Daddy Dialectic

How fatherhood can survive the Great Recession

2009-07-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Do Fewer Fathers Want to Become Stay-at-Home Dads?

2009-06-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

CareerBuilder announces: The number of guys who'd consider becoming stay-at-home dads has dropped from 49 percent in 2005 to 31 percent this year. This is based on a survey of 800 working fathers.

How can we reconcile that number with the staggering number of Father's Day stories about laid-off fathers becoming stay-at-home dads, or the rising visibility of caregiving fathers in our culture?

That's easy: We are now in the midst of an all-hands-on-deck economic emergency. Even employed parents feel under the gun at work, and many are facing furloughs, salary cuts, and benefits reductions. In that kind of situation, every able-bodied adult in every family needs to think about how he or she might contribute to the family's income, not to mention health care coverage.

That includes my family, by the way: I'm being laid off as senior editor of Greater Good magazine and my wife's employment situation has been rocky for awhile now. Am I going to go back to being a stay-at-home dad? I loved taking care of my son and would welcome the opportunity to do so again, but we as a unit can't afford voluntary stay-at-home parenthood. Not right now.

And so, based on that perspective, I have a prediction: Over the course of the next few years, we're going to see more involuntary stay-at-home dads--those created by layoffs--and fewer voluntary stay-at-home dads.

Here's the important thing: During the Great Depression, unemployment would destroy men. They were told that money was all they had to contribute to their families; if employment vanished, they saw themselves as worthless. They couldn't become "stay-at-home dads" because that role did not exist. Few mothers worked and fewer earned enough to support families. Today, most moms work and we can say to unemployed fathers: you still have value to your family, they need for you to see to their well-being.

That's a message that a decade's worth of voluntary stay-at-home dads can send to today's laid-off dads. That's something men need to hear right now, that they can play caregiving as well as breadwinning roles in their families.

ABC 7 News: Growing Shift in Parental Gender Roles

2009-06-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

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Father's Day Link Round-Up, Part Two

2009-06-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

President Obama Speaks to Dads About Fatherhood: "Just because your own father wasn’t there for you, that’s not an excuse for you to be absent also -- it’s all the more reason for you to be present. There’s no rule that says that you have to repeat your father’s mistakes. Just the opposite -- you have an obligation to break the cycle and to learn from those mistakes, and to rise up where your own fathers fell short and to do better than they did with your own children."

Mother, May I? Helping Moms Back Off So That Dads can be Dads: "Negative gatekeeping by mothers -- grimaces or criticism when men try to change a diaper or feed or play with a baby -- can block out even fathers who believe they should be involved, says a 2008 study in the Journal of Family Psychology... Gatekeeping can be positive, too: When mothers encourage dads, the men tend to shoulder more child care."

A Father's Day Assessment of Recession-Era Dads: "By now, pretty much everyone, their brother, and their mother have weighed in on how the recession is—and isn't—shaking up gender relations here at home. Journalists and researchers alike have questioned whether the downturn might change the balance of power and responsibility for good. They've offered bold pronouncements: Yes. And, well, no. They've dug up real-life tales of men and women for whom layoffs have hit hard, trotting outsagas of lost men and bitter wives one day and forecasts of a revolution in parenthood the next. I've followed the research and soaked up the reporting. I've got just one more story to add to the pile: my own."

Devoted Dad key to reducing risky teen sex: "The more attentive the dad — and the more he knows about his teenage child's friends — the bigger the impact on the teen's sexual behavior, the researchers found. While an involved mother can also help stave off a teen’s sexual activity, dads have twice the influence."

Links related to the release of my book, The Daddy Shift:

Daddy on Board: "I would like to say that there's this revolutionary movement of fathers who are going to take back fatherhood and change the face of public policy. But social change happens in stages, and I think where we're at is in the consciousness-raising stage... The logical way to close off this stage is to begin asking ourselves: How can we get public policies that will support our role as caregivers? How can we get paternity leave, which only one in 10 men have access to? How can we get flextime?"

Defining the Daddy Track: "The United States has never had a situation where so many mothers worked and so many fathers were capable of taking on caregiving work. People have a new image in their minds of what a good mother is and what a good father is, and that's a strength people are bringing into this economic crisis."

Why Working Mothers (Sometimes) Envy Stay-at-Home Dads: "Many career-oriented women marry men who become primary caregivers, and they are extremely happy with the arrangement. What’s their secret? In an age when gender roles are open to negotiation, the first trick, I found, is to identify what you want and find a partner who knows what he or she wants, bargain openly for roles as changes like parenthood loom, and clearly identify what strengths each partner brings to the table."

Father's Day Recommended Reading: "It's an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children's books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children's books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children. No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids. But where does that leave families who don't fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?"

Raising Hell: For Ella, my daughter, who asks why?

2009-06-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Note: this is the intro to rad dad 14. I want to call on fathers everywhere to make a commitment to all youth and not just their 'own.'

On the night Barak Obama was elected, he threw out this rhetorical question: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible…

I’d like a chance to answer.

Yes, Mr. president, there are.

Let me start with a story and then some facts:

Just two days before my daughters and I were leaving on a 5 week trip to southeast Asia, I heard a call come into my home phone. It was a collect call. My heart froze; it was from my son, who was being held in county jail, no longer a juvenile but now an eighteen year old “adult.” I was frustrated and confused. I could barely find out what happened because the cops were so unhelpful and condescending in my attempt to check on his situation and well-being. I was told that after he tried to evade police, they “subdued” him. Subdued?! What the fuck does that mean? I asked if he is hurt in any way. The officer said, ‘I looked at his mug shot and his face seems fine. Just a bloody nose.’ I couldn’t even talk to my son about what happened because the phones were monitored.

Then there were the other questions: should we still go on our trip? should we change our plans? After much discussion, we departed leaving his mother and the rest of our community to handle the situation, which didn’t appear to be over any time soon.

We had been in Thailand for just a week. It was a few days after New Years. We were at the point of feeling a bit homesick, missing our homes in Berkeley and Oakland, when a person whom we met on the road said, wow, you people in Oakland are crazy.

Oscar Grant had been murdered by BART police, unarmed and face down on the ground. He was shot in the back. In the aftermath, the people in Oakland took to the streets. Not knowing anything abut the situation, we made our way to an internet café and watched the video of his murder and of the protests on the streets of our home. My kids and I were stunned. We looked at each other, angry, horrified. There was nothing to say really. Until Ella, my youngest asked, how old was he?

Twenty two, I said.

Why’d they shoot him?

I shook my head.

Why does this happen? she continued.

I didn’t know what to say. What answers should I give her?

I don’t know why this happens, I responded.

She looked straight at me and declared, that coulda been Dylan, that coulda been our brother.

I know, I said, I know.

Some facts from the Ella Baker Center:

Of the 1,950 youth in California Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) prisons as of July 2008, 87% are young people of color. And virtually all of the kids inside are from low-income backgrounds….On average, children of color in California grow up with fewer services, poorer schools, more toxicity, more street violence and, as they grow older, fewer job opportunities than their white counterparts. These disparities carry over into the criminal justice system. When suspected of the same infractions, youth of color are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, and jailed than white youth.

Since that day when my daughters and I discussed Oscar Grant, I have been haunted by my desire to answer Ella’s question with more than a head shake, a hug, and some lame phrase of disbelief.

I want to be able to look straight back at her with something to say.

I want to risk being honest with her.

Ella, this is why it happens.

We have failed you and other young people from the beginning. It is not about one cop killing one unarmed young man; it’s about the years of failure that many young people, like perhaps Oscar Grant, face in our society, from schools to jobs, from media representations to the courts.

This isn’t one isolated incident; this is a pattern.

And with pattern, there is usually design.

Ella, it happens because there is a war going on.

I know this sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. Despite the “hope” and “change” we’ve been told will come from the top down like some liberal version of Reaganomics, if we just wait, the reality is that right now, right here on the streets of our cities, it is dangerous to be young. To be a teenager and a person of color can simply be deadly.

With the amount of consumer advertising budgets aimed at them, the pressure of social and gender conformity, and the economic stress of capitalist created desires, growing up is a constant battle.

As a young person, there is no room to test boundaries and make mistakes and challenge things that are given you. It’s a set-up. Community centers and after school programs close, so there’s no place to gather safely and legally; it’s prohibited to congregate on street corners and in parks past dark. We had to actually fight to get the local school playground open during the summer so that kids could play there during the day without get the cops called on them. It seems the only place safe to hang out is some shopping center, but you gotta have money to go there so you better hope you have job. Almost everything connected to youth culture, from skateboarding to the music you play, is seen as suspect, something to distrust, an excuse for adults to call the cops. Basically, for many young folks, they are guilty before they step out their door. And especially if that door is in East Oakland or Richmond.

Ella, it happens because young people are expected to be perfect.

If you are a teenager and/or a person of color, whatever you do, don’t fuck up. Don’t make a mistake. And don’t get caught. People wonder why there’s a “don’t snitch policy” in many working class neighborhoods and communities of color. Because getting caught up in the legal system is a nightmare. People know this. We live in a society in which mistakes are costly and if you the wrong class or color, those mistakes aren’t things you can simply learn from, but shackles that are extremely difficult, time consuming, and expensive to free yourself from.

