Dad
Top 50 Dad Blogs of 2012
Last year, when we inaugurated our Top 50 Dad Blogs list, we praised dad bloggers for “changing the way we think about fatherhood.” Indeed, a number of our favorite bloggers on this, our second Top 50 list, insist our thinking needs to be changed. They describe themselves as advocates for fathers, taking to their keyboards in order to counter dominant cultural stereotypes of dad-as-incompetent-buffoon. (You don’t believe them? Tune in to most any family sitcom on most any night of the week.) Others on the list aspire simply to entertain us with funny, relatable tales from the trenches. A few write to work through the shattering grief of losing a child or spouse.
This list features straight dads, gay dads, working dads, stay-at-home dads, geek dads, single dads, and more. In a culture where the dominant conversations around fatherhood center simply on whether dads can deign to change their kid's diaper, it's refreshing to see these guys take the public perception of parents into their own hands. We are again struck by the variety of their voices and experiences, which itself puts the lie to the notion of any one “typical dad.” A lot of our favorites from last year are back, while many worthy entrants are making their debuts. We hope you’ll enjoy laughing, crying, nodding, and discovering along with them as much as we have. As dads' online influence grows, this list will only become more and more difficult to curate — and that's a good problem to have. If you think we missed any of your favorite dad bloggers, nominate them here. – Barbara Spindel and the dad blog panel
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Dadventurous
This humorous, well-designed blog, which ranked #44 on last year’s list, follows the continued adventures of Troy Pattee at work, at home, and at play. Since he is a work-at-home dad – a WAHD, if you will – there’s a lot of overlap among the three.
Pattee excels at sweet, funny, and relatable posts about raising his kids — and cleaning up after them. He rails against laundry duty, marvels at the cost of feeding his family, and worries that his 11-year-old son is acting, prematurely, like a teenager. (“You’ve gotta love kids,” he writes. “Unless they’re teenagers, then it should be optional.”) Dadventurous also likes to tell it like it is. When, over the summer, he received a message from his kids’ sleepaway camp explaining that a wildfire was causing them to evacuate the campers, he wrote, “My first thought: I hope everyone is safe … My second thought: It better not be one of my kids that caused it … My third (and most serious) thought: They wouldn’t send the kids home early, would they?!” Spending summer vacation with the kids? Now that would be a real Dadventure!
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I am humbled to be included.
Many thanks.
Mitch