Abstract
On a cold December afternoon, Logan and I go pick up his daughter Alice who goes in an all-girl private school in Manhattan. I am impressed by the imposing early twentieth-century landmark building and by the room where we wait for Alice’s class to finish. It resembles a Victorian salon, with Impressionist art and red velvet couches, a scintillating chandelier hanging from the ceiling, gold and red Christmas wreaths on the door, books and paintings carefully organizing the room, and a beautiful fake Christmas tree. We then go wait by the door. Alice, who is five years old, gets out of the classroom, jumpy, smiling, happy, and runs toward her dad who welcomes her in his arms, giving her a long hug. She does not see me or the others around her. Soon after, we are back sitting down, and she sits on her father’s lap. “What were your acts of kindness today?” he asks her gently, his arms around her, looking at her. Later on, as we walk toward the subway, Logan explains to me that they do a debrief before and after school. Before school, he tells her: “Have a great day at school. Be respectful, thoughtful, and kind. Learn a lot. Accept all challenges. But, most importantly, have fun!”. The other questions he asks her end of the day are, “What were your challenges? What did you learn? How was lunch?”. This routine “makes us both smile and gives us talking points at the end of each school day”, he writes on his blog that he started when he became an at-home dad.
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Notes
- 1.
The panel occurred at a filmed conference on fatherhood in NYC in the 2010s. For the sake of protecting the participant’s identity, no more details will be provided here.
- 2.
The names of fathers’ groups have been changed.
- 3.
One-third of the group of fathers were seeing a therapist.
- 4.
From field notes.
- 5.
From field notes.
- 6.
Pete’s memoir was as of 2016 a non-published, fictional piece of writing based on his real life that he shared with me and that he agreed I use in this book.
- 7.
From field notes
- 8.
From field notes.
- 9.
From field notes.
- 10.
The Annual At-Home Dads Convention organized every year or every two years by the National At-Home Dad Network.
- 11.
The interview was conducted on Skype.
- 12.
Smitherman (1994:37) refers to nappy hair as kinky hair, “extremely curly hair, the natural state of African American hair, curled so tightly it appears ‘wooly’”. ‘Nappy’ is historically a derogatory term. In African American communities it came to be associated with ‘bad hair’, in opposition to ‘good hair, which is “straight and silky” (Rosado 2008: 493).
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Gallais, C. (2023). Practices of Care: The Embodiment of Fatherhood. In: Fatherhood and Masculinities. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34132-8_4
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