Audrie Garrison | Jan. 27, 2011
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| Photo by Audrie Garrison |
| Doctoral student Jessica Birthisel analyzed news articles to examine how media portray stay-at-home dads. She found most treated these fathers as novel. |
Birthisel’s qualitative study, “Do Dads Do it Differently? Charting domestic masculinity in news narratives of stay-at-home dads,” analyzed 280 articles appearing in nine major newspapers since 1980.
With a Ph.D. minor in gender studies, Birthisel said her research often focuses on feminism and marginalization. This analysis was personally interesting to her because she is married to a stay-at-home dad, she said.
Birthisel found that coverage of dads as full-time parents has increased over time, focuses mainly on fathers who parent full-time as an anomaly that defines their identity and lacked comment from children and minority subgroups.
“Very few stories moved beyond the novel existence of a stay-at-home dad,” she said.
While the numbers of stay-at-home dads are difficult to track, because the Census requires that a parent must not work any hours at a job to be considered a full-time parent, Birthisel said it doesn’t appear that the number of stay-at-home dads has grown much since the 1980s. Newspaper coverage of them, though, has increased.
“The coverage is really going up at a rate that is not really compatible with stay-at-home dads in terms of change,” she said.
Most fathers interviewed in the articles talked about the difficulty of the work and the isolation. The discourse contrasts a time when women didn’t feel they could publicly talk about the emotional struggles of full-time parenting.
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| Photo by Audrie Garrison |
| Birthisel said articles didn't give dads a voice, and most reporters' approaches seemed formulaic with a "set stock list of questions." |
But at the end of each story, Birthisel said, the fathers described it as “wholeheartedly worth it and the best job they’ve ever had,” something she said could silence parents who find they don’t enjoy the work.
Birthisel concluded that she’d like to see more in-depth coverage of full-time fatherhood, including experiences of racial minorities, men with disabilities and gay men. Most stories, she found, seemed very formulaic and were framed the same way.
“You can almost imagine a reporter’s notebook that has this set stock list of questions,” she said, “that across the country, reporters are asking the same exact questions.”
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