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Do Real Men Bring Home the Bacon?
That was my personal title for this essay, which The Federalist ran under a rather more measured headline:
Is it possible that Clueless Dad (that tired old television trope) is going into decline? He’s long since outworn his welcome. And General Mills seems to have gotten the message.
Further:
Their new commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios features a no-nonsense pep talk from our hero, “Dad”, who shows us active parenthood at its best. He moves smoothly through the house, cheering his grade-school son’s scary mask and complimenting his teenaged daughter on her “great profile pic,” while regaling us with rapid-fire tips on “how to dad.” Nothing about this father says “bumbler.”
What does Hero Dad do for a living? It’s unclear. His wife makes the briefest of appearances, breezing by in her power suit as he hands her some coffee. Dad shows no signs of heading for the office, but his monologue does mention that dads, in their awesomeness, “do work work and homework,” meaning they help with schoolwork and… what? Is he, too, gainfully employed? Or could he be thinking of home repair and those defrosting chicken thighs? Anyhow, there’s room for speculation.
More and more fathers nowadays are staying at home with their kids, but Americans are still dubious about this phenomenon. Conservatives as a rule are delighted to embrace the warm, nurturing figure of the stay-at-home mom. Dads, by contrast, are expected to build careers and bring home the bacon.
Maybe it’s time for that to change. I’m going to suggest some ways we can legitimize the at-home dad, without pretending men and women are interchangeable. Do you bristle at the image of an aproned dad holding a feather duster? Then lose the apron, and give him a power drill.
I got some very nice notes from at-home dads after publishing this. The public comments, by contrast, are predictably angry and bitter. I think it’s particularly amusing that I’m accused of closet misandry for recommending to men a lifestyle that I myself live and enjoy very much.
More importantly, though, the angry responders didn’t seem to notice something significant: I wasn’t just suggesting that men should, when circumstances warrant, be open to doing more childcare and other domestic chores. I was also suggesting that women need to respect them for more than their paychecks. A father is so much more than just a source of income.
Is there any better way to pitch this message? Reading the angry, bitter responses made me feel really bad for the great at-home dads who must deal with this a lot.
Published in General
Just ignore those types of responses. While I wasn’t a stay-at-home dad, I would loved to have been able to be at home with the kids when they were little, and to have home-schooled them after 8 years of private, Christian schooling.
And yes, I bring home the bacon, usually after I stop off at the grocery store on the way home from work . . .
Rachel,
I read your article and really enjoyed it. It captures some of what my husband and I have struggled with over the years, particularly with our church friends. I have always worked, always wanted to. Most of my church friends were kind, not judgmental, but were strongly of the side of the woman staying at home. My husband (who can be a bit of a disrupter) would then say–but why the woman? What if the man wanted to stay at home? Conversational topics often shifted at that point.
Three and a half years ago, our family relocated for my to take a new job. My husband has been unable to find work during this time and we have slowly made the adjustment to him staying at home. What I see is exactly what you pointed out – my husband doesn’t bring home the bacon, and I still do most of the frying in the pan…but this experience has only confirmed my view of the unique and wonderful role fathers play in the lives of their children. Because of this unexpected experience, we’ve embraced a new lifestyle that our family is enriched by.
While I don’t like the feminized father figure, I have long wondered about the necessity for one partner to be a wage slave and the other a domestic servant. It seems that one consequence of wealth would be to choose a little more flexibility. Now that our children are grown and gone, it seems kind of rude to me to leave all my messes for my wife to clean up and she has started to help with the income production. It seems to be developing into a different sort of partnership… without the feminized reinterpretation of roles.
Consciously choosing to be a stay at home dad is not a sound life plan, while the proposition that it can be the best way to make the best of a sub-optimal situation, is not entirely unreasonable. It does increase the risk of divorce which is a bad scene for families and horrible for men.
Your article isn’t an ode to all the other things men do, and why they are important, it is an explicit endorsement of a lifestyle which is risky and more likely than not destructive.
