Back to the news: I'm a couple of days late on this Rochester Democrat & Chronicle piece on a family with a stay-at-home dad. What's remarkable about the piece is that it is not a straight SAHD story. The dad admits up front that he does a little work on the side, enough to bring in a small but noticeable chunk of money into the household. So while I applaud any story that has an at-home dad talking about the benefits of the gig, I'm also happy to see a story that shows that guys can become the primary caretaker without walking away entirely from paid work. In not all cases is it work or family. Sometimes there's a middle ground. Worth thinking about as I gear up for my yearly rant about how the Census Bureau counts at-home fathers.

Also: I was scanning del.icio.us for bookmark with the "rebeldad" tag and saw this New York Times piece had been marked.

The story, in and of itself, is an interesting read about smart, well-educated college women declaring their intention to someday be at-home moms. According to the story, a survey of 138 women at Yale found that 85 planned to stop or cut back work. Only two said they planned on going the at-home dad route, and two others said they'd consider it. I refuse to knock anyone who plans to stay home with the kids or who exalts work-family balance, but the fact that most Yale women have already bought into the standard who-does-what stereotype is a bit bothersome. And not just for me:

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

Of course, we hear only from the women. I'd like to think that men plan to strive for the work-family balance, too, but Yale guys appear only in passing:

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.

"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30's now."

'I think that's sexy.'!? I'm assuming that the this quote is just one of the not-really-representative, over-the-top lines that make their way into stories because they're too good for a writer to pass up, not because they reflect some larger reality. Everything I've read suggests that younger men are prepared to be equal players in the whole kid thing. Maybe the Yale guys haven't gotten the memo.

Update: for more on this, check out Feministing, which treats the story with much-deserved bile. And thanks to KZ for pointing out in the comments below that Yale is breeding future SAHM-vs-working-woman mommy warriors. To whit: "'My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time. You always have to choose one over the other.'" Thanks for spotting that, KZ. I happen to know one woman who is both. (Love ya, RM!)

Tags: SAHD blog dad media yale