Man about the house

OKAY Mum, don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t mean to get you excited about the prospect of grandchildren in the near future. Nor have I worked out a way of circumventing the hatched, matched and dispatched section of The AJN to make any big announcements. However, I feel I need to put it out there. So here goes. When I finally get around to having kids, I intend to be a stay-at-home dad.

You see, there is currently a growing trend for fathers to be the primary caregivers of their infant and toddler-aged children, while mothers go out and bring home the brisket.

Often, it is a purely pragmatic arrangement. More than ever before, it costs a fortune to raise a child and so finances dictate that the parent with the greater earning capacity should go back to work first. In a long overdue paradigm shift, it is no longer unusual for that parent to be the mother, and so it make sense that she resumes her employ as soon as possible while dad immerses himself in the world of collapsible strollers, splattered fruit mush and impossible-to-open child-proof containers. In other cases, it is a simple life choice. The fathers just want to be home with the kids and are happy for their partners to get back to the daily grind. Either way, such is the growth in the phenomena that it has become culturally acceptable for a man to stand up proudly and shout from the rooftops that he is at peace with the quick public nappy change. That is, it seems, unless he is Jewish.

When I set out to look at what I thought was no longer a taboo issue, I was met with a wall of silence.

I approached a number of Jewish stay-at-home dads and asked them to write a short piece about their experience. Far from being proud of their role, as they should have been, these fathers seemed insulted. Some claimed that they happened to work from home, and that the daddying was incidental. Others claimed I must have been mistaken, despite it being well-known in parenting circles that they had given up work to be with their children. Still others didn’t even bother to ring me back. As a last resort, I put a call out on Facebook, asking for “any stay-at-home dads, full or part time, willing to go on the record” to contact me. I was inundated. Okay, well not inundated, but a few friends emailed me within the hour, proud primary caregivers who were happy to speak about why they had chosen that path. The only problem was that none of them were Jewish.

So why the reticence among the circumcised? I applaud any parent, irrespective of gender, who, if finance allows it, chooses to stay home and devote their time to their children, rather than delegate such an important role to a third party. That there remains a stigma within our community towards men who do so suggests that we really need to rethink Jewish masculinity. The modern family dynamic has changed and we ought to embrace it. By now, we all know that raising a child is a gruelling full-time job. But from where this Jewish boy stands, it is one far more rewarding and praiseworthy than medicine or law. I look forward to the day that Jewish mothers boast about their sons, the fathers.