Your ode, is better focused on a different phenomenon. Men work more when they have families and sacrifice an awful lot to accomplish their first and most important job in the world (no amount of wishful thinking will change this, nor is it worth throwing men’s lives on the bonfire of wished for social change). Maybe unnecessarily. Getting men out of the office and into the civic organizations, is a good thing. Getting men and out of the office to go camping with the family is a good thing.
Perhaps also we can stop punishing dads for being poor. That would do an awful lot as well.
In musical circles, this trend is called “Normcore”. Hip-hop style music that promotes traditional or semi-traditional bourgeois liberal values. It’s a thing, and it’s on the rise, because of all the children of the Boomers (the “Baby Boom Echo”, also called Generation Y, or Hipsters, or whatever) who are now becoming parents themselves.
For how long, who knows? The Zeitgeist accepts it for now, because it isn’t explicitly religious or politically-partisan in tone, but I’m sure the MSM will stamp it out if it gets too big.
My favourite example, here:
I’m not so sure an image of a man holding a baby in one hand and a power drill in the other is the best way to sell this concept to the public…
“we can legitimize,” Do you mean “we elites”, I cannot figure out who this we, that you keep talking about is; and in this case what the heck needs legitimizing. There is more economic opportunity for women than there was thirty years ago. The result is more women working. That is how markets work and apparently this time it has produced something that fits into your concept socially conservative. This was not the norm for decades and people came to expect what was true three or more decades ago. They are now adjusting to a new reality and adjustment takes time. Nothing needs legitimizing. The idea that people go around wondering what “role” they should play could, in all likelihood could only be held by someone who believes they have a role to play as a legitimizer. Sorry, but the thought that I or anyone else should go around trying to legitimize or de-ligitamize reality strikes me as odd.
One of my sons is a musician and has a new album coming out. He gets a musician’s wage when he plays. His wife is a banker and gets a banker’s wage steadily. They just had their third child.
The stay-at-home musician occasionally looks bewildered and flustered simultaneously. One suspects that his mother, the stay-at-home parent in our family, experienced the same issues albeit as a woman and not a musician.
I would come home, pick up my smallest child, and go to change clothes. Our baby is (was, pretty old now) my baby and my baby deserved my attention, and my baby’s mother deserved a bit of downtime from the hard work of mothering and housewifery. Even allowing her to cook without hangers on was a break for her at the end of her workday at home.
So, I’d change clothes and talk with my baby. We’d exchange kisses and hugs and words and little bits of tenderness. Mom could pick up the phone and talk to relatives and friends and be sure she had time to do so since her husband had her back.
We had a great life.
I spent about 5 years working from home when our two were very young. My wife worked half-time, so five days out of every two weeks it was just me and the (very young) children.
It. Was. Awesome.
Well, not always awesome, but I am glad for the experience. If there was anything that really annoyed me it was the frequent comment from acquaintances that I was “playing Mr. Mom.” I would usually reply “No, I am being Dad.”
If you don’t stop crying, daddy’s going to give you something to cry about (sound of power drill spinning up). :-)
Carbonite did a wonderful job of subverting the trope in this ad.
Interesting post. A friend of mine has a high paying job and she makes more than her husband who works from home. While her husband is a wonderful father and loves being a stay at home dad, she on the other hand is annoyed about this. She wishes the roles were reversed. It’s interesting he is fully content with their situation, but she is not, and I doubt that their situation is unique. I think many women who are the bread winners may resent it. My friend and her husband make it work as the communication lines between them are very open and he is very much aware of her discontent and try to make the best of it.
