If there’s a theme to this week’s selection of must-reads, it’s how dads navigate a little adversity, from a number of fronts. The most notable is this piece from Elissa Strauss at The Week, who asserted that stay-at-home dads are “statistically insignificant.” (Adding the Michael Keaton pic from That 31-Year-Old Move That Will Not Be Named felt like piling on.)
Is it linkbait? Provocative language designed to unleash the umbrage? You be the judge. Then check out the umbrage in full-feather in the National At-Home Dad Network’s riposte, which laments the particular flaw of equating the number itself with the direction of its trend. Gender roles are shifting, and more dads are at home because they want to be. And most important to us, it makes the all-to-common mistake of conflating stay-at-home fatherhood with overall state of fatherhood, among all the dads, including those who work in- or outside the home, who are spending an average of five more hours per week with their kids than they did 50 years ago.
- In the same vein, after this piece about dads in the kitchen appeared in the New York Times, Wonkette followed up with a humorously snarky takedown. When pieces like this are being written, you know you’re doing something right.
- John Foley wrote a piece about becoming an old man as an old man. Because it’s hard to chase after your 6-year-old after your 50-year-old knees give out.
- After losing his grandmother, mother, and wife to cancer, a Pennsylvania dad individually raised more than $43,000 for Movember.
- In the evergreen conundrum of work/life balance, Australian parents have the highest stress burdens in the world. And despite increased parental leave laws in the UK, a lot of British dads are too concerned about losing money and/or job status to take it.
- Women who want successful careers and children (and are mindful of being “mommy-tracked”) are considering whether the best way to have both is to “marry down.“
And finally: As we all process the controversial decisions of grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, regarding the killings of unarmed black men by white police officers, several black parents shared what they hoped their children (and by extension, the nation) can learn about their experiences of being a person of color in America.