Calling all dads! (Tired of Mom getting all of the glory?)

When it comes to raising our son, the duties my wife and I share are almost interchangeable. Either one of us can appear at school events (if not both) and either one of us can materialize instantly with a Band Aid, tissue, change of clothes or whatever our son may need. This is also true with household tasks like cooking and cleaning.

This reflects what we see in our social circles, but the world at large seems incredibly slow to catch on. Libraries, town activities and mom’s clubs—they were all built around the idea of supporting moms. And they all still assume that raising the kids is the work of moms.  

Meanwhile, aren’t stay-at-home dads the ones who could really use the help? As women climb higher up the company food chains (IBM, yahoo and HP all recently chose women to lead them into the future) and see their salaries rise, more and more, dads are the ones waiting in school parking lots. Dads are taking the kids to swim lessons and arts and crafts.

All the while, libraries insist on calling their reading programs, “Mom and Tot” programs. Towns offer “Mommy and Me” daytime activities, not “Daddy and Me” programs. Stay-at-home dads are still in the minority, but “The Times, They are a-Changin’.”

Dads are buying the groceries. It’s dads who are cooking meals and planning birthday parties. No one does a double take these days when it’s dad who is kissing the kids good night and tucking them in while mom changes out of her suit.

Babble.com is a website “for a new generation of parents.” Its Top 50 Dad Blogs 2011 article declares that “Dad blogging is making it to the masses in a big way...Dad bloggers are gaining more recognition with every passing month. In the process, they are also changing the way we think about fatherhood, parenthood, and exactly what is possible for men raising families.”

Babble deems Mike Adamick’s dad blog, Cry It Out, best written and Jim Lin’s The Busy Dad Blog as the funniest.

I wrote a column about dad bloggers a couple of years ago in which I highlighted  Jim Higley’s blog, bobbleheaddad.com. The “memoirist, humorist, life observer, cancer thriver,” as Higley refers to himself, is still going strong.

So, fellow dads, what’s next?

We should — each of us — reach out to our local communities, either through our town libraries or town recreation departments and request programs like “Daddy and Me” where we could be invited to listen to stories with our kids. Those programs would be listed in our local papers. It's a simple way to get the ball rolling!