The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family

Description

An accessible, smart, personal, and deeply researched book about a growing phenomenon - dads taking a much larger role in raising children. What, practical and psychological challenges do they face? What kinds of relationships are they in? And what does the path they are carving out mean for the larger society? Filled with men's stories, as well as entertainingly reported research and analysis, Smith's book is a guide for thoughtful readers to a new terrain that more and more families are exploring, and more and more Americans are looking to make sense of.

Jeremy Adam Smith's writing has appeared in Moth-ering, the Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Wired, and elsewhere. A magazine editor, blogger, and former stay-at-home dad, Smith lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Jeremy Adam Smith is a most purposeful father, a periodic Stay-at-Home Dad who sees his role as not just a choice that's best for his family but as a sign of a rapidly changing societal landscape. . . . His new book, The Daddy Shift, is a chronicle of a time that he predicts we will look back upon as the start of permanent change.-Lisa Belkin, New York Times "A combination of scholarly research (citing economic and historical trends, sociological and psychological studies, and labor statistics), revealing profiles of stay-at-home dads and their families, and poignant anecdotes from Smith's own life. The personal passages are the book's most affecting ones, as Smith reveals himself not as some know-it-all superdad but as a learn-as-you-go parent who had to sort out his own complex feelings."-Regan McMahon, San Francisco Chronicle "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 "A gentle but persistent appeal to get beyond all those preconceived notions and make the choices that work best for ourselves and our families."-Body + Soul "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