So I understand the growing stay at home phenomenon, but I don’t know how content everyone is in the gender reversal,
Thanks for those perspectives. I really enjoy hearing people’s experiences with this, because I am really interested whether this sort of arrangement would workable for many families, and it’s hard to get a sense just from studies. As Artemis and PsychLynne and others have noted, flexibility is a big part of the workforce these days. Ruling out the possibility of moms being the benefit-guarantor and dads being the flexible ones seems to make things harder, perhaps unnecessarily, for families. As I mentioned in the piece, I doubt this arrangement will ever be seen in 50% of families, and I don’t care about that. But, I think the option should be seen as completely respectable when it does turn out to be optimal for a family.
Matede, my own anecdotal experience is just the opposite of yours. That is, the breadwinning women I know are of a fairly flexible “I have mixed feelings but would be willing to go either way” mentality, but they worry about their husbands’ level of satisfaction quite a bit. With varying degrees of justification, I think.
I’ve definitely known a few women who put their family at serious financial risk, even though they could have and were willing to ensure stability, because they didn’t think their husbands could handle the “shame” of being the primary domestic ones. It’s odd to consider things from that angle. I understand that work can be important to men, but if a woman jeopardized her family’s well-being to gratify her desire to work, I’d regard that as rather selfish. Should we see it as justified if the man is doing it? Tough questions.
In any case, I definitely don’t think it could hurt if we could help men and women both to see at-home fatherhood in a more positive (and masculine) light.
One more thing on Matede’s point. In print, I practically never hear women object to the at-home dad arrangement. But men definitely do, sometimes strenuously. Of course that’s not definitive evidence of anything, but still interesting.
Reading the Federalist piece after this Ricochet post made me think of a woman doctor performing a rectal exam or vasectomy (or worse). It’s great that you’re being sensitive. And it was worth doing. But it’s still going to feel like a kick in the nuts.
My wife and I work equal paying jobs. I would not be bothered if she made more than me, and given her line of work, she likely will in a few years. But I could never be a stay at home dad. I begin to crack on 3 day weekends as it is.
I’m on Matede’s side about this. If you don’t hear women complaining about the at-home dad arrangement, it is probably because you don’t know many people in that situation, or because the people you know in that situation are too uncomfortable with it to advertise that it is their situation. It is way outside the norm. People are always ready to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but particularly so when they are on the unusual side of the fence.
Just realized that you said, “in print.” I think my point does apply to real life situations. If you knew people in this situation in real life, you would find that the women were either at least somewhat unhappy with it or uncomfortable enough to not talk about it. I would add that women are taught by our benighted culture that complaining is their right, and that they should consider themselves victims whenever a situation seems less than perfect, and this feeds their lack of contentment.
My anecdotal experience isn’t actually so very slight. I guess among families to whom I’m close enough to ask (at least one parent) how they really feel about it, there are about half-a-dozen in my various social circles that fit this pattern. Two pretty intimate female friends, and one once-intimate (but with whom I don’t keep in touch so well now) are or have been (in an on and off way) their household’s sole or primary breadwinners.
So I don’t think it’s a discomfort thing; I’ve discussed it with some of them quite a bit. In all three cases to which I’m closest, I think the women really like their jobs and are happy with that part, and while they do feel some pangs over the things they miss while at work, they also really appreciate that they can leave home knowing their kids are safe at home with a loving parent. The only thing that really bothers them is worrying somewhat about their husbands’ level of satisfaction (even though the husbands are all, so far as I can judge, very clever and capable people who find many worthwhile things to do with themselves).
I also know a few cases, as I said, of women who could support the family well, but settle for less-secure arrangements to gratify their husbands’ desire to work. Hard to know how to feel about that. I grant that the issues are different than for women, but still, if it were a woman insisting on that, I’d think she was being unreasonable, so…
Of course if women are working jobs they don’t like, that’s different. But if we stipulate that some women do really like their jobs and want to keep them (fairly obviously true, I’d say) then why would all women be dissatisfied with at-home husbands? If you’re earning enough to keep the family, it’s clearly going to be nice to have domestic support, just as it would be for a high-earning man.
