Well, they're at it again. A company man loses his job and is compelled to stay at home while his wife continues her professional career and commutes to work each day, leaving the bumbling amateur male homemaker behind with the children.

Now where have we seen this before? Why, it was 20 years ago, in 1983, when Michael Keaton's Mr. Mom was on its way to grossing $65 million in box-office receipts and making a mockery out of modern fatherhood.

And here it comes again. Now it's Eddie Murphy's turn in Daddy Day Care, which opened in theaters last week and in doing so set the at-home-dads movement back to the Reagan years.

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In the late 1990s, when my daughter Samantha was still an infant, I was a member in good standing of the DFW At-Home Dads Network (now the At-Home Dads of Greater Dallas) and writing about parenting topics for Dallas Child magazine. It was then I wrote what has become my most enduring piece: "Don't Call Me Mr. Mom: 10 Things NOT to Say to an At-Home Dad," which has been circulated around the globe and last year was published in Fatherhood: An Anthology by John Lewis-Stempel, sandwiched between parenting essays by, no kidding, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov.

The point of the piece was that just because we have Y chromosomes doesn't mean we're less competent in being the primary caregivers or "on-call" parent to our children. In fact, when a dad is in the spirit of the thing, he's downright good at it. And, it should go without saying, the kids benefit.

But stereotyping is tough to overcome; sometimes it takes years, sometimes, perhaps in this case, it will never happen. But there was a time when things looked good.

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http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/living/5875857.htm