Much excitement here in our nation's capital: the local at-home dads group, the DC Metro Dads was featured on the area's most popular 11 p.m. newscast. It was nice to see the group get some more good press (this marks the second time in a year they got on TV). But one thing jumped out at me when I saw the segment (and read the accompanying web piece):

According to the latest U.S. Census figures, 3.6 million men stay home while their wives work. That's a 54 percent increase since 1986.

Huh? 3.6 million? That nearly 40 times higher than the usual (and highly suspect) Census figure. And I could only find one other reference to such a number on the web: this story out of Wilmington. I would like to begin crowing about the 3.6 million number. Does anyone have clue one about where that figure came from?

The last word (hopefully) on Judith Warner: I mentioned this on the week's Rebel Dad Radio, but damned if Judith Shulevitz doesn't hit the nail right on the head in her New York Times review of Warner's Perfect Madness. She obviously knocks Warner's we're-all-terribly-overstressed point of view, but she also raises the guy issue:

There's more than just detail, however, to back up the theory that parents put in more time than they used to. According to the Families and Work Institute's most recent five-year study of the national work force, children receive on average one hour more of parental attention on work days than they did 25 years ago. Translated out of the levelling language of statistical averages, that means many, many hours of helping with homework, cheering at basketball games and schlepping to music classes. (Interestingly, the study says that it's men who are putting in the extra hour, while working women spend the same amount of time as before: 3.4 hours per workday. Men now average 2.7 hours.)

and ...

More young professionals rank their families as equal in importance to their jobs, or even greater. More young women than men hold these views, not surprisingly, but what is surprising is how many more young men interviewed in 2002 disagreed with the statement that it is ''much better for everyone involved if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children,'' compared with young men interviewed 25 years earlier. You could dismiss this as just the young folk regurgitating the gender ideology they learned in school, except that more young fathers also ''walk the talk,'' in the jargon of corporate America: they spend an average of one more hour a day with their children than baby boomers do.

Thanks Judith ... we're trying our best.