What Today's Dads Don't Do - NY Times Magazine

The Way We Live Now
By WALTER KIRN
Published: June 19, 2005

I learned something recently that shook me. To my 6-year-old girl and my 3-year-old boy, the work I do so that I can buy them sunblock sticks, safety helmets, gummy-bear vitamins and all those other enlightened items that they tell me they don't need and that I insist they do, even though I didn't have them as a child and have never once glanced back and wished I did, doesn't look like work at all.

''Dad?'' my darling girl inquired of me on the first Monday morning of our first annual six-week-custody-period summer vacation, ''don't you need to drop Charlie and me at day care and go somewhere to make money?'' I shook my head. ''I do my job here in the house, at the computer,'' I said. ''You know that. I was just getting ready to start, in fact, when I heard you turn off the Wiggles. Stop bothering me.'' My daughter frowned and bunched up her cute blond eyebrows, and my son did the same with his funny hairless eyebrows, which looked like mine after I plucked them bare last winter while revising a death scene in my latest novel.

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