Tuesday, July 29, 2003

I've now gone back and re-listened to yesterday's Talk of the Nation on NPR, which was on the subject of at-home dads. A closer listen and it still leaves me warm. For starters, the main guest, a delightful and clearly patient guy named Bruce Stockler (claim to fame: wrote I Sleep at Red Lights). He walks the line between serious and loose well -- a natural spokesman for the cause. In response to questioning why at-home dads should be treated as a big deal when women have been doing this for years, he makes the graceful point that indeed, moms have played a huge role, but that having two parents very involved in the lives of children -- as is generally the case with at-home fathers -- is a genuine revolution in parenthood.

There's also a nice interview with Dan Mulhern, the first gentleman of Michigan. He's another great spokesman for the cause, and I'm most impressed with his willingness to go out and really stump for the idea of dads-as-caregivers. He threw a First Man's Forum right after his wife took the governorship. Obviously, by definition, it's tough for at-home dads to have the kind of public profile that attract attention -- we're too busy raising families to stump for the idea -- so having Dan aboard is noteworthy.

The program hits a lot of good topics -- isolation, family stresses, gender roles -- without implying that this is an economic phenomenon. Economics, as I look harder and harder at this topic, is actually an important point to avoid when talking about at-home dad as they fit into society. While I don't begrudge anyone who uses dads at home as a lens to view the recession, using the recession to explore at-home dads is misleading. The best way to minimize the role of at-home fathers in the American family is to suggest it's an anomoly caused by the recession, and that a rising macroeconomic tide will dent our numbers. And I don't think that's true.

But the program did expose one flaw in the at-home dad phenomenon: there doesn't appear to be anyone in academia studying us seriously. TOTN finds a prof named Natasha Cabrera to serve as an expert. But she seems to be focused on low-income men (she admits not having seen "Mr. Mom") and confesses there's not much data about what the effects of Rebel Dadism. (Was Kyle Pruett not available? I know he has some data.) But that really does expose a gap in social understanding of us: where are the experts?

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