I’m perhaps an accessory to the social injustice myself, by mere virtue of the manner in which I phrased the title of this topic I wish to discuss today, but then again it is indeed an unusual occurrence for the man to be the stay-at-home parent. By no means am I suggesting it’s wrong – in fact, I’m all for it and I long for the day when it won’t have to make for an interesting topic of discussion to be featured on blogs such as mine.

I long for the day when something like the case of a man being a stay-at-home dad will be normal, so if anything I reckon I’m doing my bit to normalise this social bias.

So anyway, to get right into it, this stay-at-home dad is a friend of mine with whom I go all the way back to high school, but I won’t mention him by name to avert the risk of getting a bit too personal with other people’s business. As far as it goes with my own affairs I don’t mind getting personal and that’s actually the entire motivation for this blog. I want to share real world experiences with the view of helping fellow parents overcome the many dynamic challenges we increasingly have to face in this day and age.

Our stay-at-home-dad is naturally a bit self-conscious about how he comes across amongst his peers, but that’s as far as it goes because then he would otherwise not have taken the decision to quit his job, put his severance package into an investment which went on to pay off rather nicely and spend his days raising his kids while the wife is the one who goes to work. It’s not as radical as it can be though, because the wife is in actual fact active in a career that has a bit of glamour attached to it, so she goes to work out of choice as well and because she actually enjoys her work.

Stay-at-home dad on the other hand was more than happy to let the existing money do all the hard work and he reports deriving great joy out of being there to be part of the milestones he otherwise missed with his first two kids. He almost has a bit of guilt about not having been there when baby number one and baby number two took their first steps and uttered their very first words, but on the other hand it makes these experiences with baby number three that much more powerful.

For all that our champion stay-at-home dad does around the house though, ultimately the natural instincts which seemed to have been programmed into us as a species cannot help but kick in, so mommy dearest does what comes naturally to her as well and takes over tasks such as coming up with thanksgiving gift ideas – something which daddy dearest could never even think about if he tried his best.

It’s a very beautiful paradigm shift to witness though, I must say!