A cruel twist of fate morphed Ron Mattocks into a daddy blogger.
The 37-year-old and his wife, Ashley, 31, both lost their jobs on the same day in February, 2008. Faced with a life of zero income, the Houston, Tex., couple pondered starting a freelance writing business. But in June, when Ms. Mattocks landed a job, the former vice-president of sales and marketing for a residential builder was left at home with his stepdaughters, Allie, 7, and Avery, 6.
That's when Clark Kent's Lunchbox, the blog he started in June, 2007, evolved into a chronicle of his new life as a stay-at-home dad.
“You're used to networking within your profession and now you're isolated at home. There's nobody there except for two kids and you're breaking up fights, you're doing laundry and you're finding Barbie doll heads clogging up the toilet,” he says. “It's completely unglamorous, but you can't sit there and pout about it. … There are a lot of guys out there trying to understand that and trying to reconcile that new role.”
Unemployed fathers have been hitting up daddy blogs and Web forums in recent months to pick up pointers and find some kind of community while grappling with the tough and, at times, isolating transition to the home front. Men between the ages of 24 and 54 have seen their employment plummet by more than 170,000 jobs since last October – four times more than for women, Statistics Canada reports. And the Web's provided housebound dads with a parenting gateway that simply didn't exist during the recession of the early 1990s, when a stay-at-home dad's best role model was Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom .
The burgeoning world of daddy blogs offers an outlet for dads who've recently met the axe and are wading into a sphere dominated by moms, says Jeremy Adam Smith, the father behind the Daddy Dialectic blog and author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family .
“I think when something bad happens to you – and being laid off is bad – it helps to talk about it, to turn it into a story that you tell people. That helps you grapple with this reality [of the] job loss,” he says. “Then you run into this new role at home. Taking care of kids is no picnic, as these fathers discover. It can be gruelling. When the kids are napping or late at night, it really kind of helps to get online and bitch or share stories.”
While many are excited to take on the new role of primary caregiver, some dads are equally terrified. The transition from being the breadwinner to the afternoon playground chaperone can be tough – a lot of identity gets tied up in it, Mr. Mattocks says.
“All of a sudden all of that [got] sucked out from underneath me. All the ways you kind of measure your own success, promotions, raises – that's all gone. Nobody's patting you on the back, nobody wants to take you to lunch.”
The rise of daddy blogs, especially as a resource for men trying to cope with the way the economy has affected their families, is a step in the right direction for giving stay-at-home fathers more confidence and community, says Andrea Doucet, author of the book Do Men Mother? Fatherhood, Care and Domestic Responsibility and a professor of sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Though there are more stay-at-home dads now, men are not as likely to join neighbourhood parenting groups, still dominated by moms. Cyberspace makes it easier to reach out to other men, she says.
