More Stay-At-Home Dads are Only Half a Victory

More men are becoming stay-at-home dads and theNew York Times is ON IT. In all reality, though, the article reports an interesting, if small, trend: over the last decade, “the number of men who have left the work force entirely to raise children has more than doubled, to 176,000, according to recent United States census data.” The article writes about this trend as a leveling of the gender playing field and an undoing of some of society’s rock hard masculinity norms. And it is important that those constraints have loosened and that men are taking a larger role in their children’s lives. But the trend is a bit overblown – and even if it weren’t, we shouldn’t necessarily applaud a rising tide of domestic dads. They are but a symptom of the larger struggles all working parents have to face.