I received a most wonderful surprise in the mail yesterday; Bruce Gibbs sent along the "pre-launch" issue of Real Dad Magazine. I've posted on this before, and I was thrilled to see the concept had made its way into reality.

I think Gibbs has a lot of the right ideas, and as the content bulks up, this could be a meaningful addition to a parenting magazine landscape that pretty much ignores fathers. Forget the beauty-and-makeup section ... Real Dad looks primed to include building projects, and the prototype reviews electric-powered ridable toy cars. In short, there's a lot of potential there. It's not as flashy as the other parenting offerings, but that's probably a good thing.

I'm so happy that there's a dad-focused magazine out there that the fact that this issue has an at-home dad story is secondary. It's a fine story -- nothing earth-shattering -- but it's good to see it included.

Anyway, subscriptions are available at Amazon.com. The content looks promising, but I'd subscribe just to support the concept.

OK. The very last word (hopefully) on Judith Warner comes from an interview she did with Salon:

There is, obviously, a certain amount of sacrifice that parents do have to make on behalf of their children, financially and in terms of time and labor. Yet it seems like mothers are taking on most of the burden, as opposed to sharing it with fathers. A lot of women wonder, how can they get fathers to do their share?

I don't know. I think at this point it's largely a lost cause for our generation. It's too late.

Wow.

It just plain hasn't happened. The statistics overall will tell you that there's a grotesque inequality of who does what. When you have families where the mother is at home full time, she does almost everything.

I'll expound more on this point in the next Rebel Dad Radio, but it's increasingly clear that there is a gender divide between me and writers like Warner and Caitlin Flanagan, who are probably a decade or two older than I and just outside the "Gen X" boundary. In short, these women come from a distinctly different generation. The changes in father involvement are probably much more radical than they realize because it's happening to families of a slightly different generation. Warner (and Belkin and a lot of other "Mommy War"-type writers) have been criticized for too often concentrating on upper-middle class women. But I'll go one step further -- by often focusing on the older suburban moms, they're probably missing the range of co-parenting arrangements springing up among 20-somethings and 30-somethings. Fortunately, there are reporters that get that.