The Old Man and the ABC

If Ernest Hemingway was an at-home dad in modern America and wrote about his experiences, it would sound a good bit like yesterday's sweet and simple "Odyssey of a Mr. Mom that Sean Devlin wrote for the Boston Globe. I read (and post about) so much analysis and so many straight profiles that his piece really stood out as something different. Worth the read.

And in my continuing effort to highlight international fatherhood, this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald deserves a look. It goes through a new report from the Australian government on what dads are up to when it comes to work-family balance. If you want to look at trends, the news is good: more dads are using flexible schedules and the such since 1993. But the absolute numbers are still small. I'm waiting for a real acceleration of those numbers as modern technology makes it simple for flexible schedules to be viable.

They also throw out a stat for at-home dads: 3.4 percent. Though still low, it's not an insignificant number -- a similar finding in the U.S. would account for more than a million at-home dads.