More Facts:

The end result is that, though African-Americans constitute an estimated six percent of California’s population, in 2008, a whopping 31 percent of the kids in DJJ were black. Latinos made up 36 percent of state residents but 55 percent of the DJJ population.

Here’s another story, an analogy.

I teach basic writing at the local community college. On the first day of classes, I sit for a minute in silence as they stare and wait for me to begin. But I wait. I wait for them to get uncomfortable, to shift in their chairs, to mumble something under their breaths about this crazy fool sitting in front of them. Then I say I’m just observing and thinking. I ask everyone to look around. What can we gather about our class? What do we see? After some playful remarks (usually about some cute girl across the room) someone will say, there ain’t that many white people in the class. Which is always the case.

And then I show them statistics from the school’s website.

For example: black students make up a quarter of the school population but more than half of the basic skills population. That success rates from basic skills instruction are dismally low. That the statistics of basic skills classes eerily mirror the statistics of the prison system.

That this the ghetto of the school.

This the reservation.

The interment camp.

How do they feel about this? Now, there is a different kinda silence in the classroom.

I try to be honest with my students. Because I believe with this knowledge comes the possibility of choice, comes determination, comes anger, perhaps action. It now is up to them individually and collectively to face these issues.

So I am trying to be honest with you, Ella.

Unfortunately, it is also your responsibility to face these issues. Someday soon it will be you out on the streets at night with your friends. It will be you riding public transportation home after some holiday celebration perhaps running a bit wild, perhaps getting into a little trouble. It will be you and your friends that will be seen only in relation to your age, your clothes and style, your color. It will be you or your friend’s facing the gun.

Ella, but it is also my responsibility to do something about it as well. To do my best to trust you. To be honest with you about the potential consequences you face. To love you unconditionally despite what the world around me says about teenagers and young people. To listen and believe and let go and support. To stand up for other young people who are dealing with these issues now. To not let things like Oscar Grant’s murder go unmourned. To remember the number of other people, both young and old, who might also raise their hands in response to Mr. President’s declaration. The doubters, the hell raisers, those trying to be honest in spite of the pressure to conform, to believe that everything for the most part is fine.

Ella, I wish I was there on that, albeit wonderful night, when President Barak Obama asked that question: Is there anyone out there who doubts…

And for you Ella, I hope I would have had the courage to raise my hand.

All statistics from The Ella Baker Center website http://www.ellabakercenter.org as well as the Berkeley City College http://vistawww.peralta.edu website. This article was also inspired by an article Cherrie Moraga wrote with the same quote.

Take the Daddy Shift quiz!

2009-06-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

Are stay-at-home dads all a bunch of slacker artistes living off of wives with MBAs? Do they spend all day surfing porn sites and having torrid affairs with dissatisfied neighborhood mommies? Are breadwinning moms dumping their stay-at-home husbands for high-powered lawyers? Who are these guys and gals, anyway? Stereotypes abound about reverse-traditional families, but if you want the facts, take this quiz.

1. During the past fifteen years, the number of stay-at-home dads has:

A. Stayed the same
B. Increased only slightly
C. Doubled
D. Tripled

2. During the same period, the number of working moms has:

A. Plunged dramatically as more and more mothers "opt out" of the workforce
B. Decreased slightly
C. Jumped up and down
D. Increased

3. The fraction of wives who make more than their husbands is:

A. One tenth
B. One quarter
C. One third
D. Three fourths

4. In 2009, what number of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

A. 13
B. 54
C. 98
D. 250

5. What percentage of American men have access to paid paternity leave?

A. 13%
B. 26%
C. 50%
D. 100%

6. Families with a stay-at-home dad:

A. Have lower than average incomes
B. Have higher incomes than families with a stay-at-home mom
C. Are overwhelmingly educated and affluent
D. Are predominantly European-American

7. Cross-national studies have found that widely available day care and early childhood education is correlated with:

A. Low father involvement
B. Emotionally disturbed children
C. High levels of sexual abuse
D. High father involvement

8. According to most studies, the attitudes of men and women towards work, family, and sex have:

A. Grown apart as people embrace more traditional gender roles
B. Grown together as more women go to work and more men spend time with families
C. Become more selfish and casual
D. Stayed the same

9. The "mommy wars" are:

A. Something that most moms have never heard of
B. A tool for undermining natural solidarity between parents
C. A fake conflict incited by newspaper and magazine headline writers
D. All of the above

10. Which ethnic group divides child care and housework most equitably when the dad lives with mom?

A. White
B. Latino
C. Black
D. Asian

11. When men become fathers, their testosterone:

A. Spikes
B. Decreases
C. Both
D. What testosterone?

12. Rebeldad is:

A. A bar in San Francisco's Noe Valley
B. An evangelical Christian men's magazine
C. The name of the next Ice Cube film
D. A blog for stay-at-home dads

ANSWERS:
1 - C, 2 - D, 3 - C, 4 - A, 5 - A, 6 - A, 7 - D, 8 - B, 9 - D, 10 - C, 11 - B, 12 - D

SCORE YOURSELF
12-9 = You're a reverse-traditional genius
8-4 = Not too bad
3-0 = You need to watch less TV

Want to know my sources? Consider buying my book, The Daddy Shift, on which this quiz is based.

[This gimmick was inspired by Deborah Siegel, author of the very fine book, Sisterhood, Interrupted, and the forthcoming Man Enough.]

Father's Day Acting Class

2009-06-18T12:39:00.001-07:00

And also, here's my annual list of children's books that actually depict fathers, up at Beacon Broadside.

Princess Parenting!

2009-06-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

My newest collaboration with DadLabs.com...

Are you a princess parent? Does your baby girl have more princess paraphernalia than you can fit in your mini van? As a parent, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the inevitable onslaught of princess culture. In this episode of The Lab, Daddy Brad and Daddy Clay compare who is the bigger princess parent by adding up their daughters’ princess gear. From Disney games and Disney princess toys to princess costumes and unicorn stuffed animals, the two Dads compare who is the bigger Cinderella father. Author Jeremy Adam Smith discusses the impact that princess mania is having and the steps to maintain a healthy father daughter relationship.

In preparation for this episode, I chatted with a number of psychologists. "Many preschool girls go through a kind of princess phase," said Stephen Hinshaw, chair of the UC Berkeley psychology department and author of the new book, The Triple Bind. "At the 'right' time, this is not deleterious or promoting of narcissism. But if it becomes a preoccupation [i.e., an obsession], and if the 'princess treatment' begins to extend to the girl herself, and if it lasts beyond the 'normative' time, could be problematic." For a solid and interestingly neurotic feminist take on princess mania, see Peggy Orenstein's 2006 piece in New York Times Magazine.

Incidentally, today's USA Today mentions me and DadLabs and an all-star line-up of fatherhood researchers in a piece entitled, "New daditude: Today's fathers are hands-on, pressure off." It's well worth a read.

Thanks to Axel Hausemann for his camera and sound work here at DadLabs West!

report back from the second annual celebrating parents reading

2009-06-16T14:37:00.001-07:00

The other night, we had another wonderful “celebrating parents” event at Pegasus bookstore in downtown Berkeley, California. It was the second such event and we hope to have a third. I am hoping we get some musical acts! It was wonderful to be in a space where kids and parents and the accompanying noise and chaos were all welcome.

One of the things I shared at the last event was a list of ways fathers (and others) can fight patriarchy.

And since I love lists here’s another. A list of things parent allies can do to support the parents in their communities. Feel free to add more things and I’ll include the entire list in the next issue of rad dad…Here it is:

Concrete things you can do to support parents/or childcare givers and children in your community.

Give children attention; talk to them, not about them, in a regular voice.
Don’t get upset if they don’t want to talk to you when you do.
Develop a consistent relationship with the children in your life. Set up a weekly or monthly date with a child.
Speak up for childcare issues in all areas of what you do. Don’t let it fall to the parent to have to ask about childcare, or if it is a child friendly event.
In general, feel free to ask a parent or childcare giver if you can help out when you see them “multi-tasking” (code word for overwhelmed, freaking out, having a melt down), and of course be gracious if they say no thank you.
Smile at parents.
Remember parenting doesn’t equal mothering; ask fathers how they are feeling as well.
If you are throwing a party, hosting a meeting, planning a running street protest, announce that it is or is not a child friendly event. And if for some reason the event is not, make sure you are prepared to help parents stay involved: child care, classes for older kids.
Create a space for children in your home: have some books to read and a toy or two to share when some little one (or not so little) comes over.
Look at the world from child’s height
Know how to change a diaper
If you’re dating a parent offer to chip in on childcare costs while on a date
Call your own parents regularly: remember you were a child
Take the initiative to invite parents to events or to just hang out, even if they decline…parents often feel isolated.
Remember parenting doesn’t end with infancy; parents of older children need allies too.
And of course buy yourself and parents alternative books and zines about parenting…yes shameless plug

Father's Day Link Round-Up, Part One

2009-06-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

"The subhead of 'Mr. Big Gets Downsized' reads: 'What happens when the breadwinner is toast? Chris Noth plays Mr. Mom, while Milla Jovovich leaves him with the crumbs.' And so begins a role-reversal-ish photo shoot, in which the man is left at home to watch the rugrats while the woman is all business. Just like in The Hangover, it's supposedly instant comedy to see a man with a baby, as though men never parent and are as comfortable with kids as they are with, say, fainting goats."

