t immerse himself in the primary parent role. When I was at home more, I didn’t call him in the middle of a business trip to ask whether I should take a child to the doctor; I just made the decision I felt was best and went with it. I also never pulled him into every single interaction with school; I just handled it.

My husband is getting better (I feel I need to stress that more), but it has taken years to reach the point where he felt confident enough to parent without asking for constant reassurance. I was never expected to need that reassurance; I was always expected to be comfortable and capable in my role as mother. He has just as many years experience as a parent as I do (a few more, in fact), so I don't understand where the hesitance originates.

Can you relate to that reader? Or are you a dad who has taken the lead with parenting? Email hello@theatlantic.com on those questions or any others raised by Levs, Moravcsik, or their readers above.