The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad: Your Essential Manual for Being an Awesome Full-Time Father

by Shannon Carpenter

A practical guide for modern-day parenting geared towards stay-at-home dads, offering advice on everything from learning to cook and clean with children, to dealing with mental health and relationships and addressing male loneliness, with the easygoing perspective that dads can use their natural talents to parent any way that they choose.

The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad manual takes the best advice and wisdom from a dads' group, and puts it into a format to help new stay-at-home fathers. Characterized by actionable and direct advice to fathers, the book takes on parenting from a father's point of view and encourages dads to use their natural talents to become a better parent. That advice is further bolstered by an additional 57 other dads who also give advice. All this advice is framed by the author's personal stories, which help the reader connect with the content and drives the advice home. This is a book that takes on day-to-day parenting, not just as a stay-at-home dad--working fathers could benefit from this book as much as at-home dads.

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2021

Reviews

[Steven R Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really did inspire me to become the best dad I can be and really does give great advice on being a stay at home dad. Has some great humor and jokes. Is a must read if you’re a stay at home dad

[Jenae · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is obviously geared towards dads, but I was fascinated with the concept of a book specifically written for at-home dads, by a dad who did/does just that.

The book did have a lot of good stuff in it and was also hilarious, which made it fun to read. However, I did skip a few chapters that were less interesting to me. Also, as a heads up, there is quite a bit of swearing if that is not your thing.

While some profanity generally doesn’t bother me, the amount of it combined with the casual tone throughout the entire book seemed to detract from the author’s delivery of the information. That said, I also acknowledge I am not the intended audience so maybe that is not a concern from the dads reading this book.

[Lauren Modery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up at my local library and thoroughly enjoyed it, both as a helpful resource and as comedic relief during some pretty hectic days with my infant. Though I'm not a dad or a stay-at-home parent, I found many of the tips in this book helpful as a new parent. I would recommend this book to any new parent, but particularly dads since dads oftentimes don't read parenting books like moms do and I think they would find help/solace//brotherhood/humor in this book. Shannon is a very empathetic writer and very relatable.

[Julie Vick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know Shannon from the internet and knew that he was a funny and wise dad, so I was not surprised to find that his book was filled with great advice. As a mom, I also found a lot of great tips and laughter (for one thing, he describes meeting one of his dad friends in romance-novel style prose). I also particularly appreciated his discussion of mental health for parents in the book.

[Michael Torbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting mix of anecdotes, acknowledgements of biases and prejudices of other people and discrimination against dads, and some how-tos for new dads. If you've been a dad for a while, especially as a primary caregiver, you probably won't get much out of it.
If you're a new dad or a new primary caregiver, you may find it much more helpful.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

You need this book, whether you think you do or not. I'm a better parent for having read it, and I think you will be too. Other parenting books might be helpful in figuring out how to help you with your child, but nothing has been as helpful as Shannon's book in regards to figuring out how to help you be a better parent when it comes to figuring yourself out, especially as an at home dad.

[Rolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good info for dads just starting out, but honestly felt a little elementary and I was turned off by the tone, which felt almost like it needed to be uber-dudebro for humor's sake.

Also, not much in terms of advice for parenting older (i.e. older-than-toddlers) kids.

[Tara Makhmali · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband read this book out loud to me and it cracked us both up. Fun and honest read. My husband said the author reminded him of me. Lol.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. Tons of good, practical information and funny as hell!

[Book Club it’s like Fight Club Without the punching · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, book. great info. Great for new dads and veterans.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humor, some great advice and a lot of filler. Pretty good book all in all, but there are a few skippable chapters.

[David Yocum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing! Funny and helpful for any parent, but especially at-home dads.