When Opting Out isn't an Option: "Examining the lives of privileged women and their work-life choices is certainly much sexier and more controversial than telling the stories of the majority of working women in this country. After all, most women must balance work with caregiving. They don't have the option of opting out. Where's the debate in that?"

Helping Breadwinners When It Can't Wait: "In a nation where the vast majority of families now have no one at home to provide care, workers need paid time off from work to care for one another. Our current system of family and medical leave is unpaid, and even that is not inclusive and leaves out many of the hard-working families who need these benefits the most... It is patently unfair for some mothers and fathers to have to take unpaid leave or fear for their jobs to care for a newborn or take care of seriously ill children or parents—or even worse be unable to take that leave because their bosses just say no."

Two Senators Try to Give Working Parents Relief on Child Care Costs: "Under current tax law, many parents can get a tax credit for a portion of their child care costs. The problem is the portion is capped at $3,000. As MomsRising points out today, who pays $3,000 a year for good child care?"

Paternity Leave: "I have to admit, I also felt a little bit insecure about the whole idea of paternity leave. I think there's a lot to the notion that, in our culture, men derive a great deal of psychological satisfaction from going to work every day. Being out and about, running errands, with or without my son, in the middle of day made me feel a little bit strange and somewhat marginal... I'm not particularly proud of that, but there it is."

The next four links are related to the release of my book The Daddy Shift:

The Daddy Identity Crisis: "I wish we as a culture were better at rituals; it would be good to have a ritual of some kind that would mark this passage, from reliance on mom’s body to ramping up dad’s care. As things are in most families, I think it really comes down to Mom, at a certain point, being able to give the baby to her partner and then just… walk away."

Hands On Dads Handle Stress Better: "Job loss is traumatic. So is financial anxiety. But hands-on fathers who can juggle bath-time, playground jaunts and laundry duty are better equipped to deal with those than earlier generations of men, says the author of a new book on fatherhood."

Of fathers, mothers and parenting, and why I choose not to be completely useless: "Fathers are changing the nature of families. I don’t give fathers any particular credit for this. I just maintain that it is true. Fathers are stepping up, and as they do their partners are stepping aside and letting them in. I have watched these changes in my own life and in my own evolution as a father, and in families around me. The change isn’t universal. It is a work in progress."

No Child Left Behind = All Boys Left Behind: "I have great faith that having more men at home can help bring that critical masculine energy back into the nucleus of the family- there may be more sword fighting, squirt guns, and more hours of farting than flash cards. If boys can be empowered by men at home, ideally their ability to perform in school will increase. If more men are paying attention to how their sons are being taught and the obvious deficits they are facing, motivation will occur to take action and address their specific needs."

Readings: David Eddie's "Housebroken"

2009-06-12T15:12:00.002-07:00

So I've been reading a lot of books by and about stay-at-home dads lately, including Jeremy's, which is of course required reading, but since he runs this blog you all know what his stuff is about and I don't need to go over that. I'm reading other stuff, mostly accounts by dads about what it was like to somehow or another wind up like me, a stay-at-home dad.

Some similarities, highly unscientific, are emerging from my equally unscientific literary survey sample. The guys who are writing books that manage to get onto my radar seem to be media types -- writers, aspiring writers, journalists, TV producers, etc. A number of them make a point of not ever having expected their lives to land them in stay-at-home-dadhood.

And, beginning with Neal Pollack's Alternadad, Philip Lerman's Dadditude, and David Eddie's Housebroken, they all present a narrative beginning in bachelorhood, or pre-pregnancy, that sets up the stark contrast between the upside-down world of reverse-traditional parenting with what came before (cad-ness, guy-ness, non-middle-class conformity-ness, overall bohemian-ness). Alternadad and Housebroken both portray classic male slobs going nowhere until they meet the woman of their dreams, the love of which brings out the inner father none of them thought they had.

Classic conversion stories. I once was lost, but now am found. Was riding a donkey on the road to Damascus a Jew, saw the light, fell off the donkey, and began writing epistles to the Christians of Asia Minor. For a marketable modern fatherhood memoir, you must begin with a fallen man, an incorrigible slob (Eddie), pothead (Pollack), or middle-aged hippie (Lerman), or a bumbling incompetent who finds his way (Michael Lewis' Home Game, though I've only heard the author on NPR). Only Lerman starts off fully embracing his new role and what comes with it.

And all of them, each and every one, according to the blurbs on the back covers, is "painfully funny," "leaves you chortling out loud," and is just "utterly hilarious" from start to finish. The stay-at-home dad book evidently comes with a laugh track.

I'm not sure what this means, whether it represents the conforming mold of publishing editors and marketing departments imposed from without, making fatherhood be as funny as possible, making caregiving dads into former cads, and adding the requisite dosage of guy-ness to every manuscript so as not to scare away the relatively small number of possible male readers.

After reading Philip Lerman's Dadditude, for example, and finding the author to be a pleasantly sincere, earnest, and reflective parent who willingly took on the role of stay-at-home father, I can't help but wonder who came up with the book's subtitle: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad. With a title like that, you'd think the book would describe the persistence of some elements of classical masculinity or machismo, or at least their transvaluation in the crucible of caregiving. Not so. It is a story of a middle-aged professional who quits a great job to spend time raising his son and writing about how much he loves him.

Which brings me back to David Eddie's Housebroken. It was published 10 years ago now, in that pre-Dot Bomb world that now seems as far away as Coleridge's Xanadu. In the style of most dad memoirs, it's unabashedly honest about gender expectations and stereotypes. "No man expects to end up a stay at home dad," Eddie claims early on, in a phrase that is reiterated on the book's back cover. He's ambitious. He works from home, he steals time away from the baby.

But he also really likes his job, and stands up for it. Towards the end of the book one finds a chapter titled "Towards a Possible Redefinition of Machismo," in which Eddie, already a non-conformist, takes a non-conformist and interesting approach to the masculinity of fatherhood:

[I]f any man reading this were to say, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into a nearby spittoon, "Househusband? Pushing a stroller, wearing an apron, collecting an allowance from his wife? What a wimp. What a wuss. Get a job. Be a man. You're embarrassing your entire gender," I would simply say, first of all, I've never been sexier or more attractive to women.

I wouldn't disagree. But that's the bone thrown to defensive guyish-ness, and it's comically effective. It's followed a few pages later by the following thoughtful paragraph:

We need to lose the old military models of masculinity, I think, in favor of a peacetime version which hearkens back to the old idea of a gentleman. Manhood should be about sincerity, passion, fidelity, and honor. A certain adherence to tradition, perhaps. One of the most manly men I know is probably my college roommate Charles. He's balding, heavy-set and prematurely gray, but he has one of the strongest, most masculine minds I know. A firm and fair-minded lawyer. I'm not sure I'd want him in my foxhole; but if I ran afoul of the law I'd want him to prepare my briefs.

Sincerity, passion, fidelity, and honor are all attractive qualities, but I'm not quite sure why they are exclusively masculine, or should be. And I'm not sure that these are "peacetime" as opposed to [Cold]wartime traits. They are, after all, the signal virtues of Knights Errant, chivalric figures of the Middle Ages who were occasional warriors for hire, when not romancing in the south of France.

What I take away from Housebroken is a fairly entertaining narrative of a reflective man who is utterly at peace with his situation. That's the significant thing here: Eddie isn't arguing about gender equality, equal pay for equal work, parental leave policies, government-sponsored day care, the evolution of capitalism, or other policies and abstractions. He is simply comfortable being a male primary caregiver and recounts his experiences. He himself is a sociological effect, an artifact of the complex changes Jeremy Adam Smith describes in The Daddy Shift. And he makes no apologies.

He hasn't jettisoned every trait that is typically masculine, but has preserved a mix of them and incorporated them into a new set of traits that is applied to a new set of tasks. Eddie has simply adapted, keeping his sense of vocational identity while committing to the role of full-time fatherhood.

The bottom line, probably, is that I derive most of whatever sense of machismo I have from my skills as a writer. I look at it like this: writers have always needed something to do in the afternoon to take their minds off writing. Hemingway had the bulls; Bukowski had the track; I change diapers and push a stroller around...

And some of us just blog.

David Eddie. "Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad". New York, Riverhead Books, 1999.

Practical Feminism 2: The Elastic Wasteband

2009-06-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

My mother has shared many words of wisdom over the years, and most of them deserve to be engraved in stone.

"Always buy a jacket with a hood," perhaps the most important advice ever shared between a Midwestern mother and child. "Don't lay out in the sun," was a needed corrective at a time of adolescent vanity. "Never get a credit card with an annual fee," became important as I entered the world of consumption, as did "You should help your wife as much as possible," as soon as I married a my breadwinning spouse.

But in addition to these bits of guidance from a successful and practical woman, there remains a residue of aphorisms that once made sense, but which now strike me as a collection of rules for travel a foreign country.

