Tina Vartanian

English 115
Mary Griffith
3 October 2014
Gender Stereotypes - Mr. Mom
The essay titled The New Mr.Mom, written by Lucy Telliyan focuses on the roles her
parents have in their household and how the traditional idea of gender stereotypes have affected
them. Throughout the generations, the typical image of the roles of parents have shifted. It use to
be that the wife would be the stay at home mom and do the household chores while the man of
the house would become the ...primary breadwinner of the household; however, now a days
it is not necessarily like that (87). Telliyan begins her essay by giving her readers a general
description of what roles her parents play. Her father is a ...stay-at-home dad while her
mother ...has been working four jobs six days a week (86). She then began to explain why
her parents played these roles. Her father was originally an ...engineer, [but] worked as a
contractor due to the ...recession hit in 2007 (86).
According to the article, Is Fatherhood a Full-Time Job? author Beth Latshaw ...notes
that the U.S. Census Bureau defines a stay-at-home father as [a] married father with children
under 15 years old who has remained out of the labor force for more than one year primarily so
he can care for his family while his wife works outside the home (86). Telliyan analyses this
definition by going deeper into the context in which it was written. She makes sure that her
audience knows that this definition is not fully correct because it lacks a lot of father figures who
were not included such as gay parents. She strengthens her argument of gender stereotypes by
including statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the Bureau of Labor

Statistics, men, compared to women [lost] 4 million jobs since 2007 (87). This caused a
change in many households including Telliyans.
Although Telliyans family adjusted their mentality on gender roles due to the fact that
Lucys father had lost his job, many other families change for several ...key factors[such as]
job loss/relocation, job dissatisfaction, instability, or shift work (87). Telliyans main focus for
this essay is to prove to her audience that men are capable of doing the woman's job and that it
is a very difficult stereotype to overcome.