Via Instapundit, an interesting article about how TV and movies are evolving in their portrayal of stay-at-home dad’s.
Personally, the doltish-Dad spiel never applied to me and my guess is it didn’t apply to a lot of kids growing up. In addition to running a small business for 30 plus years, my Dad was more than a little competent around the house. He built a deck, managed a pool, grew fruit trees, coached all 3 of his kids through various athletic endeavors including football and track and field, renovated just about every room in our house without blowing things up, helped us with homework and school projects and dished out some discipline along the way. A typical working day for him was 14 hours including office time and then traveling to various job sites to manage the field. Frankly, he didn’t have time to be incompetent.
Mom was the classic stay-at-home variety, and that was what enabled them to make things work. She handled the lion’s share of the house, including dealing with me and my brother and sister. As we kids got older, she took accounting classes and eventually helped Dad with running his business, taking care of the money management side of things.
They worked like that because that’s what was required to make thing work. Someone had to be responsible for providing and someone had to take care of the kids. About 8 years ago, the Wife and I had the same circumstance presented to us. By gender, roles ended up different, but in the end it’s the same result.
And the Wife hasn’t blown anything up yet either.