Why, for example, should I "look for pants with an elastic waste band," "never buy cotton shirts" or "go with carpeting" instead of wood floors? Why did I find myself asking salespeople, when looking over everything from a pair of socks to a Persian rug, "how hard is it to wash?"

In my early at 30s, at the age when men generally become adults, I realized what was going on. Sometime in my childhood my mother had passed a cultural event horizon, beyond which it was impossible to escape the gravity of convenience offered by a nebulae of polyester, drip-dry slacks, plastic slip covers for the furniture, a medium shag to the carpet to hold the dirt until it could be vacuumed every month or so (but no more than that), and certainly, under no circumstances, no cotton shirts, because those have to be ironed.

I had seen all the old film shorts and 50's infomercials praising the emancipation of the modern housewife from the drudgery of cooking and cleaning, thanks to modern science and consumer durables, leaving her free several hours each day to volunteer, spend time with the children, and relax in the tidy, paneled living room.

My mother had all the gadgets, and more, but I would not describe her emancipation as relaxing. She took the modernist promise of a liberation from labor and pursued it with a ruthless single-mindedness, in the context of a new set of synthetic fabrics, still more advanced electronics, and a full-time legal career. Mom did everything she could to eliminate the so-called Second Shift.

The result was a strange, bastard coupling of feminism with disposable consumer goods, the offspring of which came in a thousand shapes of plastic. Or paper: while everyone expects to eat off of paper plates at a Memorial Day or Fourth of July barbecue, our family used them nearly year-round -- and paper cups, too -- because it meant fewer dishes to clean. Fast food take-out, which we had at least once a week, was ideal because not only did someone else do the cooking, but it came in its own, disposable, packaging, meaning we didn't have to waste ours.

I could go on. When I began to wear cotton shirts in my 20s, my mother was horrified. Did I not know the labor that would be required to keep these clothes wearable? Was I really prepared to iron them? To this day she is baffled by my generation's rejection of the polyester revolution, embodied nowhere more fully than in the global domination of the GAP khaki aesthetic. A similar logic was applied to home repair, another enormous time-suck. When hundred-year old wainscoting began to fall from the front porch ceiling, it was replaced with plastic wainscoting -- "Just as good as the original!" -- on a house that was already completely sheathed in maintenance free, fiberglass siding.

Was this the "House of Tomorrow" trumpeted at the 1933 World's Fair, the Century of Progress? Had the time-saving devices and scientific wizardry behind them come to dictate the texture and look of the leisure time they allowed us? Did my mother's practical feminism require living in Plastic World?

The really ambitious, successful women I have known have all been ruthless with regards to one thing: their time. I can see why. For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in an old house with no washing machine. My mother packed the laundry into baskets and packed the baskets into the car every Saturday morning, and then drove a few miles to the nearest laundromat. I remember her returning hours later to carry the plastic baskets full of folded laundry -- my Evil Knievel shirts, my cowboy socks -- up the front steps from the driveway, then upstairs to my room.

So when the washer-dryer finally showed up, well into my mother's middle age, it was a belated redemption of the promise of those 50's infomercials. And much deserved.

But my mother is now so profoundly accustomed to cheating labor, to chipping and hacking away at the Second Shift with all the consumer aids at her disposal, that what began as her creative response to the burdens of a working mom in the 70s now persists as a set of habits and a settled outlook on life long after the nest has emptied.

So it is with the elastic waistband. The antithesis of the whale bone corset, it is the ultimate concession to feminine freedom, prêt à porter. It is one of the many creature comforts that Mom treats as the fruit of her labor. It will not be taken from her. And when I was at an age when the measure of my waistline rose and fell 3 inches with each meal, the elastic waste band was of some use to me, as well.

But now I prefer a belt.

Liko blows out a candle

2009-05-27T08:41:00.001-07:00

"Daddy, where does the fire go after you blow it out?"

"Where do you think it goes?"

"I think it goes to where they keep the fire. It's flying through the air right now into these pipes that go to a factory where they use the fire to make things like...[looks around the room]...furniture."

What? No Porn?

2009-05-23T11:27:00.001-07:00

The Daddy Shift

2009-05-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

My new (first!) book, The Daddy Shift, is now available for order everywhere books are sold, and its very first review appears in this month's issue of Mothering magazine:

In The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, Jeremy Adam Smith leaves no stone unturned in his adroit navigation of the slippery terrain of the changing role of "dad." Part lucidly written historical, social, and economic analyses of moneymaking and caregiving roles, and part eloquent portraits of stay-at-home dads of various cultural backgrounds (including gay couples), the book covers a lot of ground. But it never feels as if Smith is stretching to make his points. His investigations are very well researched, and he's pursued them with a rigorous intellectual integrity that makes his arguments engagingly persuasive. The result is an impressive book that even the childless should read, for at essence, The Daddy Shift is not just about stay-at-home dads, but about the changing roles of men and women in society.

Not a bad start. And my publisher, Beacon Press, even made this nice little promotional video. Embed it on your blog, forward it to friends! Here are some upcoming Bay Area events:

On May 30th at 2 pm, I will conduct a workshop for new and expectant parents on father involvement at Natural Resources in San Francisco. Come explore how new fathers and mothers can equally share in the joys and burdens of parenthood. Emphasis will be placed on successful co-parenting relationships and in understanding and overcoming obstacles to father involvement. To sign up, call 415 550-2611 or email info@naturalresources-sf.com. Co-sponsored by the Bay Area Homebirth Collective.

On Saturday, June 6, at 7 pm, Cover to Cover will host a release party for The Daddy Shift. Cover to Cover is located in San Francisco, 1307 Castro St (between 24th St & Jersey St). Come one, come all.

On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, Jeremy will read at an event for Rad Dad, which won the 2009 Independent Press Award for best 'zine. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

I want to thank all of Daddy Dialectic's readers and contributors, whose stories and comments through the years have helped shape my ideas about parenthood in America. I'm grateful. And I hope you'll consider purchasing a copy of The Daddy Shift--especially for friends and relatives (or even spouses...) who may be questioning why parents would want to share in caring for their children.

because you never know -- the intro to rad dad 13

2009-05-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

Just a note to say that a bunch of local radical parents (including your very own Jeremy Adam Smith) will have a reading at Pegasus Bookstore in downtown Berkeley on June 14th at 5 pm -- spread the word and come out and say hi -- it should be a lot of fun! Here's my introduction to the newest issue of Rad Dad, nominated this year for an Independent Press Award for best 'zine:

Trust me. I was planning on writing this kick ass introduction for the fourth year anniversary issue of Rad Dad. The debut issue premiered at the 2005 SF Anarchist Bookfair (I make it sound all glamorous but really, I didn’t even have a table then, but occupied the free space outside the building). A lot of stuff has happened since then. I have met some amazingly inspiring and radical parents; the bookfair itself had evolved to include a kids’ space; last year we even had an anarchist parents panel! And, yes, now I have a table in the building. So I was all ready to write this articulate, perceptive, engaging manifesto on anarchism and parenting called A Primer on Potties, Procreation, and Politics. Or something clever like that. Trust me, I was.

But instead I find myself focusing on the little things. The small moments of fathering that bring my head and heart back to what is right in front of me. And upon reflection, I realize that it is in fact those very moments that all the theory and planning is put in to practice. It is in those moments we learn and test and reevaluate our values and morals; we discover our politics; we reveal on our honesty, our vulnerability, our humanity. What can be more radical than that? There is nothing wrong with theory and philosophy; in fact, I still want to write that manifesto, (someone out there wanna collaborate with me???) but for this introduction to Rad Dad 13, drummmrolll please, the anti-authoritarian anarchist zine on parenting, I simply want to share with you a few stories that for me get to the heart of this amazing, challenging, never static position we parents find ourselves in:

That coulda been…

Just two days before my daughters and I are leaving on a 5 week trip to southeast Asia, I hear a call come into my home phone. It’s a collect call. My heart freezes; it’s from my son, who is being held in county jail, no longer a juvenile but now an eighteen year old “adult.” I’m frustrated and confused. I can barely find out what happened because the cops are arrogant and condescending in my attempt to check on his situation and well-being. No help, no sympathy. I am told that after he tried to evade police, they “subdued” him. Subdued?! What the fuck does that mean? I ask if he is hurt in any way. The officer says, ‘I looked at his mug shot and his face seems fine. Just a bloody nose.’ I can’t even talk to my son about what happened because the phones are monitored.

Then there are the other questions: should we still go? should we change our plans? After much discussion, we depart leaving his mother and the rest of our community to handle the situation, which doesn’t appear to be over any time soon.

We had been in Thailand for just a week. It was a few days after New Years. We were at the point of feeling a bit homesick, missing our home in Berkeley and Oakland, when a person whom we met on the road says, damn you folks in Oakland are crazy.

Oscar Grant had been murdered, and in the aftermath, the people in Oakland took to the streets. Not knowing anything abut the situation, we make our way to an internet café and watch the video of his murder and of the protests on the streets of our home. My kids and I are stunned. We look at each other; we are all angry and horrified. There is nothing to say really. Until Ella, my youngest asks, how old was he?

Twenty two, I say.

Why’d they shoot him?

I shake my head.

Why does this happen? she asks.

