The number of stay-at-home fathers is on the rise. But reasons for that increase aren’t all positive:
Olga Khazan mentions the fact that “mothers are still more likely to stay at home because they think it’s the best way to raise the kids; fathers are more likely to do it because they physically can’t work outside the home”:
These fathers’ lack of options reflects in their educational attainment and on their families’ financial situations: Dads who stay at home are twice as likely to lack a high school diploma as working dads, Pew found, and they’re far more likely to be ill or disabled than stay-at-home mothers (35 percent to 11 percent). Importantly, nearly half of stay-at-home dads live in poverty (47 percent), while only 34 percent of stay-at-home mothers and 8 percent of working fathers do.
But Yglesias contends that the trend isn’t all economic:
Each time the economy recovers, the share of stay-at-home dads declines. But it doesn’t decline all the way back to where it was before the recession started. The business cycle, in other words, seems to intersect with shifting gender norms. If the economy keeps recovering, we should expect to see more and more dads reenter the labor force (moms too) but there likely will be a more lasting impact.
Claire Cain Miller agrees:
[T]aking a longer view shows a marked increase in the number of stay-at-home fathers, to 2 million in 2012 from 1.1 million in 1989, according to Pew. Even if fathers who can’t find jobs are excluded from the data, there is still a notable increase since 1989 in stay-at-home dads, said Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at Pew and an author of the report.
The most telling change is that just over a fifth of at-home fathers say the main reason they are home is to care for family, up from 5 percent in 1989, and that segment is the fastest-growing.
