Daddy Shift How Stay At Home Dads Breadwinning Moms & Shared Parentingaretransforming the Twenty First Century Family

It's a growing phenomenon among American families: fathers who cut back on paid work to focus on raising children. But what happens when dads stay home? What do stay-at-home fathers struggle with-and what do they rejoice in? How does taking up the mother's traditional role affect a father's relationship with his partner, children, and extended family? And what does stay-at-home fatherhood mean for the larger society?

In chapters that alternate between large-scale analysis and intimate portraits of men and their families, journalist Jeremy Adam Smith traces the complications, myths, psychology, sociology, and history of a new set of social relationships with far-reaching implications. As the American economy faces its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, Smith reveals that many mothers today have the ability to support families and fathers are no longer narrowly defined by their ability to make money-they have the capacity to be caregivers as well. 

The result, Smith argues, is a startling evolutionary advance in the American family, one that will help families better survive the twenty-first century. As Smith explains, stay-at-home dads represent a logical culmination of fifty years of family change, from a time when the idea of men caring for children was literally inconceivable, to a new era when at-home dads are a small but growing part of the landscape. Their numbers and cultural importance will continue to rise-and Smith argues that they must rise, as the unstable, global, creative, technological economy makes flexible gender roles both more possible and more desirable.

But the stories of real people form the heart of this book: couples from every part of the country and every walk of life. They range from working class to affluent, and they are black, white, Asian, and Latino. We meet Chien, who came to Kansas City as a refugee from the Vietnam War and today takes care of a growing family; Kent, a midwestern dad who nursed his son through life-threatening disabilities (and Kent's wife, Misun, who has never doubted for a moment that breadwinning is the best thing she can do for her family); Ta-Nehisi, a writer in Harlem who sees involved fatherhood as "the ultimate service to black people"; Michael, a gay stay-at-home dad in Oakland who enjoys a profoundly loving and egalitarian partnership with his husband; and many others. Through their stories, we discover that as America has evolved and diversified, so has fatherhood.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Jeremy Adam Smith writes so well and so honestly about his love of staying home with his son, about the economics of his family life, and about the politics of our nation at large. Whoever doesn't already think the public and the domestic are linked needs to read his work."

—Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth behind the Mommy Wars and coauthor of The Daring Book for Girls

"Forty years ago, a man who wanted to share child care equally with his wife would have been called ‘deviant, and a wife who wanted him to would have been condemned as an ‘unnatural mother. The Daddy Shift shows how far we have come and how much we have to gain by completing this revolution in marriage and parenthood."

—Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage "The Daddy Shift skillfully melds factual and historical data with a style that brings to life these important issues of family, parenting, and fatherhood."

—Shira Tarrant, Professor of Women's Studies at California State University, Long Beach, author, When Sex Became Gender "Jeremy Adam Smith says what I wish I could about the politics of fatherhood and what it means to be a dad dedicated to equity, change, and social justice for our children and for all children."

—Jason Sperber, blogger, Rice Daddies 

"Most books about fatherhood work from the outside in, from big structural changes to their impact on new dads. Its far more difficult to work from the inside out, to locate your own experiences in those larger patterns. Like William Blakes ‘world in a grain of sand, Jeremy Adam Smiths book invites readers to identify with the mundane, and then slowly expands the frame to reveal the bigger picture. The Daddy Shift is impassioned and insightful, careful and compassionate."

—Michael S. Kimmel, author of Guyland and Manhood in America: A Cultural History

"The Daddy Shift is a major contribution to a growing field. Both Jeremy Adam Smiths research and his personal observations cast valuable light on a topic thats vital to us all, no matter our gender or whether we parent."

—Lisa Jervis, founding editor of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture "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."

—mothering

From the Trade Paperback edition.