At this point in her life, she knows me and knows my by now predictable stance on police brutality, on the need to rethink our criminal justice system and its affects on young people and people of color.

But what can I say now?

I don’t know why this happens, I respond.

She says that coulda been Dylan, that coulda been our brother.

I know, I say.

I know.

Kow Jai

After a few weeks of traveling, my daughters and I had the chance to meet up with Julia, a woman we meet earlier in our trip through a friend and who helped us out while we were in Bangkok. When we first met, I had been feeling a bit overwhelmed, and she was a blessing, showing us around the city for a couple days, making us feel at home. Her generosity really helped calm and relax me, something I needed after dealing with the stress of my son in jail and the reality of jet lag and the 15 hour time difference that hit me like a punch in the face (though my kids seemed amazingly unaffected!)

So we’re all there joking and feeling good; but it’s her laugh that is so amazing. It’s the best laugh: loud, guff, like a punchline. When she laughs, all three of us look at each and laugh even harder. To make matters worse, she speaks exactly like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin; I can’t listen to her without smiling. The shitty thing I realize is that she’s the exact kinda person -- white, from the Midwest, dreads, yes dreads, hippie girl -- I would probably roll my eyes at, make some hasty generalization about with in earshot of my kids.

And my kids would hear and listen.

Yet when I, a complete stranger, needed some help, she was there, genuinely, asking no favor, nor thanks.

We we’re sitting around, telling stories over iced coffee - yes my daughters convinced me that they should be able to drink iced coffee while in Thailand -- don’t ask me how – discussing the differences we noticed between Thais and people in California. It just so happens, she’s is also tutoring this 13 yr old Thai girl who had asked the same exact question that morning. Julia says she’s not sure what the difference is and perhaps there really is no difference between us all. (I said she’s a hippy right)...

And then Ella shares with us all the Thai phrases she’s taught herself from her little Thai phrase book. After a few, she shares this one: ‘I don’t understand’ in Thai is ‘mai kow jai.’

Julia asks, so you wanna know what that literally means. It means ‘it has not entered my heart.’ Jai means heart and Kow means to enter or come into.

She smiles and I turn to her and ask, so when you wanna say ‘I understand’ you are saying: ‘it has entered my heart’?

That’s so amazing.

Oh yeaaah, she says, Thaïs always talk about their heart.

I say, that’s so opposite of us; we always talk about the mind. When do we ever talk about heart?

We both smile and she takes out her journal and writes a note about this to share with her student.

I look at my kids sipping their coffee and say: Ella and Zora kow jai. Kow jai.

Jai. Heart.

Why we do what we do

Here’s my favorite story from our travels. We were on a boat traveling between islands in the southwest of Thailand. The night before we had been struggling over the reality that my children were assigned homework to do while they were traveling. And not just some – shit loads. The school district doesn’t seem to think that they will learn anything outside of a classroom, regardless of the fact that the kids learned more about life in those five weeks than what could possibly be covered by the California state grade standards.

For example: the exchange rate for the Cambodian Riel is 4,226.87 for 1 dollar. Try figuring out how much a meal is when the bill’s 47,500 Riels? They learned phrases of Thai and Cambodian. They witnessed the social realties of global poverty. And talk about gender. Try explaining why we kept seeing signs about the dangers of “sex tourism” as well as the preponderance of so many older white men with super young Thai women.

Kids see a lot.

So as we were on the boat, we saw these fish jumping out of the water and flapping their little fishy wings like they were flying. We were amazed at them, whole schools jumping out and flying. I asked my youngest daughter why she thought that they evolved that way? What makes them do it? She shook her head and guessed that maybe they were escaping predators. I said, or perhaps it’s to see other fishies they wanna eat. Or maybe to breathe, she guessed.

Feeling like a good teacher helping my children rationally examine the world through the good ol’ scientific method, I turned to my middle child happily sitting there, head in a book, and I asked her why she thought they did that.

She looked at me and then looked out over the water and then without the slightest bit of hesitation said simply: because it’s fun. She returned to her reading.

I smiled. Yes. Because it’s fun.

It’s true: sometimes we do things because it’s fun.

Because it feels right.

Sometimes, there is no better reason.

So one of these next issues, I will address the historical implications of anarchist tendencies in regards to the notion of discipline. Or, How to Say ‘No’ the Anarchist Way. But for now, I am doing this because it feels right.

Because it’s fun.

Because it has entered my heart.

Practical Feminism, Part 1: A Belated Mother's Day Tribute

2009-05-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

I fell out of love with my mother at the age of 26.

Of course, what I fell out of love with wasn’t really my mother; it was a certain relationship with my mother, which was the model until then for how I attempted to love all women. It didn’t work. It couldn’t, for me or for the women I attempted to love.

Within 6 years of that momentous event, and after a good number of romantic misfires, I married a woman who happened to share many of my mother’s best characteristics, both physical and spiritual: her rich black hair, her modesty, her elegant, practical intelligence, and her drive for personal independence won through a professional career.

My wife’s ambitions are self-conscious and grounded in an engagement with feminism. There is a tall bookshelf in our living room devoted exclusively to women’s studies, to the history, sociology, psychology, and economics of women, gender, sexuality and feminism. When I first met her, her two degrees were hung prominently on the wall, and she had developed elaborate strategies for deflecting her parent’s nagging: When was she going to get married? Did she want to have children? Why was she still single?

My mother’s feminism, on the other hand, was entirely untheoretical. She was part of no movement. She did not steep herself in (then non-existent) undergraduate women’s studies, nor in 60’s campus counterculture, nor in women’s issues generally. She didn’t come from a family with pronounced ideological commitments to social causes. Her father was an Ivy-educated, domineering, and quick-witted accountant from Philadelphia whose wife, my grandmother, dropped out of college after only one year to marry him.

After my mother was born, and my grandfather returned from the war in Europe, my grandmother became his secretary, working in an office on the ground floor directly across the hall from his. They were clearly -- even to me as a little boy -- a couple in love. They gardened together behind the grand old house they had acquired from one of Cincinnati’s minor industrial barons; they both loved the drawings of M.C. Escher and the humor of James Thurber, they both enjoyed bird watching, the Muppet Show, the same sweet dessert liquors, and the music of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

But it was always clear that a Patriarch towered at the apex of my mother’s family. And I am convinced that my grandmother’s lifelong subscription to National Geographic and her devotion to PBS programming were attempts to make up for, through self-directed enrichment, the college degree she gave up in order to be the Patriarch’s wife.

Social change often works in microscopic, capillary ways. From this decidedly conventional family background, my mother went to college and graduated, all with the support of grandfather the Patriarch. She then continued on to law school, among the first generation of women to do so in any significant numbers, and earned a Juris Doctorate. My grandfather didn’t understand why she wanted this, but again he supported her. Along the way, my mother met a man who later became a college professor -- my father -- who would never make as much money as she did.

Within one generation, my mother had outstripped my grandmother’s educational achievements, and by the beginning of her professional career, she had completely overturned the household role models she had grown up with, effectuating a family revolution of practical feminism. My father followed my mother in the early years, and tailored his career moves to suit hers. For a few years in my toddlerhood, he was a stay-at-home-dad. Yet no one complained, and my mother now sees herself as just another working professional. Maybe if my grandmother had finished college, she might have found a job and a route to independence back in the 1940’s. But it’s not clear that she really wanted to; and even if she had, it’s not clear how far she could have gone. My mother did want to, and it just so happened that circumstances had evolved in her favor. Now she has helped to change those same circumstances even further.

My mother saw her chance, and she took it. As a consequence, perhaps in unconscious imitation, I am now following in my father’s footsteps, raising a child with a woman who will probably always make more money than I ever could, and doing my stint at an at-home-dad. It feels very familiar, very matter-of-fact, and although I know in my head that there are more and more families in which the woman makes as much as, if not more than, the man, I am always privately surprised that it is not still more common.

Small actions can have large ramifications over the course of a few generations. En masse, they can amount to broad social changes in attitudes, opportunities, and behaviors. My grandfather saw no need to encourage the education of his wife and embodied many of the prejudices of his generation, but he provided his daughter with all possible resources to fuel her ambitions. He was in many ways a difficult man, but his loving open-mindedness allowed my mother to flourish. That, in turn, made for a loving mother who allowed her son to flourish, and left the son, now an adult, to wonder “Where will I be able to find anything comparable to this?”

Fortunately, after many years of looking, I have.

[This post also appears on Dad's Book of Days]

What happens when compassion hurts?

2009-05-08T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is the edited transcript of a May 7 talk I gave to the nurses of UC Berkeley Health Services on surviving compassion fatigue. It occurs to me that it applies just as much to parents. Originally posted to the Greater Good blog.

I’m going to warn you: This is a somewhat difficult talk, full of paradoxes. I’m going to talk about the best in human nature and behavior, and also the worst. I’m going to talk about how human beings seem designed to care for each other, but also how the grind of daily care can be soul-destroying. And in the end, I hope to share my thoughts on how we can work with other people to bring out the good in each of us.

I’m an early riser, and I do most of my writing in the early morning. A month ago, I was walking to a coffee shop at 6:30 am, and I was doing what I often do during my early morning walks, which is to look around at the Victorians and hills and mist of the place where I live and think about how beautiful all of it is.

