It wasn’t my finest performance as a dad.
After dinner, I headed upstairs with my kids, Sprout and Cub, expecting the evening to move quickly into our usual bedtime routines—only to discover that Cub’s bedroom was a disaster area. Side and activity tables from both kids’ rooms were piled about the bed with Tetris-like precision. Boxes and spare sheets and blankets from the highest reaches of Cub’s closet were strewn about the floor, and it looked like they’d used the closet shelves as a ladder to get them. The kids had clearly had a fun and imaginative time during their afternoon “rest” time.
A rush of heat surged through me, and I did not so much as pause to breathe and collect myself.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I gasped, my voice already strident and cutting. “Pick it up, now! All of it!”
A soft, steady voice inside me counseled: “Take a breath. You don’t have to be this guy.”
But I was swept up with anxiety, as if fired from a slingshot, sprung from the tension of my forehead, scalp, and shoulders; from the tightness in my chest. My tired body, wanting only to sit and just not think, puffed with indignation at the thought of the long clean-up ahead, as if an exaggerated stance of dominance could ensure my kids’ rapid compliance. And the more I moved about the mess, the more I suspected that Sprout had taken advantage over Cub: only the younger sibling’s room was in disarray, from the floor to the highest shelf.
“God damn it,” I muttered loudly, wanting my kids to know the inconvenience they’d foisted upon me. Then I turned to Sprout. “And you, why doesn’t your bedroom look like this?”
(In the background, the steady inner voice whispered: “You don’t have to act like this—just stop. The kids do this sometimes.”)
Indeed, this was just another day with my active, creative kids. They are avid inventors of imaginary worlds, and I love that about them. When they’re together, each amplifies the other’s energy and ideas, and though this is frequently exhausting to keep up with, it’s also riveting. And that creativity doesn’t stop during times demarcated by their mother and me for rest. Moreover, Sprout is known in our home for building sculptures from bedroom furniture and extracting materials from high places. My wife and I have marveled at this capacity, if a bit nervously at times, since Sprout was a toddler.
If I had taken a deep breath at the outset and given my steady inner voice the chance to lead the way, perhaps my sense of wonder about my kids’ creativity would have softened my heart. Instead, my heart had contracted, leaving room only to blame my kids and especially myself.
If only I’d checked the condition of their bedrooms during the afternoon, we could have cleaned Cub’s bedroom earlier, and I’d have avoided this last-minute panic.
If only I’d taken that deep breath. If only I’d listened to that soft, steady voice.
If only.
Failure.
Pain.
And yet, that steady inner voice, inviting me: “You can still begin again.”
Later, when the room had been cleaned up, our normal routines were back on track, and I’d found some quiet moments for my toxic churn of thought to settle and drain from mind, Sprout showed me a small, bright piece of stationary. “When you feel like you are getting angry, you should remember this,” Sprout said calmly.
The note.
I already knew what it said: I’d written it. Every parent who’d attended the Kindergarten overnight trip during the previous school year had written a note to their child. In radiant magenta ink, I’d written about how I’d loved sharing the trip with Sprout, and this: “You inspire me to be a better man.” Sprout had been surprised by that sentence, having never considered that parents are always learning, too, guided by the needs and insights of their children.
I’d always hoped that Sprout had saved and cared for the note, but I’d never been sure, until now.
I looked at my seven-year-old and took a slow breath. I settled deeper into my fatigue, that feeling of emptiness that follows ill-spent adrenaline, and accepted the truth of it.
Sprout had recognized the gulf between my behavior that evening and the higher calling embodied in the note. The note was a promise: an invitation to hold me accountable. Sprout took it seriously and was taking the risk to call me back to my own higher cause. I’ve come to expect this kind of courage and attention to kindness and justice from Sprout, and I admire it deeply.
“Are you trying to say, I should remember to be a better man?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sprout said, not missing a beat.
“Fair enough.”
For me, fatherhood means the courage to reflect and learn what kind of man my kids need me to be, so I can respond to them fully as they are—and as they wish to become.
My proudest moments as a parent answer to this cause, albeit imperfectly. And when I fall short, this cause invites me to take a hard look at myself, pivot, make amends, and gather friends around me who support my growth.
This book shares stories about learning to name and serve this cause.
I’m obsessed with learning.
I loved school as a kid, and both of my parents are educators. My father is a poet and law professor who gave up the practice of corporate law because of its moral compromises. My mother is a teacher and historian—a former stay-at-home parent who dove into graduate school when my brother and I were old enough to be home alone during the afternoon. They raised us in a Unitarian Universalist church where friendly but earnest wrestling with theology, truth, and moral obligation, without any promise of finality or certainty, was considered central to a meaningful and just life. Like any institution, the church of my childhood sometimes exemplified that ideal and sometimes fell short. But the underlying principle—that learning together, in common cause and covenant, is fundamental to the good of self, other, and the wider world—rang out loud and clear, and it stuck with me. It even became a calling: I went on to earn a Ph.D. in the philosophy of education and worked for nearly a decade in education non-profits.
