Brian Reid isn’t one of those guys who can’t take a compliment.
Still, you can’t blame a fellow for taking umbrage at the following Mother’s Day e-mail he received from Pampers.
“Dear Brian: From the moment you first held your newborn baby in your arms, you knew that things would never be the same again. Suddenly, you’ve become a teacher, a nurse, a coach, a playmate and a friend.
“But, above all, you are a mother.”
News to him.
Sure, Reid buys diapers. And changes them. He also cooks and cleans and plays with his two kids. He has worked part time, he’s worked full time. He has done the stay-at-home thing.
To a diaper company, that might make him look like a mother. In reality, it makes him look like a lot of modern fathers, a group that could fairly be labeled Do-It-Yourself Dads.
Dissatisfied with the traditional model for fathering, DIY Dads alter their careers to fit their family life, rather than the other way around. Fewer hours in the office, more hours at Gymboree. Less pay, more play.
“What we’re going to see over the next decade is a much better spectrum of choices for fathers,” said Reid, known as “rebeldad” to those who follow his parenting blog (rebeldad.com) and his regular contributions to The Washington Post’s On Balance site (washingtonpost.com/onbalance).
“Some fathers are still going to work 80 hours a week,” he said. “But with modern technology and more flexible workplaces, a lot more guys have the possibility of being at play group on Tuesday morning. Working fathers, stay-at-home fathers or some sort of combination — what unifies us all is wanting to play an active role in our children’s lives.”
According to the 2004 census, about 147,000 dads stay home full time, up from about 98,000 in 2003 — an almost 50 percent increase.
Mark Smithivas of Logan Square is one of them. Smithivas, 39, began staying home last year after juggling his job as an administrative assistant at Northwestern University, his wife’s job as an environmental consultant and a host of less-than-appealing day-care options for their 3-year-old daughter, Amanda.
“I enjoyed my job,” Smithivas said. “It was very fulfilling, and I enjoyed being at a university. But we got to a point where because of our values and how we feel about raising kids — we’re very much attachment-focused — the idea of putting our daughter into full-time day care just wasn’t what we wanted.”
Being with Amanda full time is fulfilling as well, Smithivas said. And it hasn’t hurt things in the marriage department either.
“We’ve struck a good balance,” he said. “I like to cook, she still does a lot of the cleaning. We try to do more of a model of shared parenting so it’s not just a traditional inversion of roles. It’s both of us trying to spend as much time as possible with our daughter.”
Other DIY Dads opt to hold on to their careers but in a dramatically reduced capacity.
Uptown dad Josh Eisenberg, 32, left his job as a tour coordinator at the Chicago History Museum when his son, Andrew, was 6 months old. He still conducts history tours throughout the city, but he sets his own schedule and rarely works more than one full day per week.
“I get to see him speak, I get to see him walk,” Eisenberg said of Andrew, now 2. “I get to do all the things that dad upon dad wanted to and didn’t get to — or didn’t care to — for centuries.”
DIY Dads make up a growing presence on the Web. Locally, chicagodads.com provides an online community for men looking for a place to chat about sports, arrange a play date or plan a Dads Night Out. Reid’s rebeldad.com provides links to more than 100 other dad-specific Web sites and blogs. The publishing world, however, is a little late to the game, with the majority of parenting magazines and books still aimed specifically at mothers. Reid hopes to see this change during the next few years.
“A reasonable goal is for the resources already out there to be a little more gender neutral, so if you’re a man, you don’t get the sense that parenthood is not for you,” he said.
But Spiro Dousias, a 27-year-old DIY Dad who has juggled several part-time jobs teaching art since his daughter was born two years ago, says he’s doing just fine without some so-called experts weighing in on his every move.
“I guess I don’t need to be reaffirmed by a magazine telling me I’m a good dad,” he said.
Dousias, who lives in Brighton Park, spends most of his time joining little Lori at her Gymboree classes, strapping her ladybug helmet on for long bike rides or pulling her in her little wagon to the grocery store. And Lori’s happiness is affirmation enough for him.
“When we’re at music class and there’s a song with the word ‘mommy’ in it, the teacher always makes a point to say ‘daddy’ because I’m sitting there,” Dousias chuckled. “That’s nice, but I’m like, ‘We can talk about mommies. It’s OK.'”
How very DIY.