Without warning, I felt a blow on the back of my head, and someone ran past me holding a tire iron. I sank to my knees and put my hand to the back of head, and it felt very warm and wet. There were footsteps, and I looked up: there was another young man walking towards me holding a gun. I remember that his face seemed very young, and that his voice quavered as he asked me for my wallet and backpack; I can say with confidence that he seemed more frightened than me by what was happening.

I stood there for a long minute, not feeling anything. Then I heard a pitter patter like raindrops; I was bleeding onto the sidewalk. My attackers were gone, though I hadn't noticed them leave, and so I stood and started to stagger home. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t make it.

I want to pause here to describe what went through my mind, because I think it’s interesting: I was reluctant to ring my neighbor’s doorbell. I didn’t want to bother him, an older man I had seen on the sidewalk many times but whom I had never bothered to meet. Think about that: Here I am with an injury that would later turn out to be serious, and something inside of me, some lifelong American conditioning, still resists reaching out for help. I’m my own man, dammit! I don’t need anything! This? This is just a flesh wound!

But at that point I had two options: I could lie down on the pavement and wait for someone to come along, or I could ring the doorbell. I rang the doorbell.

“Who is it?” said the neighbor, sounding ready to tell me to go away.

I apologized for bothering him and explained the situation through the closed door. He opened it immediately, brought me a towel to put at the back of my head, and called 911. Paramedics and police soon arrived. At the ER, a doctor and a nurse glued my head shut. After the police caught the boys who attacked me, I spent the rest of the day at a police station; at one point I went into the squad room to make a phone call and found three cops sitting around watching CSI on TV. I asked them if it was a training film, and one of them just laughed.

OK, so, let’s break this down. Three people—the boy with the tire iron, the boy with the gun, and the boy who drove the car—hurt me that morning. That’s terrible. But how many people helped me? Let’s count them.

The neighbor who opened his door. He was the first.

Two paramedics. One doctor and a nurse.

Numerous police officers, especially officer Ed Robles and his partner, who pretty much spent the day chauffeuring me and my family around the city. These officers put themselves in danger when they captured my armed attackers.

Our friends jumped in, too. They babysat my son on a moment’s notice and helped us to run errands.

And later, after I came home, three people called because they found my stuff in three different locations around the city. Those people didn’t have to do that; they just did it.

And what about the invisible people? The 911 dispatcher? The administrators who run the hospital and police departments? The people who pay the taxes that fund police and rescue work? The countless people in history who worked to set up police departments and hospitals and ambulance services and the countless medical discoveries that made my injury a survivable one?

It boggles the mind, to think about the number of people who contributed to my care. A cynic might focus obsessively on the split second of violence and claim that one act reveals the true face of humanity. A cynic might also claim that the neighbor who opened his door really had no choice; I guilt-tripped him into doing it. The police, the cynic might say, are just grunts doing their jobs and that doctors and nurses are just in it for the paycheck.

But that’s precisely what’s interesting about this incident and incidents like it. When I was in trouble, I could feel a social net tighten around me, to catch me as I fell. The tightening seemed habitual, reflexive, commonplace, ubiquitous—and the guilt of not-helping, I’d argue, is important, because that’s evidence of how important helping is to us. Far from guilty, the help was compassionate. I experienced the compassion as an individual thing, but also institutional.

What is compassion? That’s the topic of an absurd amount of debate among scientists. Dacher Keltner, the psychologist who leads the Greater Good Science Center, where I work, defines compassion as “concern to enhance the welfare of another who suffers or is in need.” This is different from empathy, which is the “mirroring or understanding of another's emotion.” So empathy is feeling; compassion is action.

And by that definition, I experienced a great deal of compassion that day, from the neighbor to police to nurses to our friends—many kinds of compassion. The compassion of our friends was shot through with empathy; the compassion of the doctor and nurses was executed, I’d say, without much empathy. They weren’t mirroring my emotions—in fact, the female doctor seemed to hold those emotions at arm’s length—and yet they did the most to, quote, “enhance the welfare of another who suffers”—namely me, in this case.

Why is compassion so universal, not just in individuals but through social networks and institutions? It was thought for a long time that compassion was the exception, selfishness the rule. After Charles Darwin made his case for evolution, many Europeans interpreted the survival of the fittest to mean that only the fittest should survive. Europeans even invented an ideology called Social Darwinism, the belief that alleged intellectual and behavioral differences between people with different skin pigmentations were rooted in biology, making some races fit to rule and some fit to serve.

But that was all wrong right from the start, because Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested that the good in human beings was just as adaptive as the bad. In other words, we have compassion because compassion helps our species to survive. Compassionate acts, Darwin wrote in Descent of Man, “appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social and maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time; though, if prevented by any cause, distress or even misery might be felt.”

In other words, our evolved instinct to help other people is a reflex, like smiling back at someone who smiles at us or flinching at the sound of a gunshot. When we are prevented from acting on the compassionate instinct, it hurts; we feel miserable. The effect can be deadening.

Time and science have both been kind to Darwin, for many of his speculations about emotion and human nature have been confirmed by decades of research. Nonhuman primates, with whom we share about 99 percent of our genes, exhibit compassion all the time, including providing special care to blind, deaf, crippled, or wounded comrades, not to mention caring for infants and engaging in what is called affiliative grooming, which sometimes entails eating bugs off of each other. Talk about compassionate action!

Now, it should be emphasized that nonhuman primates also kill and mutilate each other all the time. They vie for dominance, they rape, they murder infants, they even eat each other—just like humans do. But nonhuman primates have been observed reconciling after conflict; even intransigently violent species like baboons have revealed a capacity to culturally evolve in more peaceful directions. With all primates, including humans, compassion flourishes in some environments and it withers in other environments—a crucial point.

So compassion has deep evolutionary roots, but how does it express itself in human beings? Over the course of recent decades, scientists have discovered many of the biological building blocks of compassion and empathy. Infants as young as 42 minutes have been observed copying their mothers’ facial expressions, an empathic behavior. Neuroscientists have located sociable and shiny happy emotions in action all over the brain--finding compassion, for example, in the amygdale and prefrontal cortex. Mirror neurons fire when we sense another's emotional state. A hormone called oxytocin is released during moments of trust and social bonding. We’ve even identified genes whose presence seems to predict generosity and altruism. Not surprisingly, kindness, gratitude, and compassionate action have been discovered to provide real health benefits, physical and mental.

So we are literally wired for compassion; we experience compassion in both our minds and our bodies, and the experience makes minds and bodies healthier. This explains why the absence of compassion is so painful. Let’s go back to the attack I experienced. What if it had happened in another place, one without a reliable police and medical system, or the rule of law, and I had been left to fend for myself? What if my skin had been of the wrong color in the wrong time period or the wrong place, and everybody had turned their back on me just because of that? What if I had been a woman, and I had been raped, and a male police officer told me that it was my fault because of what I was wearing?

Then how would I feel?

I’d feel rage. That’s what happens when compassion is denied. I think about the boys who attacked me. I don’t believe that they were devoid of compassion in their lives. At the least, I hope, their mothers loved them. And I suspect that they at least loved their mothers right back. But I also suspect, without knowing them, that as children they were the targets of violence from people they trusted, and that there were few adults in their lives who gave them the care they needed. I think it’s very likely that they’ve been made to feel like outsiders in America because of the color of their skin—they were dark-skinned Latinos.

I’m not letting these boys off the hook. To inflict violence on another human being is to deny the connections between us, and the denial of empathy and humanity seems to me to be the best definition we have of evil. I’m not saying these boys were evil, but I’m a husband and a father, and my family counts on me to come home, and when someone threatens to take me away from my family, that’s an act of evil.

But I believe that when we’re confronted with evil, we cannot respond in kind. I don’t believe in fighting fire with fire. Instead, I’d argue, we must aim to reestablish the connection between us as human beings; this is the definition of goodness. In the face of cruelty and stupidity, we have to respond with empathy and imagination. We have to leave the confines of our own minds, and travel that biological and social bridge of emotion, and try to help those who have hurt us, and try to imagine what drove them to hurt us. We must make their pains our own. Not for their benefit, but for the sake of our own potential. The boys who attacked me are suffering in some sense; they deserve compassion, which, unfortunately, they probably won’t find in jail.

And what about me? Remember that moment I described, when I looked into the face of the boy who held the gun on me, and I saw that he was nervous and afraid? Despite the danger of the momen — despite the fact that I was stunned and he saw me as a target instead of a fellow-being — my empathic equipment still fired and I felt that spark of connection, reflexively sensing his emotion. To deny that experience would be my loss.

And that experience was in no way extraordinary. If we are normal and healthy, it’s very hard to turn off the empathy. The emotions of other people sweep us up and carry us along and we are changed in the journey. Most of the time, that’s great; that’s why good times and friends and family are so important to us, and every kindness we perform makes other people more likely to be kind themselves. And most people are very well equipped to handle the fleeting distress or pain of friends, and to provide compassionate help. That’s just what our friends provided to my family, on the day I was mugged.

