RebelDad

The Latest from Working Mother on Hopeless Fathers

Posted on 17. Feb, 2010 by Brian Reid in at-home dads, economy, gender wars, media

A few months back, I dutifully flagged a request from a Working Mother reporter who was putting together a piece on how families were coping with role reversals in cases where the economy flipped breadwinner roles. This is a danger-zone topic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it lends itself to a lot of generalizations about what men and women are “good” at. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. After all, the e-mail said that the author was interested in looking at the challenges *and* the benefits.

That didn’t quite turn out to be how the piece played out. The article, by Sara Eckel, manages to find plenty of couples to talk about the role reversal, and all of them, pretty much, are miserable. You don’t have to go far in the piece before you get to the first bumbling dad. Here is the lede:

On a cold, rainy November morning, Christine Fruehwirth’s 5-year-old son showed up at preschool without a coat—or even a sweater. “The sweater was dirty,” says Christine’s husband, John. He also had taken their 7-year-old daughter out to run errands in the ballerina pajamas she’d slept in. “I didn’t know. I thought it was an outfit,” John says of the wardrobe mishap, one of several that have occurred since he took over many of the household and child-care duties two years ago.

That sets the tone. You have Bill, who doesn’t pay the bills, Ron, whose self-image is “shattered,” and James, who can’t sort laundry. The only bright spot: one mom shares tells how she was inspired by the plot of Mr. Mom,” in which a hopeless husband is redeemed by housework.

To be sure, sudden, uncontrollable shifts in family responsibilities can be rough on everyone involved, especially for guys who never put much thought into full-time fatherhood (to the piece’s credit, it quotes Jeremy Adam Smith saying pretty much exactly that). But that disruption is the beginning of the process, not a permanent state of affairs. Sure, some families aren’t going to recover until traditional gender roles are re-established. But for thousands — maybe millions — the long-term effect of the downturn will be a permanently improved family life.

It’s a shame Eckel couldn’t find any of those guys. They are out there. Trust me.