DADS WHO CARE
By: Kirstin Kennedy
Being raised by a single father in the ‘90’s wasn’t exactly like an episode of Full House. I know because my younger sister, Caroline, and I lived with our single dad for the majority of our lives. John Stamos certainly wasn’t hanging around our Pittsburgh home. It was a challenge for my dad, sister, and me, even with the help of our aunts and grandparents. After my mother died, the three of us had to learn to work together around the demands of growing up in single parenthood.
My dad has been working a demanding job at NBC for the past twenty-five years. No businessman wants to come home from a long day in a stuffy office to a restless night of picking up toys and preparing meals. He did everything for us. From packing healthy lunches to blow drying our hair, I will always admire my father for everything that he did to be a great dad, let alone a heroic single dad.
At the time, it seemed to me that our situation was pretty unique. None of my friends were growing up in a single parent household. We lived in a very comfortable neighborhood where families seemed to be as perfect as their front lawns. Of course, my seven year-old perception of suburbia was skewed. Plenty of my schoolmates were going home to a household with only one parent and plenty of them were struggling in ways that we weren’t. But then, the majority of single parents were female. Families and Living Arrangements released a study revealing that there was very little change in single parent rates in the United States from 1994 (one year prior to the death of my mother) and 2006. In 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were 10.4 million single mother families and 2.5 million single father families. With there being nearly 5 times as many single mothers as there were single fathers, it seemed that the odds of us being “normal” were stacked against us.
Caroline and I both knew that we were different than most kids growing up in single parent homes, but we agree that there were some great benefits of having a direct male influence. We both have realized that gender roles are nearly irrelevant within relationships. Neither one of us has ever gone into a relationship with the expectation that a man should act in a certain way. I grew up to understand that men can be just as caring, and sometimes even more demanding, as women. The idea of being courted was not instilled in me. My dad taught my sister and me to take care of ourselves and, as a result, I found that I am not often disappointed in failed relationships. When you respect yourself, you, in turn, will be respected by the other person in the relationship. I have never found it hard to be honest with a man about how I feel, and I absolutely attribute that to the way my father demanded that I always be honest with him.
Not surprisingly, I am overjoyed to see the recent increase in stay-at-home dads. A stay-at-home dad is different than a single father, however. Stay-at-home dads choose to take the caregiver status while the mother of the family becomes the primary breadwinner. The Washington Post reports that, as of last Father’s Day, stay-at-home dad’s made up 2.7 percent of the United States’ stay-at-home parents. The same article divulged that the percentage has more than tripled since 2000. Men all across the country are choosing to be the primary caregiver to their children for a variety of reasons. With women now out numbering men in the workforce, many families are choosing the mother’s salary over the father’s. This is not to suggest that stay-at-home dad’s don’t work. Many do with more flexible schedules or work-from-home situations. This is a great variety to the typical family dynamic. While the family still has a solid, two-parent foundation, they add a different outlook to America’s families.
I learned to be a strong woman through the influence of a strong man. As this country grows to accept fathers as being great parents, we are getting closer and closer to total equality of the sexes. I’m sure that he’ll find a grammatical error or call me a raging liberal when he reads this, but regardless, Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.
Kirstin Kennedy, an undergraduate English major at the University of Pittsburgh, is an A&E staff writer for the Pitt News and the business coordinator for the Pitt Writers Club.