But what happens when you must confront pain and distress every single working day? What happens when you are a doctor or nurse or social worker or paramedic, and compassionate action is part of your job description? Health care and social workers are trained to manage empathy and maintain some professional distance. I asked a nurse-friend this morning how she staves off the onset of compassion fatigue, and she replied, “Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries!” These boundaries are what allowed the doctor and nurses at Kaiser to provide compassionate help to me without superfluous empathy. Good for them.

But human beings are not, as we know, robots, and there is a great deal of research suggesting that somatic empathy — that is, the involuntary, unconscious empathy we feel in our guts—is a major factor driving compassion fatigue, a state of mind in which we become less and less able to help others, for fear of being hurt ourselves. We’re talking about natural processes—namely, compassion and empathy —being put to use over and over again in highly repetitive, artificial situations.

That kind of work will wear down even the strongest person, especially during times like these, when budgets are being cut and resources, including human resources, are being stretched to the limit, and distressed people are counting more than ever on infrastructures of care like University Health Services. It’s in historical moments like this one that compassion fatigue becomes a real threat, not just to professions like nursing but to our entire society.

Charles Garfield is an advisor to Greater Good magazine, clinical professor of psychology at the UC School of Medicine, founder of the Shanti Project, one of the first HIV/AIDS community organizations in the world, and an expert on compassion and compassion fatigue. In his book Sometimes My Heart Goes Numb, Charlie describes the symptoms and consequences of compassion fatigue: depression, anxiety, hypochondria, combativeness, the sensation of being on fast-forward, an inability to concentrate.

Caregivers, he writes, "describe greater and greater difficulty in processing their emotions. They are anxiety-ridden or distressed. Fellini-esque images intrude on their days and nights, painful memories flood their world outside the caregiving arena."

If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, Charlie recommends seeking professional help and withdrawing from the caregiving arena entirely. For those caregivers who don’t feel they can, usually because it's their livelihood or they there is no one else to provide the care, Charlie reminds the reader that “dysfunctional caregivers can severely jeopardize their clients’ or loved one’s care.”

But what about those who are not at extremes of depletion, but who feel the onset of psychic numbing or see evidence, in yourself or others, of compassion fatigue?

Compassion fatigue has only recently been recognized—C.R. Figley coined the term in 1995—and the research and theorizing has only just started. In last month's Journal of Health Psychology, a team of researchers surveyed 57 different studies of compassion fatigue among cancer-care providers, and concluded that right now, we know almost nothing about it. “These findings highlight the need to understand more clearly the link between the empathic sensitivity of healthcare professionals and their vulnerability to compassion fatigue,” conclude the authors.

And yet I’ve been struck, in reviewing the literature, how much of the process of managing compassion fatigue is really just a matter of common sense and healthy choices. The really hard question is why we so often do not choose to make these healthy choices.

So what we can you do? First of all, take care of yourself. Use your weekends and your time off to do things you enjoy, eat healthy foods, read novels, go for long walks. If you’re struggling with darkness, look for light wherever you can find it. Show compassion for yourself—recognize suffering in yourself and act to alleviate the suffering. That's different from self-pity, when we see suffering in ourselves and we don’t do anything about it. We just feel sorry for ourselves. With self-compassion, we don’t allow the suffering to define us. Instead, we are defined by our resistance to suffering.

Next, there’s simple awareness. Simply being aware that there is such a thing as compassion fatigue helps us to prevent it and address it when it happens. We can remind each other and ourselves to maintain some distance from patients and clients, to remember that their distress is not our distress, that we didn’t cause it, and that we can help them best by not participating in their distress. However bad a situation is, we can always do something to make it better, even if that means helping someone to accept the inevitable.

The psychotherapist Babette Rothschild, in her excellent book Help for the Helper, recommends mindfulness practice for caregivers. Now, you should know that I was born and raised in the Midwest and the East Coast, and I am a longtime skeptic when it comes to practices like mindfulness. But through my work at the Greater Good Science Center, I’ve seen study after empirical study showing that it works in controlling stress, fear, and fatigue. In different forms, you even see practices that sound an awful lot like mindfulness pop up in police and military training, where body awareness is used to control fear under fire.

This isn’t a mindfulness training and I won’t go here into any depth, but the basic idea behind mindfulness is that you are constantly focusing on the present moment and monitoring what’s happening in your body. This is obviously a great way of controlling the kind of automatic, somatic empathy that contributes to compassion fatigue. If mindfulness is a new concept to you, I recommend that you attend the seminar with Dacher Keltner and Jon Kabat-Zinn that Greater Good is hosting on May 15 or read Babette Rothschild’s book.

There’s one last step I’d like to highlight, the most important one, and that is talking to other people and forging a community of compassion around you. That’s not something we’re good at, us Americans. Do you remember how I didn’t want to ring my neighbor’s doorbell? Isn’t that a strange? Here I am, bleeding, injured, and I don’t want to bother someone for help. Doesn’t that sound crazy? It was crazy.

And yet it happens every day. We live in a very individualistic culture—we’re bombarded by cultural messages that say it’s wrong to want help and that compassion is for suckers—and that makes it hard to ask for help when we need it. We’re afraid of our own vulnerability. This goes for me, and it goes for people in the helping and healing professions. Most hurts aren’t external, they’re internal and invisible, and those we suffer in silence. But we don’t have to. Sometimes you just have to reach up and ring the doorbell, and you might discover more compassion than you expected.

Jeremy Adam Smith is senior editor of Greater Good, author of The Daddy Shift (Beacon Press, 2009), and co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct (WW Norton, January 2010), an anthology of essays on the scientific roots of human goodness.

It's Funny! Because it's TRUE! Argh!

2009-05-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Autoworkers Compete to Keep Jobs, Livelihoods on New Reality Show

Are Men in Crisis?

2009-04-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the annual Chicago conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, which consisted of a series of briefings and discussions about cutting-edge research into the family. Highlights:

• Clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft started off talking about her work with “gender variant children”—boys and girls who, from a very early age, decide to embrace identities as the opposite gender—and their families. Many parents, Ehrensaft said, struggle to get their boys to be boys and girls to be girls, with especially intense pressure on boys. The problem, she argued, is that there is a clear link between the mental health of the child and support of parents for the identity the child embraces. Ehrensaft tries to help parents form what she calls a "transcendent" family, which doesn't attempt to impose rigid gender roles.

• Sociologist Barbara Risman and colleagues spent a year studying gender identity in a racially diverse Chicago middle school. Findings: Girls felt really free to play sports and didn't feel they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. This is a big change from the past. However, they focused obsessively on the body—painting nails, dieting, etc.—and were often hyper-sexualized.

• Risman's findings about boys: Boys police each other's masculinity and sexuality ferociously. Part of this involved objectifying girls' bodies, even though they were not interested in actual sex (i.e., these boys were still very much children)—this is a form of play, albeit of a negative kind. So girls could do boy things, but boys couldn't do girl things, according to Risman's study. She used the example of a boy in the school named Marcus, who was not gender variant but was good at gymnastics and decided to be a cheerleader. As a result, he was teased, bullied, and so forth. The middle schoolers, both girls and boys, generally sanctioned the bullying. (Note that Risman’s conclusions echo those of another study run by University of Puget Sound sociologist C.J. Pascoe, reported in her 2007 book, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.)

• On the other hand, psychologist Braden Berkey reported that he's seeing vastly more confident and mentally healthy lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth. So what, the audience asked, is going on with middle school boys? Ehrensaft proposed a partial answer: Middle school is a very particular developmental stage characterized by extreme rigidity. Gender nonconformity in girls has accrued a fair amount of cultural support, she suggested, thanks in large part to the feminist movement; boys, it seems, are still on their own and are reacting to ambiguity with inflexibility. Of course, the boys (and girls) are not reacting this way on their own; they reflect the responses of parents, teachers, and the culture at large.

• According to a new study by economist Bob Drago, coupled mothers still do twice as much childcare and are half as likely to work; at the same time, coupled mothers make almost three times more money than single moms. White women are twice as likely to have access to paid maternity leave than black and Latina women; meanwhile, only one in ten American fathers has access to any paternity leave, paid or unpaid. Drago tried to figure out what would happen if paid paternity leave were offered to men in traditional families, based on survey responses and analysis. Answer: It would make a dramatic difference for moms in terms of work and care balance.

• Black marriages, reported University of Kansas sociologist Shirley Hill, tend to be more stressful and more likely to result in divorce; black couples are also least likely to embrace traditional gender roles. At the same time, however, African Americans are more likely than other groups to say they favor marriage and traditional gender roles. The answer to this paradox, according to Hill, is that black women have had more economic resources than black men (which is not the case in other American families) and are picky and hardheaded about whom they marry—often looking for men who can be providers, when only a minority have historically been able to perform that role. Thus the black historical experience is at odds with black-community ideology, according to Hill; this can contribute to stress, which in turns hurts marriages.

