From Carol Evans' popular new book This Is How We Do It, now out in paperback.When I first met Bob, he was a 37-year-old confirmed bachelor, a former tennis teacher with a high-spirited sense of fun who usually dated three women at the same time—until he met me. After Bob realized he couldn't teach tennis eight hours a day for the rest of his life, he went into the insurance business and later sold mutual funds. Although he did well and was rewarded with annual trips to the President's Club meetings held in beautiful resorts, he never loved his work. I, on the other hand, was madly passionate about my career in publishing and my job at Working Mother magazine. Thanks to this fundamental difference, Bob and I ended up making choices that neither of us could have imagined. Gradually, he downsized his career, eventually working part-time and becoming the first "at-home dad" we knew, but not the last. The idea of Bob staying home with the kids would have seemed completely ridiculous to both of us early in our relationship. After all, I almost ended our relationship because he didn't seem to want to have children in the first place.I always knew I wanted kids, and I assumed everyone else did, too, including Bob—until we attended the christening of Lauren Knight, the first baby to be born to our circle of friends. As I held the tiny bundle of baby in my arms, agog at her newborn beauty, I looked up at Bob with love in my eyes and said, in front of all of our friends, "Oh, Bob, wouldn't it be great to have one of these?" Bob looked into my eyes and said flatly, "One of what?" That's when I knew I had to get serious about my future. I was 31 years old, and although I loved being with Bob, I was not going to marry him if he didn't want kids. So a few months later I gave him The Ultimatum. I told him that he had six months to decide if he wanted the whole nine yards—wife, kids, home, responsibilities. I told him I wouldn't nag him about it or point to the precious toes sticking out of baby backpacks anymore. He simply had until December 1, and if he didn't decide by then, I'd be on my way. Or rather, he'd be on his way, since we had been living in my loft in Greenwich Village for two years.He never did propose. He just stood up before 35 friends gathered at a restaurant in West Hampton Beach and said that we were "talking about getting married." He must have been having a deep conversation with himself—the M-word had not crossed my lips since The Ultimatum. But it was wonderful anyway—and it was a whole month before the deadline. We made our move to Chappaqua several years later—with Robert, our first child, in tow. I had an easy commute, but Bob faced a long trek down to Wall Street. Within a year, Bob decided he couldn't take the commute anymore and moved his base of operations to an agency in downtown Chappaqua, with a window looking over the local branch of Citibank instead of the towering skyscrapers of the financial district. Several years later, he downsized into a tiny corner of our house. As his value around the house grew, he devoted less time to his business. Over time, his commitment to volunteering in the community—first with the fire department and then with the ambulance corps—became his passion. As a local EMT with the ambulance corps, he even delivered a baby when the mom couldn't make it to the hospital! Slowly but steadily, Bob turned into a work-at-home dad with a part-time business and an important role in the town we had adopted. And he became a trailblazer of sorts, exercising the new choices that working mothers have created for our partners as well as ourselves.We Give Men New ChoicesOver the last 25 years, working mothers have given men a huge opportunity to change their lifestyles. For the first time since the industrial revolution drove men off the farm and into the modern workplace, men have some freedom to venture outside the traditional 40-hours-a-week, 40-years-in-a-row model. Yes, the number of true stay-at-home dads (those with no paid job) is tiny—less than 1 percent of fathers, or about 143,000 dads, in 2006. But many men are starting to use flextime, to work at home and to downsize their careers like Bob did. Others launch their own companies or take bigger career risks than they could otherwise afford to chance, while their working wives provide a steady paycheck and benefits. At first, Bob was the only work-at-home dad that we knew. People called him Mr. Mom, and he took a lot of flack from colleagues. Larry Moss, his mentor and friend, warned him he needed to pay more attention to his career and worried that he was missing opportunities. But over time, we noticed that other dads we knew were making new choices as well.Today, I see many examples of moms and dads rejecting the conventional gender roles. In the magazine, we write about stay-at-home dads (see "The New Dad" ), flextime dads and dads who proudly announce they're leaving the office to go to a dance recital. Our readers write to us about husbands who do much more than "help out" around the house. We hear more and more examples of men who are taking paternity leave. And I sometimes meet young dads like Warren Hart, a member of the Chappaqua Ambulance Corps who works at IBM. He told me that he was at a lacrosse game at 3:30 on Friday afternoon when he ran into a fellow IBMer watching his daughter's soccer game on the adjoining field. "Our dads would never have had that experience!" he said with a laugh, proud of his involved fatherhood. Bruce Tulgen, founder of RainmakerThinking, a management training group that studies the changing workplace, summed up the difference between dads 20 years ago and today's Generation X and Y fathers: "For Boomer dads, if you were really involved with your kids you were cool. For Gen X dads, if you're not involved, you're just lame."Today, men spend much more time with their kids than fathers did 20 years ago—on average a full hour more per day than fathers spent with their children in 1977. They also spend 42 minutes more per day doing household chores than fathers did in 1977. Hooray for that! Hooray for new choices!For Some Men, It's a Diaper CeilingWhen Robert was a baby, I had to teach my husband, Bob, a lot of things about him. I felt a giant chasm between us—an expertise gap between what I knew about Robert and what Bob knew about Robert. This gap carried over into every aspect of raising Robert, as I studied all the books and made all the decisions about Robert's care mostly on my own, always pushing Bob to do things my way.My intention was to provide Robert with the best of care, but now I see that I contributed to a phenomenon I call the "Diaper Ceiling"—a compulsion moms feel to be the expert in their children's well-being and to constantly correct and educate dads. Like the Glass Ceiling that excludes women from the corner office, the Diaper Ceiling excludes dads from the inner sanctum of parenthood. Here, some ways we can help dads feel closer to their babies: