Why I Like Being a Middle-Aged, Stay-at-Home Dad

On the mantel in our living room, I have two pictures that remind me of why I'm sitting here at home with a laptop instead of putting on a suit and tie and going to an office somewhere. One picture is of my late dad in his boxing trunks and gloves, which I think was taken back in 1944 when he won the U.S. Army 87th Division boxing championship. The one next to it is of my 11-year-old son, Minh, taken back he was 4 or 5. He's also wearing a pair of boxing gloves and shorts, and he's mimicking his grandfather's fighting stance and doing his best to look equally fierce, though you can tell a laugh is about to slip out.

I was able to become a writer because of my dad, who grew up poor and wanted his kids to have opportunities that he was too busy surviving the Great Depression and World War II combat to ever pursue for himself. He worked 12-hour days in his corner grocery store on the edge of the projects, and renovated apartment buildings on nights and weekends so that I and my older brother and sister could go to college. The price he paid for that was that he didn't get to spend as much time with me as he would have liked, and when he was around, he was often too exhausted to really relax and enjoy it. There was always another bill coming up that he had to find a way to pay. But at least he eventually got some satisfaction out of seeing my byline in newspapers and magazines, and knowing that I'd become a writer, just like the sports columnists who used to toss around all those big words and literary allusions when they wrote about his boxing exploits.

When my wife and I finally became adoptive parents in our mid-40s, I knew that I had to follow my dad's example in some ways, but not others. I needed to make enough money to keep Minh in Air Jordans and Cocoa Puffs, and eventually to pay for whatever lofty institution of higher learning he chose. But I wanted to be an ever-present part of my son's life, too.

That's a challenge that a lot of fathers -- mostly younger ones -- are finding difficulty meeting, according to a just-released study by Boston College's Center for Work and Family. The researchers found that 70 percent of fathers see their role as both caring for their children and providing for their financial needs, and that they feel even more stress than their working wives about being able to do both. Fifty-three percent said they'd welcome the opportunity to be a stay-at-home dad if they could find a way to do it.

Fortunately, I have found a way to do that, thanks in large part to my own dad's sacrifices and determination to help me pursue a writing career. (I also must give fair credit to my wife, too, who has a job that provides health insurance.) I can be there in the morning when my son wakes up, and pour his cereal for him and nag him to get dressed for school and brush his teeth instead of killing a few more zombies on his iPad. When he decided he didn't like riding the school bus, I was able to walk with him to school. I'm available to go with him on field trips, and I'm the one who's there to meet him after school and coax him to talk about his day while we walk the dogs. When he wakes up sick with a cold -- a major crisis for a lot of working parents -- I'm the one who is able to send him back to bed and to open a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup for him. I'm the one sharing crude adolescent-boy jokes with him, much to my wife's feigned dismay.

Another big benefit is that my son is getting to see what I have to do to make a living. Dad's job isn't some abstract concept to him. He's around when I'm interviewing people on the phone and looking up things on the web, and we often talk about things I'm working on since I have the good fortune to write about a lot of exotic subjects -- robots, prehistoric sea monsters, space travel -- that are right up an 11-year-old boy's alley. Minh even helped me out on this series of articles for the Science Channel's website by performing various crazy experiments while I snapped pictures.

That's not to say that I don't have to make a few compromises and/or sacrifices. Even with a flexible working arrangement, I've still got to get my work done, so if I spend time with Minh during the day, I'm probably going to be at the keyboard that evening instead of devoting my attention to repeats of NCIS. I also occasionally have editors who are either young and childless, or else have nannies or au pairs, and they're sometimes a bit puzzled when I'm a little late with an article because I had to help my son revise his school essay on building his own version of Stonehenge. (I should mention that his version was remarkably like the original, except that it also had a clear Plexiglas roof that you could walk around on, laser light shows, and speakers to blast Green Day songs.)

But for the most part, being a stay-at-home middle-aged dad-writer is a great life, and I know that up there in the firmament, my own old man is smiling.