On a dad line.

• Position: UPFRONT

When my wife and I decided to have kids, we also decided we didn't want them in day care their first few years. After our son, Kian, was born, my mother-in-law became his nanny for a year, but she moved back to California in May. My wife works in financial services, and those folks make more money than journalists do. A lot more. So I left my job as a senior editor of this magazine, a position I had held for 12 years, and became a stay-at-home dad.

I realize this is a terrible career move when jobs are so scarce. And stay-at-home dads get no respect. People who have never raised a child think it's easy. A neighbor recently asked how I'm liking retirement. Trust me, I'm not planning to work this hard when I retire.

Journalism takes brains and a thick skin, but it's not physically demanding. It's much more tiring to chase a toddler bent on self-destruction while juggling cooking, laundry and other tasks. When I worked at BNC, it often took me an hour to fall asleep at night because I still had enough energy to fret about the next day. Now I'm usually out cold in 10 minutes. I don't worry about tomorrow. I'm too tired from today.

Fatherhood is changing me in other ways. In journalism, if you tell relevant truths, no matter how mad it might make people, you'll usually do OK. I liked that. Parenting, I'm finding out, is more like public relations: A good PR person never lies, but his job is to accentuate the positive and avoid the negative. As a parent, you don't show, for example, the concern you might have that your kid is a little late hitting the milestones for fine motor skills. Instead, You revel in the fact that he's "off the charts" (to quote our pediatrician) in gross motor movement and quietly work with him on what he's not yet good at.

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The main skills I honed in journalism seem useless in my new job. A warts-and-all written summary of his day would have no effect on Kian. He doesn't read, preferring instead to eat books, using his fine set...