Noting several of the responses above, I have known women who dreaded the idea of staying at home. Some of them dreaded the idea of being a wife, let alone a mother. Perhaps it is the age in which we live; or perhaps something else is at play (I hesitate to use the word ‘fault’ here) but these women weren’t looking for children or that kind of responsibility.
I believe we’ve heard from some such women in other conversations here at Ricochet.
Maybe I should add to what I said in #19: female breadwinners are definitely a thing in academia, because it’s a place where very smart and accomplished people can nevertheless have trouble finding jobs. A lot of the at-home dads I know are themselves very educated and may even have extensive work experience. In a way that can make staying at home a bitter pill, and I think they generally do have at least some desire for a job; at the same time, I don’t think they feel emasculated by their lack of traditional career in quite the way some people would. They know they’re not failures, but circumstances worked out such that their wives were more employable.
Basically, they’re male counterparts to me. And often employ themselves in similar ways.
The women in these situations are perhaps less likely to be resentful, because their jobs are nice but also because it’s very obvious that their husbands aren’t just ambitionless slackers. They could have been successful at something (and were) but with respect to family, circumstances made it more natural for them to be at home.
These families, as PsychLynne suggested, don’t generally look like precise mirror opposites to male-breadwinner families. The women still spend as much time as possible at home, I think more than average male breadwinners. Both still do, on the whole, more manly and womanly types of things, in terms of both hobbies and household responsibilities, but they just divide differently in terms of amounts. It seems like some people make it work pretty well.
But making it work is of course partly a cultural thing, not just an individual-family thing. Men won’t like it if it’s not respected. Hence my efforts to suggest that maybe it should be.
Oh dear! That’s not what I was going for. Any way to make it more palatable?
Here’s a way to put the question. People are always telling women in their adjustment-to-motherhood phase (the ones for which it’s kind of rough): a job isn’t anything great. Most jobs are boring. Jobs are drudgery. Why dwell on that when life is so much richer outside the workforce?
OK. If this is good advice for women, why can’t it be for men? Jobs aren’t boring for them? Life isn’t richer at home for a man? Why can’t the embrace of the domestic be a blessing for a man too?
I wanted to comment on Matede’s post about the woman earning a higher wage, but being resentful of her role . I’ve seen several couples adopt this type of model, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes due to circumstances. When I’ve seen resentment in the working wife, it has often come down to “he’s not doing it the way I would.” While this attitude can be seen in any marriage, I think if a woman is uncomfortable with her role as breadwinner, and struggles with wanting to be at home, this type of attitude can insinuate itself into the relationship and cause problems.
For me, having grown up in fundamentalist/legalistic, Baptist churches, the term breadwinner was associated with spiritual leadership in the home. Thus, I had a lot of other expectations and connotations attached to the term. My attitude improved when started thinking of myself as “the person who makes more money right now.” Just a statement of fact, baggage removed.
Also, my housekeeping mantra has always centered around – if someone else does it, the best response it “thank you” not “here’s the right way.” However, I have pretty low standards : )
Right or wrong, there is a perception among working men that when you meet a guy who does strictly domestic duties, you think: 1) What is wrong with him? 2). He’s whipped.
It’s not fair, but it is probably the overwhelmeing reaction.
Byron Horatio:
Right or wrong, there is a perception among working men that when you meet a guy who does strictly domestic duties, you think: 1) What is wrong with him? 2). He’s whipped.
It’s not fair, but it is probably the overwhelmeing reaction.
Right. I think you’re right about that, and that’s partly why I suspect that it’s really male judgment, not female judgment, that men most fear when they react against this suggestion. That’s not to say female judgment is a non-issue; obviously it varies. But they figure other men won’t take them seriously.
Hence my idea that being at home with kids could be manlier if combined with the right activities and/or social roles. Does wage-earning have to be so definitive of the paternal role?
Thinking out loud, so I may walk this back later . . .
