NY Times: Dads are Taking Over as Full-Time Parents

Excellent article in The New York Times about the changing face of dads, “Dads are Taking Over as Full-Time Parents (Just Wait Until Your Mother Gets Home)” by Alex Williams. The article features many members of the NYC Dads Group as well as some of our favorite fathers around the country, including Mike Adamick in San Francisco and Dave Worford in Colorado. Some of our favorite quotes:

Six years later, he considers himself less a Mr. Mom than a new archetype of the father as provider. “I sort of take things upon myself,” said Mr. Griffioen, whose family has added a son and moved to Detroit. “I don’t go to the store to buy my kids toys. I make them toys. I do woodworking, leatherworking. I learned all sorts of manly skills that I never would have had time to learn if I were sitting in an office 28 stories above San Francisco.”

“Just a few years ago, I was usually the lone dad on the playground during the day,” Lance Somerfeld, 39, said on a recent sunny Wednesday morning, while hanging out with eight other dads at the Heckscher Playground in Central Park. “The moms and nannies gawked at me like I was an exhibit at the zoo. Now, I’m the new normal.”

But Brad Harrington, director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family, who has conducted multiple studies involving fatherhood, said that many men now feel the freedom to choose to be at-home dads for the deeper rewards, even when their jobs are secure. Of those who had made the choice, Professor Harrington said, “many expressed, ‘This may be the most meaningful work I’ll ever do.’ ” 

Last week, he [Brooklyn Dad, Chris Michel]  recalled: “We were walking through the park, and I had a nice alliterative line drop into my head, so I pulled out my phone, opened up the tiny little word editor, trying to frantically type this good line. And of course, as soon as I opened my phone, she wants to show me this bug that she has found.” 

“This ain’t the 20th century,” he added. “There are 300 million people in the U.S., so there are 150 million ways to be a man.”

Definitely worth a read and a big step forward for the media’s representation of stay-at-home dads.