Jeremy Adam Smith

“Twenty-First-Century Dad skillfully melds factual and historical data with a style that brings to life these important issues of family, parenting, and fatherhood.”

Forthcoming from Beacon Press:

In 2004, my son Liko was born. Everything—the tree outside the window, the dreams I have at night—changed.

For his first year of his life, my partner stayed home with Liko. Then she went back to work and I quit my job. I joined the ranks of stay-at-home dads.

Now it was just the two of us, and it was scary. Liko, a confirmed breast addict, could not nap without his mother. When I set him down, he'd wail inconsolably, relentlessly, reaching out to me. But when I picked him up, he'd fight back, kicking and arching his back, his little hands pushing off against my chest. This would go on for hours.

I'd put him in the stroller and walk. He'd cry and fall asleep, but when I stopped—in a bookstore, a coffee shop—he'd wake and cry again. I'd keep moving through our San Francisco neighborhood, sticking to the side streets, going up the hills and down, up and down.

Time slowed, and with every minute I'd feel more and more isolated, more and more anxious. Was this now my life? I'd see three people laughing in a picture window, and want to be one of them.

I learned to let that go, let myself get lost. On foggy days the hills of the city floated around us like deserted islands, the stroller a lonely raft. I'd study the cornices and gables on the Victorian facades, watch the tsunami of cloud spill over Twin Peaks.

Later, Liko learned to fall asleep in my arms. I'd carry him through all the rooms in our home, stepping carefully around the bouncy seat, the swing, the baby gym, the high chair, the toy basket. I'd do this for hours.

One day, I sat down in a rocking chair and he stayed asleep. I took a book down from the bookshelf. It was the best book I'd ever read; I don't remember its name. One afternoon as the room darkened, his eyes snapped open and they met mine. He smiled and said “Dada,” and his soft, small fingers curled around my forefinger.

He was glad to see me there with him. And I was glad to be there.


* * *

It is strange to think that such an intensely private moment might be the product of a tectonic shift in society and the economy. Although I felt acutely isolated when I was learning to take care of my son, in fact I was not alone. Since 1995, the number of hours men spend on child care has nearly doubled; and, during the same period, so has the census count of stay-at-home dads. A 2006 survey by careerbuilder.com found that 40 percent of American men would consider staying home with their kids; a 2007 survey by monster.com puts that number at a startling 68 percent.

And yet, despite the emergence of new practices and new ideas about what makes a “good dad,” a definition of father as breadwinner and head of the household continues to dominate the discourse of fatherhood. Today, two images of fatherhood—one rooted in the sexual division of labor established in the Industrial Revolution, the other in the fragmentation of a globalized, digitized twenty-first century—stand opposed to each other, with numerous variations in-between. The father who worked every day to support his wife and children, giving his wife command over the domestic sphere, is an entrenched model in our culture, and honored, and shrinking. The ideal of the nurturing co-parent is just emerging, little understood, and under sporadic attack from the defenders of the so-called traditional family.

It is time for twenty-first-century dads to go on the offensive. My book, Twenty-First-Century Dad, will tell the stories of fathers who have embraced caregiving and egalitarian marriages, explore the hopes and ideals that inform their choices, and analyze the economic and social developments that have made their choices possible.

Stay-at-home dads represent a logical culmination of fifty years of family change, from a time when the idea of men caring for children was literally inconceivable, to a new era when at-home dads are a small but growing part of the landscape. Their numbers and cultural importance will continue to rise—and I will argue that they must rise, as the global, creative, technological economy makes flexible gender roles more and more possible and desirable.

I focus on stay-at-home dads for the same reason that anthropologists study lost tribes and obscure subcultures: to reveal the variety and potential of human experience. We already know that women can succeed in the workplace and, in the process, change it. But for many people, the questions of whether men can succeed at home, and what their homes will look like, remain open. The stay-at-home dad is important because he sweeps aside myths and stereotypes about what men can and can’t do for their families, tears down the walls that divide men from their children, and fulfills the promise of feminism, which was always as much about transforming gender roles as fighting inequity.

But the stay-at-home dad is much more than a novelty item in the store of human experience. I will argue that stay-at-home fathers point to a way of life that is more in harmony with the twenty-first century economy than so-called traditional fatherhood, which is based on the idea of the man being the sole breadwinner. As women advance through careers in the private, nonprofit, and governmental sectors—and even in the military—today men, women, and our entire society have a stake in the future of male caregiving.

“Will women ever achieve real equality with men?” writes Rhona Mahony in her 1995 book Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power. “I propose that the answer to that question is another question: Can a father raise babies and can a woman let him do it? This is the key question, because in order for women to achieve economic equality with men, men will have to do half the work of raising children.”