The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family

244 Pages·2009·1.21 MB·English

by  Jeremy A. Smith

Cover
The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and
Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family. - Jeremy
Adam Smith
A Note about Names and People
Contents
Introduction: Twenty-first-century Dad
Part I: The Fathers of Yesterday and Today
1: A Stay-at-home Dad’s History of North America
2: Searching for Role Models
3: Stay-at-home Economics, or Five Myths of Caregiving
Fatherhood
4: Searching for Community
5: Interlude
Part II: The Dads of Tomorrow
6: Returning to Glory
7: The Astonishing Science of Fatherhood, or Three More
Myths about Male Caregiving
8: Searching for Heroism
9: Conclusion
Epilogue: Another Fatherhood Is Possible
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

The Daddy Shift
How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared
Parenting Are Transforming the American Family
Jeremy Adam Smith
Beacon Press Boston
Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist
Association of Congregations.
© 2009 by Jeremy Adam Smith All rights reserved Printed in the United States of

America 12111009 87654321
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper
ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design and composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of

Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Jeremy Adam. The daddy shift : how
stay-at-home dads, breadwinning moms, and shared parenting are transforming the
American family / Jeremy Adam Smith.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8070-2120-0
(HARDCOVER : ALK. PAPER)
1. Househusbands—United States. 2. Stay-at-home fathers—United States.
3. Working mothers—United States. 4. Work and family—United States. I. Title.
HQ756.6.S65 2009 306.3'6150973—dc22 2008047404
This book is dedicated to my father and to my son.
A Note about Names and People Unless otherwise indicated in
the endnotes, all quotations ap pearing in this book (of both
parents and researchers) come from personal interviews. The
couples I interviewed requested varying degrees of anonymity.
Some agreed to let me use their full names; some asked me to
drop or change their last names; others (“Mike Rothstein” and
“Lisa Holt” in chapter 3 and the “Hoffman” fam ily in chapter
8) requested that I change their entire name and alter certain
personal details. In every case, I obeyed people’s wishes, if
they expressed any.
Some readers might notice that even though I write about my
family life, my wife appears in these pages only in name, not as
a full-blown character. This is simply because she is not a
public person and she does not wish for her personal choices
and feelings to be subjected to public scrutiny. I obeyed her
wish as well, even if it gives the mistaken impression of her
absence.
As a result the autobiographical passages primarily concern
my own responses as a caregiver, which I felt needed to be
there in order to complete this snapshot of male caregiving in
the early twenty-first century. The reader should not construe
this to mean my wife is unimportant to me. On the contrary, I
love her and my son more than words can express.