But my interest in learning wasn’t purely a meeting of upbringing and predisposition: it also offered a hopeful, if sometimes painfully narrow, path through depression and anxiety. Depression began to loom like a shadow over my daily life during high school. That shadow gripped me for the first time in college, at precisely the same time as I began to discover a passion for philosophy about learning. Several personal crises, both depressive and anxiety-driven, followed in adulthood.
Returning again and again to big questions about how people learn and find purpose—plus therapy and, eventually, medication and meditation—carried me through the upwellings of depression and anxiety that sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. It gave me hope and permission to accept my struggles as strands in a larger journey whose destination was open to possibility. And crucially, my mentors along the way, collectively, taught me that learning is never a matter of knowledge and techniques held in my own body alone: it’s about growing through loyalty and responsibility to others. I can’t linger or brood in my own head forever: I have to answer for something to someone else, through action. They also taught me that writing is a powerful tool for reflecting to that end. Over time, I got myself together.
Then I became a dad, and I discovered I had a lot more work to do.
My wife became pregnant with our first child, Sprout, just as I resigned from my last education non-profit job. At first, I thought I’d take only a few months off to rest and get a fresh perspective. But those months passed, and I didn’t miss my old professional life: instead, I rediscovered my love for creative writing, and I joyfully gathered baby gear and prepared a nursery. My wife and I agreed that I would become a stay-at-home dad and pursue writing alongside, which was possible because my wife had a good job that supported our family. Two-and-a-half years later, we welcomed our second child, Cub, into the world. (No, “Sprout” and “Cub” aren’t my kids’ real names—but we had fun choosing these book-names together!)
At home, my lifelong interest in learning found a new focus: being a stay-at-home dad was transforming my understanding of myself as a man. Reflective writing and meditation became the essential practices through which I reckoned with isolation at home, fear of failing as a stay-at-home dad, and the reactivity that sprang from that fear. These practices brought me back, again and again, to a growth mindset that affirms: I am fundamentally capable and always learning, through my imperfections and vulnerabilities, on behalf of my family.
This book offers stories about learning to become the man my kids need me to be—indeed, the man I need myself to be. They include stories about coming to understand how love operates in my life through everyday, ordinary practices and seeking greater wholeness and community as a man and a stay-at-home dad. They include stories about learning to navigate anxieties about manhood I’d not fully appreciated lurked within me, in order to live more accountably and in growing relationship and trust with my kids. And if that all seems very heavy—and sometimes, it is—I’ve sprinkled funny songs I’ve written for my kids about diapers, poop, and pee throughout the book, to lighten the load.
I wrote this book because I had to: writing is part of how I learn, and stay-at-home dads like me need access to each other’s insights and knowledge. But I also believe that stay-at-home dads can bring important—and increasingly many1—perspectives to America’s cultural struggle over what constitutes healthy and responsible (rather than toxic and dominating) masculinity in relationship with our spouses and our children. Our perspectives are all the more important in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, still with us as I write this, which has radically reshuffled the boundaries between work and home—and thus, the boundaries of the self—for a great many American men.
I offer this book to every man who loyally does his best to be the responsive man his kids need and deserve, rather than the reactive man who strains for control in service to anxieties, rote expectations, and habits that undercut his aspirations for loving; to every man who seeks wholeness with others, rather than loneliness; and to the partners, spouses, and children of those men. Your practical, religious, and philosophical sources for reflecting on your actions and finding meaning may differ from mine, but we share a common challenge: to forge loving and growing lives with our families and in productive engagement with our values. I hope this book provides some measure of imaginative company and solidarity, useful food for reflection, and, when needed, the permission to forgive yourself and begin again.
You might think that defining and counting who is an at-home dad would be easy, but it’s not. Should you count only dads who are the daily, primary caregivers of their minor children, regardless of whether they work sometimes in the home, as does the National At-Home Dad Network? Or should you include all dads of minor children who are not working, regardless of whether they’re at home expressly to care for their kids, as does the Pew Research Center? The metric you choose will define which dads are part of the tribe and inform your priorities for supporting them, and it will shape how you assess the impact of cultural and economic disruptions like the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic.
But all agree that the number of at-home dads in the United States is trending upward.
For example, drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Pew researcher Gretchen Livingston finds that 7% of American dads stayed at home in 2016 compared with 4% in 1989. (The rate was a bit higher, or 9%, in 2010 due to unemployment in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession.) “As a result,” Livingston writes, “17% of all stay-at-home parents in 2016 were fathers, up from 10% in 1989.”
Livingston also points to changing cultural norms about manhood and fatherhood. Millennial dads in 2016 were more likely to be at home than were Gen-X dads in their day. Millennial dads were also more likely to be home explicitly to care for their families: as of 2016, 26% of Millennial stay-at-home dads were there to care for family.
See: Gretchen Livingston, “Stay-at-home moms and dads account for about one-in-five U.S. parents,” Fact Tank: News In the Numbers, Sept. 24, 2018, Pew Research Center, https://pewrsr.ch/2xzW0x9; and the National At-Home Dad Network, “Statistics on Stay-At-Home Dads,” https://www.athomedad.org/media-resources/statistics/. [Accessed August 31, 2020].