From a parenting perspective, I do think that the Dad-at-work/Mom-raising-kids-at-home model, while often upheld as the ideal, has its own problems. Historically, we haven’t been using that model very long. For a large portion of our history, Dad worked, but worked at home. e.g., On the farm, or some trade that was generally located at the home. So even if he was the primary breadwinner, the kids still saw dad throughout the day or were working alongside him on the farm or at his home-located trade.
With what we now think of as the ideal model, even if Mom is home with the kids, she’s still the parent doing most of the raising of them.
Some say this is model ideal because women are natural nurturers, and men aren’t. But men just nurture in a different manner than women. So how does this mostly-mom child-rearing affect the development of a child? And what are children who don’t have a man’s kind of of nurturing missing?
Rachel Lu, I know that’s not what you were going for. I appreciate and agree with what you’ve written. I don’t know if there’s a better way.
It’s far more of a challenge to convince dads than moms that staying at home is embracing their gender identity. There’s biology (hormones and body parts), society, and history.
How insecure do you feel in your femininity? Do you generally wish there were more focus or less on your gender? If you want to feel more like a woman, can you accomplish that relatively easily?
For men it’s different. What makes me a man and not a woman? That I can stand up in the bathroom? That I’m obsessed with women? Facial hair?
Women can now do all the things men do, and that’s great. But women can choose between gender-specific and gender-neutral. Men just have gender neutral.
I’m not asking to trade places. Women have it much harder, IMO. But understand men’s insecurities regarding their masculinity.
I don’t know if it can be made more palatable. I’m glad you’re trying.
Rachel Lu, I think telling men or women that jobs are drudgery is a disservice. Yes, job satisfaction is sometimes overrated. But we should be able to appreciate domestic life without dissing corporate life.
From the perspective of roles, I think part of the problem with the Dad-at-home/Mom-as-breadwinner model is that even if people can accept it, they presume that Dad-at-home will adopt a Mom-at-home style. The traditional model has Mom-at-home, raising kids while cooking, washing and cleaning. So there is an assumption that if Dad is at home, then he must adopt the traditional “Mom” model and spend his day cooking, washing, and cleaning. In other words, Dad is expected to be a traditional “housewife.”
If we understand that Dads nurture and raise children in a different manner than Moms, doesn’t it stand to reason that their “nesting” instinct would be different than Moms’ as well. Perhaps instead of cooking, washing, and cleaning, he . . . I dunno, builds a gazebo or a fence, or landscapes. (My personal inclination was to pack up the kids in the car or the bike trailer and go exploring.)
Exactly, Drew. This is why I was trying to suggest that maybe we could adapt the at-home dad role to be more fatherly, instead of thinking of at-home dads as masculine pegs in naturally feminine holes. Another thing that got be reflecting on this, by the way, was thinking about my late father-in-law (very much a man’s man, extremely capable and traditionally-minded), who had a small business renting farm equipment. All through his grade school and middle school years, my husband spent his afternoons there at the shop with his dad, while his mom worked a more traditional 9-5 job. Hearing him talk about it made me realize how important that time with his dad really was. (Something sociology is also confirming, btw. As you mentioned, in the 1950’s people had this idea that parenting was more of a mom thing, that kids didn’t need that much dad time and that dads weren’t naturally suited to nurturing. This is totally wrong. Kids are enormously better off with involved fathers, and boys especially have dramatically better adult outcomes if they have a significant paternal presence in their lives. And men who are involved in their kids’ lives also report being much happier and more fulfilled.)
So, basically, my very manly, traditional-gender-role-supporting father-in-law, did tons of parenting in the context of having my husband there with him at the shop. Helped him with homework, took care of him when sick, played backgammon with him on slow afternoons. Taught him to fix machines and keep the books. Of course, this didn’t seem emasculating to anyone because the setting was so manly: surrounded by tractors on his privately owned business. Thinking about this got the wheels turning in my brain, because it seems like there must be other ways to achieve a similar effect, enabling men to do more parenting (if that’s the most workable arrangement for the family) without coming across as “male housewives”.