I’ve watched a couple of television shows recently about fathers who stay at home and watch the kids.
It seems that some professors, sociologists and redundantly-degreed people have discovered that dads can wash dishes, do laundry, change diapers and cook supper.
True, that may not be the way most of the world turns, but Dad as a full-time parent is not exactly a 21st Century innovation.
Down here in the Ozarks, dads have been raising kids for a lot of years. While the procedure wasn’t exactly the same as on these television shows, lots of dads used to stay at home. We called ‘em farmers.
While I’ll admit that it wasn’t the rule (college-educated mom’s have long been scarce), it wasn’t such an oddity, either.
When I was a youngster it was Mom who got in the car and left for work every morning, and it was Dad who got us off to school and often saw that we were fed supper.
Granted, we didn’t take a lot of “nurturing” like these modern stay-at-home dads say they provide. “Prodding” would be more accurate, though we became pretty adept at taking care of ourselves.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I could make biscuits, corn bread, chocolate cake or fudge just as well as Mom could, and may have done so more often. It kind of went with my territory as the oldest boy. Most of what I learned about cooking, though, wasn’t from Mom.
Dad, cookbooks and experience (with more than a cupful of mistakes mixed in) taught me my way around the kitchen. The prospect of not eating unless I figured out how to cook it was also a great encourager.
Now, back to Dad.
I didn’t know until just a few years ago that Mom and Dad made a calculated decision that he should stay home while she went to work. Mom was a medical technologist – a good job for a woman in those days (though it paid a lot less than any man’s job).
Shortly after the folks bought their farm in Dallas County, they decided that we boys would benefit most from Dad staying home to teach us the virtues of hard work, and what he knew of farming and livestock, which was quite a bit. So, dad quit his job as an artificial insemination technician and put us to work chopping sprouts in winter, raking hay in summer and milking cows night and morning year-round.
I never thought about it being out of the ordinary. Many of my friends’ dads stayed home, too. The farm was their job. The family was their crew.
I guess what was a little unusual was that Mom worked in town. Except for school teachers and nurses and the like, moms generally stayed home, too. But, several of those “exceptions” lived up and down our road.
I never had the opportunity to be a stay-at-home dad, but, the newspaper office wasn’t much farther from our house than the barn was when I was a boy. There were times, too, my girls were beside me just like when I was with my dad.
None of that is of much concern, now. Martha and I are stay-at-home grandparents, at least in theory. In practice we are more “commuter grandparents.”
Maybe that’s another 21st century innovation, but we’ll take it.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
