Stay-at-home dad

Jamie has gone back to work.  She has decided to pursue her passion for teaching and has been fortunate enough to receive a full-time teaching position at a local Montessori school, where she’ll be teaching 4^th grade Earth Science and Ancient History. What this means for Ada is something rather shocking: mom will no longer be her primary care-taker. That responsibility lies at my feet. Recently, I read an article discussing the social norms and habits of the Millennial Generation— you know the group of lazy young adults more concerned with driving ink-filled tattoo guns into their skin than actually paying down their record student-loan debt. But I digress. Anyway, true to Millennial form (with my generation’s emphasis on education, inclusiveness, acceptance, and anti-racism) heterosexual couples have relished taking a sledge hammer to the household gender roles of generations’ past--at least in principle. In a recent study done by  a university and subsequently published in the New York Times, it found that nearly 80% of young couples expressed a desire to be more equitable in the rearing of children. Meaning, that a full 80% of men my age claim that they WANT the opportunity to stay at home and sacrifice a few years of their “career” to raise a son or a daughter. Millennial women, it is assumed, are not pressured by their partners to be the sole caretakers of the household and the child. One could say that the Millennial notion of work and family responsibility is way more egalitarian than 40 or even 20 years ago. The problem arises, of course, when young adults enter the work force. It’s not that having a job makes one abandon their ideals, but rather that the work environment is still controlled by social norms implanted there from prior generations. What this looks like in concrete terms is this: lower wages for female professionals;  the industrialized world’s worst maternal leave practices; an obsession with the supposed “inappropriateness” of breastfeeding in public; an emphasis on working over-time to the detriment of one’s health, not to mention family life; rampant sexual harassment in the workplace (specifically in areas where women are not the predominate gender); and calcified definitions of masculinity and femininity that leave limited space for re-imagining the family- gender dynamic.

Out of a desire to support Jamie in her attempt to pursue her dream job and out of a desire to raise my daughter and be an “involved dad,” I have offered to stay at home. I will be juggling both work responsibilities and that of child-rearing. It’ll be difficult. But I’m sure that by taking on what is still considered a “woman’s role,” I’ll gain priceless insight into some of the stresses that affect a vast majority of women. I’m excited to invert the social norms and experience first-hand the beauty, stress, and difficulty that come with parenting. I will never be a dad proud of the fact that “I never changed a diaper.” That would be a badge of embarrassment, not pride.

I’ll continue to write about this journey as it goes….