Contents
Introduction: Twenty-first-century Dad
Part I: The Fathers of Yesterday and Today
1. A Stay-at-home Dad’s History of North America
2. Searching for Role Models
3. Stay-at-home Economics, or Five Myths of Caregiving
Fatherhood
4. Searching for Community
5. Interlude: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Part II: The Dads of Tomorrow
6. Returning to Glory
7. The Astonishing Science of Fatherhood, or Three More
Myths about Male Caregiving
8. Searching for Heroism
9. Conclusion: Remember the Future
Epilogue: Another Fatherhood Is Possible
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
Twenty-first-century Dad
In 2004 my son Liko was born. Everything—the tree outside the
window, the dreams I had at night—changed.
For the first year of his life, my wife Olli stayed home with
Liko. Then she went back to work and I quit my job, joining the
ranks of caregiving dads.
Now it was just the two of us boys, and it was scary. Liko, a
confirmed breast addict, could not nap without his mother.
When I would lay him down, he’d wail inconsolably, relentlessly,
reach ing out to me. But when I picked him up, he’d kick and
arch his back, his little hands pushing against my chest. This
would go on for hours.
I’d put him in the stroller and walk. He’d cry and fall asleep,
but if I stopped—in a bookstore, a coffee shop—he’d wake and
cry again, so I soon learned to keep moving through our San
Fran cisco neighborhood, sticking to the side streets, going up
the hills and down, up and down.
Time slowed, and with every minute I’d feel more and more
isolated, more and more anxious. I wondered: “Is my life now
no more than this?” I’d see people laughing in a picture
window and want to be one of them.
In time, I learned to let that go, let myself get lost. On foggy
days the hills of the city floated around us like deserted islands,
the stroller a lonely raft. I’d study the cornices and gables on
the Vic torian facades, watch the tsunami of fog spill over Twin
Peaks.
Later, Liko learned to fall asleep in my arms. I’d carry him
through all the rooms in our apartment, stepping carefully
around the bouncy seat, the swing, the baby gym, the high
chair, the toy basket. I’d do this for hours.
Then one momentous day, I sat down in a rocking chair and
he stayed asleep. I took a book down from the bookshelf. It was
the best book I’d ever read; I don’t remember its name. One
afternoon as the room darkened, his eyes snapped open and
they met mine. He smiled and said, “Dada,” and his small
fingers curled around my forefinger.
He was glad to see me there with him. And I was glad to be
there.
New Model Family
It is strange to think that such an intensely private moment
might be the product of a tectonic shift in society and the
economy.
Although I felt acutely isolated when I was learning to take
care of my son, in fact I was not alone. Since 1965 the number
of hours that men spend on child care has tripled. Since 1995 it
has nearly doubled.1
In 2007 the Census Bureau counted 159,000 stay-at-home
dads in the United States, up from 64,000 in 1995.2 But these
numbers tell only part of the story of male caregiving, because
they exclude stay-at-home fathers who also do paying work.
When we add fa thers who work part-time or from home, and
who are primarily or equally responsible for taking care of kids,
the number of male caregivers increases. According to a 2008
census report, for exam ple, one in four preschool children
spend more time in Dad’s care than any other arrangement
while the mother is working,3 though most of the fathers work
at least part-time and probably do not call themselves “stay-at-
home dads.”
Many studies find that twenty-first-century couples divide
paid work, household labor, and child care far more equitably
than cou ples in the past.4 Some professional dual-income
couples have even achieved rough equality in their domestic
divisions of labor,5 and one-third of working-class couples work
different, complemen tary shifts and share care of young
children.6 A great deal of evi dence also indicates that more
fathers would adopt caregiving roles if they felt it was
financially feasible to do so: For example, a 2007 survey by
Monster.com found that 68 percent of American men would
consider staying home full-time with their kids.
The bottom line is clear: during the past decade, the number
of caregiving fathers has risen dramatically. Dads now spend
more time with their children than at any time since
researchers started collecting longitudinally comparable data.7
This does not mean that Americans have achieved an
egalitarian utopia. The cen sus counts 5.6 million stay-at-home
moms, compared to 159,000 dads.8 The University of
Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households says
that the average mother is doing five times as much child care
as the average father. When both parents work for pay, Mom
still beats Dad by a four to one ratio.9 If men as a group have
indeed increased their contributions at home—and they have —
they still don’t come close to matching what mothers do.
However, averages can be deceptive. They reveal the big pic
ture but, by doing so, obscure the many smaller pieces and
coun tertrends that give it shape. In truth, we are in a period of
transition when inequality coexists with progress. Some groups
of men have adopted flexible gender roles and embraced
cooking, cleaning, and taking care of kids, while other groups
have not. The negative examples, often glorified, are
everywhere, while the positive ones are often hidden and hard
to find, especially for boys and young men.
It is time for twenty-first-century dads to go on the offensive.
In this book I tell the stories of fathers who have embraced
caregiving and egalitarian marriages, explore the hopes and
ideals that inform their choices, and analyze economic and
social develop ments that have made their choices possible.
As we will discover, stay-at-home dads represent a logical
next step of fifty years of family change, from a time when the
idea of men caring for children was inconceivable, to a new era
when at-home dads are a small but growing part of the
landscape. This is the “daddy shift” of the title: the gradual
movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure
breadwinning to one that encom passes capacities for both
breadwinning and caregiving.
Stay-at-home dads are the leading edge of the daddy shift,
pio neers who are quietly mapping new territory for all fathers.
I focus on stay-at-home dads for the same reason
anthropologists study lost tribes and obscure subcultures: to
reveal the variety and po tential of human experience—and
thus to suggest new possibilities for organizing our lives.
But in many ways, this book is really about male caregiving
writ large. Stay-at-home dads represent one extreme of a
contin uum that includes the growing number of dads who split
work and child care equally with their spouses, widowed or
divorced custo dial dads (a group that has quadrupled in size
since 1970), two-dad families, and working fathers who have
restructured their jobs in order to make more time for their
children. Many of the facts, ideas, and trends I describe apply
to all dads who have chosen to prioritize, for one reason or
another, care over paid work.
This is also a book about female breadwinning, which is, of
course, the main economic factor that makes stay-at-home
father hood possible. Prior to the 1960s, as we will discuss in