At-home dads no longer alone

They're multiplying and finding respect

He can bring home the bacon. He fries it up in a pan.

So says the new song by kiddie music star Justin Roberts. It's an anthem for that once exotic, now increasingly familiar type of father -- the stay-at-home dad.

These men of the household still make up a tiny fraction of at-home parents -- about 3 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But this Father's Day finds more men of the house who are also the man of the laundry, the shopping and the child chauffeuring. The government counts as many as 160,000 at-home dads across the country, up from 76,000 in 1994.

And those numbers don't include all of them, say dads who pay attention to such things. (For one, the government counts only parents with kids ages 15 and under).

"It strikes me as pretty low," said Mike Biewenga, a Chicago-area father who runs the Web site AtHomeDad.org.

Men veer off the traditional daddy track to raise their kids for the same reasons women decide to stay home. Their spouse's job pays better, they lose their job or they just want to be there.

When Donald Zepp of South Raleigh and his wife decided to have a baby, Zepp had reached the point in his business where he could hand off the day-to-day operations to others. Zepp is 63. His oldest child will turn 42 this year. His youngest is 8 months old.

"I'm taking the time to sit down with this one," said Zepp, who is reveling in his son's babyhood. "This is really a wonderful opportunity."

Though life as an at-home parent can be lonely and frustrating at times for mothers, dads say it can be particularly isolating for them.

Being a man can make it difficult to negotiate the politics of the playground, said Greg Barbera, a Durham dad who stays home with his sons, ages 8 and 5. In 2001 Barbera lost his job as managing editor of the weekly Spectator in Raleigh when it was purchased and shut down.

"People think it's weird for some dude to call your house and say 'Hey, can I talk to your wife? I'd like to get our sons together,' " Barbera said. Or worse, he said, some dads worry that moms will think they're some sort of predator because they spend so much time with children.

Barbera said it took him a while to warm up to the idea of being home with his kids. Eventually, he started his blog, an online diary, and he found other dads struggling with the same issues.

"It's tailor-made for dads because they don't really interact with other moms or other dads," he said. "When the kids are napping ... [y]ou blog or surf the Internet."

Eventually he found some moms who got a kick out of his complaints about doing the laundry or cleaning toilets.

"I don't regret it for a second," said Barbera, who plays in a band and does a little catering work to bring some money in. "We always knew that one of us was going to stay at home. We were never going to farm out our child-rearing."

Last weekend, current and former stay-at-home dads came over to Barbera's house for a Dad Summit. They discussed everything from blogging for money to the isolation many felt. A dad from Winston-Salem had never before met other stay-at-home dads.

"It was communication between a bunch of people who, for the most part outside of me, nobody knew each other," Barbera said. "Which is kind of epic for dudes."

As the ranks of stay-at-home dads grow, it might just happen more often.