Bounce Back In Style 2nd Edition Edition | Page 68

This is a quick look at the new trend of Stay-At-Home-Dads. This is fast becoming the way to go for some young couples. The world is constantly going through a lot of changes, transformations, crisis, confusion, shifts, random motions, you just name it, and we are seeing a lot of things we wouldn’t have thought would ever happen. According Frank Lowe's TV debut on the June 12, 2014 episode of " oday Show”, T 51% of men they interviewed would stay at home with kids if they could afford it. Believe it or not, they also found out that “71% of stay-at-home-dads said that the society underestimates dads”. What you won’t want to do is to assume everything is always smooth for those experiencing this new trend. For some reasons not quite known to me, my wife, asked me to write on Stay-athome-Dads. I remember it so well that one of the challenges we faced at our first church planting station was that my dear wife had to be in School of Midwifery, Oron in Nigeria just as we were beginning the process of planting a new church under Revival Valley Ministries at Eket (one of the Oil towns Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria). That in itself was not the main issue, it was how I had to take care of our less than 6 months old first daughter, Edi. I had a young church less than one year to raise and a baby less than a year to raise as well. That wasn’t easy! Doing either of these two at any time is a big enough challenge; talk less of doing both at the same time. The new church had only 6 adults and 1 toddler with 2 babies. It was my first opportunity of being a “stay-at-home-dad”. For me I was not babysitting, I was simply parenting our first baby. From time to time, in between, my mum who was living in another town would help out from time to time. This had to be my major work for the most part spanning 1 year, until my wife was through with her Midwifery programme 68