Literature Has a Stay-at-Home-Dad Downside

A decade in the past, after I turned a stay-at-home dad, I used to be too busy sanitizing child bottles and washing reusable diapers to learn a brief story, not to mention a whole novel. Now I’ve a pair of night-owl elementary schoolers, and though bedtime can nonetheless be draining, I no less than have the power to take pleasure in just a few chapters as soon as they’re asleep. So after I realized final 12 months about two well-reviewed novels that includes stay-at-home-dad protagonists—Something Rotten, by Andrew Lipstein, and The River Is Waiting, by Wally Lamb—I used to be curious to choose them up. Within the primary few pages, nevertheless, I used to be upset to search out that these characters had been primarily a group of the identical outdated incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, within the case of Lamb’s e book, tragically negligent.

I by no means was a reader who wanted to see himself in a novel. But as a dad who takes satisfaction in bringing enjoyable and, if I’ll say so, some talent to the position, I’ve grown bored with cultural stereotypes that scale back stay-at-home fathers to undignified buffoons. So I made a decision to go searching, to see the place else these dads present up in literature, within the hope of discovering a personality whose expertise may mirror my very own.

I began by asking folks I knew for suggestions. But my novelist mates couldn’t consider any full-time-dad characters; neither may the stay-at-home dads I knew. Soon I grew a bit obsessed—and, via my very own detective work, ended up compiling what’s, to my data, probably the most complete listing of stay-at-home dads in novels.

In my search, I dug via a newspaper archive for outdated e book opinions and combed via my county’s digital library, a number of bookselling web sites, and databases similar to Publishers Marketplace. I sought out data way back to the Seventies—a time when, in actual life, “virtually no fathers” reported being a stay-at-home dad, in response to a 2015 study. For my listing’s functions, I outlined stay-at-home dads as those that served as their youngsters’s main caregiver whereas their partner labored exterior the house (although lots of the fictional dads I discovered had been employed in some capability). I didn’t think about novels with single dads, so classics similar to Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World had been out. And I excluded books through which stay-at-home dads make solely transient appearances. I principally checked out novels that had been historically revealed, however I included a few extensively obtainable self-published works. In all, I discovered 83 titles.

Together, these books provide a window into shifting views on full-time dads and males as caregivers extra broadly. The first fictional dad on my listing, Mr. Quimby from Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Her Father—who finds himself at house after shedding his job—set the parenting bar low by chain-smoking and watching TV all day, a precedent that continued in novels for many years. In 4 of the six novels I discovered from the Eighties (together with Frank Parkin’s satirical Krippendorf’s Tribe, a few fabulist anthropologist), the dads have affairs. By the Nineties, many extra fictional fathers have taken up child-care duties, however most of the time, they’re preoccupied with no matter work they’re doing from house.

Perhaps not stunning, as extra real-life males began selecting to turn into main caregivers, extra novels that includes them had been revealed—and the characters’ dedication to caregiving noticeably improved. In practically each e book on my listing revealed since 2010, the stay-at-home dad is depicted doing precise youngster care: altering diapers, strolling youngsters in strollers, feeding infants. And not like their predecessors, many of those characters selected their at-home position. In 2015’s Finding Jake, by Bryan Reardon, a dad who quits his profitable company job to remain house together with his youngsters is described as representing “everything right about men of the new millennium.” In Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2013 novel, Sisterland, a mother really seeks out a stay-at-home dad for parenting recommendation.

Read: The rising cohort of single dads by alternative

So far this decade—at a time when nearly a fifth of all stay-at-home dad and mom within the United States are males—18 novels that includes full-time-dad characters have been revealed, which is on tempo to just about double the quantity on my listing from any earlier decade. These books embody among the most devoted stay-at-home dads in print. Yet lots of the books additionally characteristic fathers who embody the position’s worst stereotypes.

In practically half of the stay-at-home-dad novels revealed since 2020, fathers put youngsters in bodily hazard—a twist not often seen in prior years. Nearly 40 % of the characters are introduced as being thrust into the position as a result of they will’t maintain down a job, in contrast with roughly 10 % in every of the earlier 20 years. More of those dads abuse medication and alcohol. More additionally cheat on their working spouse or are discovered to be repulsive by their partner. Most of those fathers have moments through which they seem like collapsing underneath the burden of society’s disapproval. In 2024’s A Rough Way to Go, by Sam Garonzik, the daddy imagines how others see him: “He’s a loser!!!!” he thinks. “He’s hopeless!!!” Ultimately, many of those books’ characters are portrayed as avatars of resentment and disaffection, males who appear to fall prey to the inflexible imaginative and prescient of masculinity disbursed by real-life adherents to the manosphere.

Take Lamb’s novel. The River Is Waiting follows Corby, a dad laid off from his job in an promoting agency’s artwork division, who secretly drinks 100-proof rum and abuses prescription remedy whereas caring for his twin 2-year-olds. For his plight, Corby blames a feminine co-worker who was employed three years after him however was usually given higher assignments. When he’s alleged to be trying to find work, he masturbates and watches porn. “While every other dude is out in the world, working during the week and hanging with his bros on the weekends,” Corby laments, “I’m Mr. Mom twenty-four seven for a couple of toddlers.” Corby’s interval as a stay-at-home dad ends when, early within the e book, he drunkenly backs over his son together with his SUV and is shipped to jail. Rather than discovering redemption, nevertheless, Corby—unable to shed his macho tendencies—continues to undergo due to his personal recklessness.

Read: I nonetheless get known as daddy-mommy

The different e book that impressed my quest, Something Rotten, is, typically talking, extra nuanced. The father, Reuben, makes pretty minor child-care errors, similar to forgetting to thaw out breast milk. But he’s not precisely what anybody would name a likable man. He’s at house not by alternative however as a result of he’s been fired for a sexual act by chance seen by his co-workers—and, like Corby, leans into gender-based indignation, griping {that a} girl wouldn’t have confronted the identical punishment as he did. He can also be portrayed as deeply unsexy: “always too tired for missionary,” and so unattractive to his spouse that she is “more turned on by her own reflection” than she is by her “pajama-wearing husband.” Whether she’ll stick with Reuben is some extent of rigidity all through the e book. (Her attraction is rekindled solely as soon as he embraces a wide range of masculine stereotypes.)

After studying a number of such portrayals throughout the stay-at-home-dad canon, I used to be determined to discover a father who wasn’t crumbling underneath the stigma of his position. So I’m completely happy to report that I did discover one e book that provides a reprieve. In Nicholson Baker’s novel Room Temperature, revealed greater than three a long time in the past, a father lets his mind drift, for 116 pages, whereas he feeds his six-month-old daughter. He notices his sweater’s intricate stitching; the faint residue of masking tape pulled from a window; how the puff of his breath might have moved his daughter’s cellular, which hangs throughout the room. Before enterprise my analysis, I may need thought of Baker’s e book boring. But after encountering so many oafish, repellent dads, I discovered this character to be outright transgressive: lastly, a father who, similar to me, calmly went about his parenting as if it had been probably the most pure factor he may do.