Where Are All the Men?

Okay, I know there are some homeschooling fathers out there. I'm just not meeting them.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, once I entered the world of babies and kids I realized pretty quickly that despite a supposed feminist movement in our culture, home life is still very much divided along gender lines, with care-giving mamas and bread-winning papas. Once in a great while I meet a couple that has managed to reverse this, but for the most part these roles seem etched in stone, a fact of nature.

Just as scarce, it seems, are couples who practice a tag-team parenting style. My husband, Michael, and I fall into this unusual category. We both work at home with fairly flexible schedules, so this largely untried way of life is possible for us. After our daughter, Amelie, was born we developed a parenting strategy called "pass the baby." We continue to work and to parent in shifts and have made an art of dividing up our time fairly and evenly.

Naturally, homeschooling Amelie - should we commit to doing it (and we are both leaning strongly toward it) - will also be a fifty-fifty affair. Since we've managed to tandem-parent successfully for two years now, I'm pretty confident that we'll succeed at this collaboration as well. I do worry, though, about the biases and prejudices that a homeschooling father would encounter along the way. It seems that homeschooling folk have to explain themselves to death to everyone from Great Aunt Sally to that random stranger in the grocery store. And stay-at-home dads have to explain themselves with equal fervor. Imagine combining the two in the form of the (drum roll, please...) Homeschooling Dad. Is the world ready for him?

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