Current Events

The Daddy Shift:
How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting
are Transforming the American Family

Date: December 1, 2009
Time: 12-1pm, book signing 1-1:30
Location: UCSF Parnassus Campus, Health Sciences West, Room 303.

Journalist Jeremy Adam Smith will read and discuss his critically acclaimed book The Daddy Shift, explaining how fatherhood has evolved beyond breadwinning, to include a capacity for caregiving as well. What happens when dads stay home and their partners support families - and what do reverse-traditional families mean for American society and public policy? Stay-at-home dads represent a logical culmination of fifty years of family change, from a time when the idea of men caring for children was literally inconceivable, to a new era when at home dads are a small but growing part of the landscape. Their numbers and cultural importance will continue to rise - and Smith argues that they must rise, as the unstable, global, creative, technological economy makes flexible gender roles both more possible and more desirable. The stories of real people form the heart of this book: ethnically diverse couples from every part of the country and every walk of life - from working class to affluent, and both straight and gay.

Jeremy Adam Smith is the editor of Shareable.net. He's the author of The Daddy Shift, published by Beacon Press in June 2009; co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. in January 2010; and co-editor of Are We Born Racist?, which Beacon will publish in Spring 2010. His essays, short stories, and articles on parenting, popular culture, urban life, and politics have appeared in Mothering, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Utne Reader, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, and many other periodicals and books. Jeremy has also been interviewed by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, USA Today, GQ, Nightline, Salon.com, ABC News, NBC News, and many NPR shows.

"Engagingly persuasive... an impressive book that even the childless should read, for at essence, The Daddy Shift is not just about stay-at-home dads, but about the changing roles of men and women in society." - Review in Mothering magazine.

"The Daddy Shift skillfully melds factual and historical data with a style that brings to life these important issues of family, parenting, and fatherhood." - Shira Tarrant, Professor of Women's Studies at California State University, Long Beach, author, When Sex Became Gender.