A new study by the Pew Research Center shows that the number of dads who choose to stay home and care for their children and families has quadrupled over the past 25 years. Can social and economic factors explain the change?
Make no mistake - fathers who are the primary caregiver for their children are far from the norm. In fact, they are only 16% of all stay-at-home parents. But that number is up from 10% since 1989, when Pew started analysing data. The steady growth since then suggests that these numbers represent a growing trend, not a fad.
"It's up from 1.1 million to 2 million," says Gretchen Livingston, one of the study authors. More significantly, the number of men who say they stay at home specifically to take care of their home and children is at an all-time high, more than four times the rate of fathers who gave that same answer in 1989.
"When I first started being a stay-at-home dad I was the only father in New York in Riverside Park," says Jacques Elmaleh, who started staying at home with his children in 2000. "Slowly there were more and more."
In fact, a yearly meeting for Chicago-based stay-at-home dads that started in 1995 has now grown into a national non-profit organisation with 70 chapters across the US and several in Canada.
Through its annual conference and its active social media presence, the group helps dads connect and offers advice on the same types of things about which moms confer - nappy rash, teething pain, and playground politics. They also provide moral support.
"Stay-at-home dads have a unique situation - we don't have role models so we are kind of doing this on our own and trying to figure out how to navigate the relationships that are different than we expected them to be when we first got married," says Al Watts, the president of the National At-Home Dad Network.
As women have taken on more high-paying careers, the assumption that they'll stay home with the children has become less automatic.