• I ran a panel on “gender convergence”—that is, the phenomenon of men and women growing increasingly similar in terms of how they behave and what they want out of life. The discussion turned controversial when the first panelist, sociologist Reeve Vanneman, suggested that the forty-year trend of gender convergence is now over. He noted a substantial decline in media coverage of feminist activism; a spike in men’s earnings relative to women; a slight decline in mothers’ labor-force participation; and increasingly conservative cultural shifts, as documented by surveys. Most of the other panelists, and many audience members, disputed Vanneman’s interpretation of the numbers: For decades, the pace of change was staggeringly fast, with more and more women going to work; while it has leveled off during the past ten to fifteen years, the evidence shows that the behavior of men and women continues to converge. Vanneman saw the leveling off as a cessation; most researchers at the conference saw it as a slowing down, and in some areas of male behavior, the pace has actually picked up. University of Oxford researcher Oriel Sullivan, for example, noted increasingly high levels of male caregiving and housecleaning in the U.K. and the U.S.

After the gender convergence panel, University of California, Berkeley psychologist Philip Cowan told me that “everything everybody on the panel said was true.” It seems we live in a time when many things are happening simultaneously and many of the trends seem to contradict each other.

Later, psychologist Joshua Coleman suggested that the baton of the gender revolution, carried by women for so many decades, is now passing to men—in other words, men will be changing more rapidly than women. (This is actually one of the arguments of my book The Daddy Shift, though I don’t put it in those terms.)

That change is complicated. At the close of the conference, I chatted with Chicago Pop (who blogs here at Daddy Dialectic), Marc Vachon of Equally Shared Parenting, and a former stay-at-home dad turned grad student. Our talk gradually turned toward our children, how much happiness they gave us, and what challenges we faced as fathers.

Sounds dull and perhaps a bit trite, doesn’t it? But the conversation gave me pleasure, and I still recall it with a small warm feeling. I don’t believe we are unusual; I think plenty of other guys quietly prize time with children and see their wives as true partners, even if they are not the types to make pretty speeches about it all.

The next morning I was in a café at the Chicago airport. A group of homeland security officers sat at the table next to me, and I was struck by the homophobic, misogynist tenor of their conversation--disliked male co-workers were “fags”; females were “bitches.” These are the men who are supposed to be keeping us safe, but their emotional maturity matched the level of the middle-school boys Barbara Risman interviewed. Most of them, I’m sure, were fathers, but there was no place at that table for a language of care. Of course, each of those men has a life away from that table. There is more to each of these individuals than what I saw.

And indeed, my contrast might strike you as smug—a more educated guy looking down on a group of working-class guys—but that gulf is precisely what I want to highlight: To an unprecedented degree, today the ice sheet of “masculinity” is breaking up and the pieces are drifting further and further apart. While I present those two conversations in Chicago as binary poles, most men live somewhere along the spectrum. Most men, I believe, would not want to join either conversation: They would simultaneously sneer at the one group of “sensitive” dads and at the other group of homophobic misogynists. And, interestingly, today those men don’t have to join one or the other: They can sit down at their own table and they will find companions.

I reckon that will be the condition of men for quite a long time--that is, a state of fragmentation, contradiction, alienation, and confusion. The apparent consensus by the end of the CCF conference was that masculinity is in what one speaker called an “invisible crisis,” in which men are confused about where to draw the lines of intimacy and respect, as well as of violence. This invisible crisis will likely be the topic of next year’s Council on Contemporary Families conference.

For a summary of new and surprising findings that came out of this year's conference, see CCF’s new report, "Unconventional Wisdom."

Moon Up There

2009-04-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

One January morning, in temperatures that now seem as unbelievable, ridiculous, and as distant in time as the reign of the dinosaurs or the divine right of kings, I took the dogs for their first walk of the day. Wearing gear designed for polar exploration, I was comfortable enough to enjoy the modest consolations of winter mornings: the peculiar sound of very cold snow compacting under my feet, like the crushing of Styrofoam; steam rising from the storm drains; the silence of cities at dawn.

But these are all adult flavors of experience, and I wouldn't rush home to tell my son about them. When I saw the moon on the western horizon, however, this had to be communicated. In fact, if I managed to get the sled team inside before the earth advanced a few more degrees in its rotation, I might even be able to show him. Right at the breakfast table, out the kitchen window, like an extra page that had been magically inserted at very end of Goodnight Moon.

While we were faster than the earth's rotation, we weren't as fast as the clouds that quickly descended from the north. By the time Spot and I were seated and looking out the window, the western horizon and the morning moon above it were gone.

"Spot, the moon is out there. Right now it's just hiding behind the clouds." We ate. "Moon up there," Spot said, turning he head and looking out the window, at the fog.

"Not yet; it's behind the clouds, but it's coming. It's there." And sure enough, within moments the clouds had passed, and like a vindicated Galileo before his telescope I pointed out the window at the frosty white globe in the growing light.

"Moon up there!"

In the weeks that passed, we rarely saw the morning moon again. It was either absent on the clear mornings or, for all we knew, hiding behind the clouds on overcast ones. But the moon had obviously not disappeared from the universe, it had not exploded or for some other reason been deleted from his private planetarium. Spot seemed to know this with certainty, and almost every morning would sit with his yogurt or oatmeal in front of him and gesture out the window.

"Moon hiding cloud," even on the clear days.

Now he was telling me what was what, sharing with me what I had taught him. But what had I taught him? The mystery of his assertion sunk in as it was repeated virtually every morning.

Moon hiding cloud. Up there somewhere.

There was room enough in his boxy toddler thought, it occurred to me, for the wildest prophetic vision, and the most sober scientific observation, for the flaming poetry of Elijah as well as the reasoning of Galileo.

Elijah: what Spot is really expressing is not certainty, but expectation; not knowledge, but hope. The Messiah will return someday, and when obscurity is removed we will see the heavens as they really are. Indeed, he will return together with Elijah in a flaming chariot, to "turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers."

Or, Galileo: working the problem through between gulps of porridge, Spot has observed a certain regularity in the phenomena of the celestial spheres, and it is therefore a matter of the highest probability that, based on earlier and repeated direct observation, the appearance of the moon is likely -- though not certain -- to be reoccur most often at night, but occasionally in the morning, just in time for breakfast and shortly before Curious George.

So, still uncertain whether my son was a budding Prophet or a junior Galileo, I leashed up the dogs for the evening walk sometime in late February. As on other frigid nights, we see the steam from the manholes, hear the sharp crunch of cold snow, and now we see the doormen dozing in the doorways. Turning the last corner on the way home, back to my sleeping household, we see -- the dogs and I -- a full moon high in the winter sky.

Whatever Spot may think about the harmony of the celestial spheres, of Galileo, Aristotle, Copernicus, or Elijah, a sublunary truth became clear to me on the moonlit stretch of sidewalk: that now, when I saw the moon, I shared his excitement. I saw the moon through his eyes. Had he not been asleep, I would have told him, taken him to the window, and together looked up. After 40 years of imperfect existence on an irregular globe, this, it seems to me, is what I have been shooting for all along.

Yes, how about that. Moon up there.

Random News, Mostly about Me

2009-04-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

1. Greater Good (the magazine where I work as senior editor) has been nominated for another Independent Press Award in the category of "Best Social/Cultural Coverage." The new issue of Greater Good tackles the question, Why do we make art? You can read most of the essays online.

2. There is now a Wikipedia page about me. The book release party for my book The Daddy Shift will happen on Saturday, June 6, 7 pm, at Cover to Cover books on Castro St. in San Francisco. On Sunday, June 14 at 5 pm, I'll read at an event for the 'zine Rad Dad. The reading will be held at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, CA.

3. In January 2010, WW Norton will be publishing The Compassionate Instinct, co-edited by me, Dacher Keltner, and Jason Marsh. In Spring 2010, Beacon Press will publish Are We Born Racist?, which I also co-edited.

4. Andrea Doucet, a Canadian sociologist who wrote an important academic book about stay-at-home dads, is now turning her attention to breadwinning moms. She's set up a new discussion forum for the moms, and I hope you (or your wife/partner) will join her.

5. I got mugged on April 4--my birthday!--and now I'm recovering from a concussion. Hence, the relatively long silence. Some thoughts on that later. And on that note, watch this video, "Warriors Against War":

Decency in Iowa

2009-04-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refuses support Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley's effort to amend the state constitution to ban gay and lesbian marriage on April 6, 2009, the first day the Senate met after the unanimous decision by the Iowa Supreme Court to allow same sex couples to marry:

Transcript
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country.

Any my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: You guys don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care.

I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I've talked with other people about it and that's what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that.

Is that so wrong? I don't think thats so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I've been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.

No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.

Paternity Leave: The Ultimate Family Vacation

2009-03-31T04:23:00.000-07:00

And here's the result of my second collaboration with DadLabs:

I like the way this one turned out. It makes a strong 5-minute case for paternity leave, and the DadLab guys' descriptions of bonding with their kids during leave are really moving. If you think more guys should take leave when it's available and if you think more paternity leave should be available, then spread this segment around. We might change some minds.

Why Not Dad?

2009-03-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

Why Not Dad?, says the film's website, "is the result of 9 months of ethnographic collaboration between the filmmakers and a group of stay-at-home fathers in San Francisco. Weekly contact with the men and their children gave rise to an unprecedented filmmaking collaboration in which the fathers were able to help shape the direction and development of the film." Which sounds a trifle dry; the film is actually warmer than one would expect an "ethnographic collaboration" to be. You can can watch it here:

Why Not Dad? @ Yahoo! Video