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Dawn was surprised — and happy — to discover two colleagues whose husbands are also stay-at-home fathers. But she does feel like she's missing out sometimes.

"I showed up for the preschool graduation, and they all looked at me like, 'Who are you?' And I kind of felt like the bad mom moment. Like, he's got the Dad of the Year award, and I'm kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit," she says.

Mostly, the Heisey-Groves and others say they are doing what works best for them to create happy lives for their children. And they hope to change long entrenched attitudes about the proper role of mothers and fathers.

The Heisey-Groves' arrangement is still an outlier. The Census Bureau finds that about 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include the many fathers who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income.

"Men today are now reporting higher levels of work-family conflict than women are," Coontz says. They feel "not just pressure, but the desire to be more involved in family life and child care and housework and cooking. And at the same time, all of the polls are showing that women are now just as likely as men to say that they want to have challenging careers."

This is all evident at a place where Jonathan has found camaraderie — a daddy's playgroup in Arlington, Va., part of a national support network.

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