The Daddy Shift How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family Jeremy Adam Smith Beacon Press Boston Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 2009 by Jeremy Adam Smith All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Text design and composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Jeremy Adam. The daddy shift : how stay-at-home dads, breadwinning moms, and shared parenting are transforming the American family / Jeremy Adam Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn-13: 978-0-8070-2120-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Househusbands—United States. 2. Stay-at-home fathers—United States. 3. Working mothers—United States. 4. Work and family—United States. I. Title. HQ756.6.S65 2009 306.3'6150973—dc22 2008047404 This book is dedicated to my father and to my son. A Note about Names and People Unless otherwise indicated in the endnotes, all quotations ap- pearing in this book (of both parents and researchers) come from personal interviews. The couples I interviewed requested varying degrees of anonymity. Some agreed to let me use their full names; some asked me to drop or change their last names; others (“Mike Rothstein” and “Lisa Holt” in chapter 3 and the “Hoffman” fam- ily in chapter 8) requested that I change their entire name and alter certain personal details. In every case, I obeyed people’s wishes, if they expressed any. Some readers might notice that even though I write about my family life, my wife appears in these pages only in name, not as a full-blown character. This is simply because she is not a public person and she does not wish for her personal choices and feelings to be subjected to public scrutiny. I obeyed her wish as well, even if it gives the mistaken impression of her absence. As a result the autobiographical passages primarily concern my own responses as a caregiver, which I felt needed to be there in order to complete this snapshot of male caregiving in the early twenty-first century. The reader should not construe this to mean my wife is unimportant to me. On the contrary, I love her and my son more than words can express. Contents Introduction Twenty-first-century Dad ix Part I The Fathers of Yesterday and Today 1 A Stay-at-home Dad’s History of North America 3 2 Searching for Role Models: Ed and Rachelle’s Story 30 3 Stay-at-home Economics, or Five Myths of Caregiving Fatherhood 51 4 Searching for Community: Chien’s Story 78 5 Interlude: Now You See It, Now You Don’t 92 Part II The Dads of Tomorrow 6 Returning to Glory: Ta-Nehisi’s Story 105 7 The Astonishing Science of Fatherhood, or Three More Myths about Male Caregiving 120 8 Searching for Heroism: Kent and Misun’s Story 146 9 Conclusion: Remember the Future 162 Epilogue Another Fatherhood Is Possible 188 Acknowledgments 192 Notes 194 Index 227 Introduction Twenty-first-century Dad In 2004 my son Liko was born. Everything—the tree outside the window, the dreams I had at night—changed. For the first year of his life, my wife Olli stayed home with Liko. Then she went back to work and I quit my job, joining the ranks of caregiving dads. Now it was just the two of us boys, and it was scary. Liko, a confirmed breast addict, could not nap without his mother. When I would lay him down, he’d wail inconsolably, relentlessly, reach- ing out to me. But when I picked him up, he’d kick and arch his back, his little hands pushing 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 if I stopped—in a bookstore, a coffee shop—he’d wake and cry again, so I soon learned to keep moving through our San Fran- cisco 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. I wondered: “Is my life now no more than this?” I’d see people laughing in a picture window and want to be one of them. In time, 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 ix