Story at a glance
- One in five stay-at-home parents are dads, a recent Pew Research Center study found.
- That share has swelled in recent decades.
- The reasons dads choose to stay at home are varied. But for many, economics play a role.
The ranks of stay-at-home parents are perennially dominated by mothers. But as women make educational and economic strides, turning some of them into the bigger earners in their households, a growing number of dads are opting to care for their kids full-time.
One in five stay-at-home parents are now fathers, a recent Pew Research Center study found.
The percentage of parents who do not work for pay has hovered at 18 percent for roughly the past 30 years, according to the Pew study. But the share of stay-at-home parents who are fathers has gone up, growing from 11 percent in 1989 to 18 percent in 2021.
Experts attribute the rise of the stay-at-home dad to changes in economic conditions for families.
“Women’s earning potential has risen considerably over this time as their educational attainment has steadily increased,” said Jocelyn Wikle, assistant professor at Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life.
Women have been steadily outpacing men in educational attainment for years. The U.S. Census Bureau found that in 2021, 53.1 percent of all adults aged 25 or older who had completed a bachelor’s degree or more were women, while 46.9 percent were men.
A 2022 Pew study found that women are also gaining ground in the highest-paying professions in the country. According to the study, women make up 35 percent of the workers in the U.S.’s 10 highest-paying professions, such as physician, lawyer and pharmacist.
That figure is 22 percentage points higher than in 1980, the study also shows.
“These economic realities mean that for some families having a stay-at-home father and breadwinner mother is best,” Wikle added.
The difference in earning potential stemming from education played a big role in why Chris Braaten, a 40-year-old father of two in Bakersfield, Calif., chose to be a stay-at-home parent.
Before they got married, Braaten and his wife agreed that one of them would stay home to care for their future children. And after their first daughter was born, Braaten’s wife initially did so, while working at a local college.
But she missed her work in the nonprofit sector, and given their different education levels — Braaten has an associate’s degree while his wife has a bachelor’s — the couple knew that she would be able to earn more in both the short and long term.
On top of that, Braaten was unfilled at work and more interested in caring for his child.
So when the couple got pregnant again, Braaten offered to stay home.
“It felt like a no brainer,” he said.
The Hill spoke with half a dozen full-time stay-at-home dads who, like Braaten, said their wives had more earning potential stemming from a difference in education.
Many of the men The Hill spoke to said that having one parent stay home to care for the children was something both they and their spouse wanted.
Many of the fathers, like Braaten, also expressed dissatisfaction in their work and said that staying at home with their children provided them with a deeper sense of satisfaction than their jobs.
“I did not like my job … and all I thought about all day was ‘what could I be doing with our kid’,” said Braaten.
For most, that difference in earning potential played a role in which, if any, parent stayed home with the children early in their marriages.
But for some, that difference didn’t factor into how caregiving work was distributed until later — often becoming a bigger consideration when the skyrocketing cost of child care caught up with families.
“The cost of child care is really, really high and hard to get,” said Noelle Chesley, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “So that’s going to force a lot of parents to do things that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered like have the man stay home.”
Child care is becoming increasingly out of reach for many families. The cost for a single child ranged from $4,810 a year for school-age home-based care in small counties to more than $15,000 for infant center-based care in large counties in 2018, the most recent year data was collected, according to a U.S. Labor Department brief released earlier this year.
Those price ranges are equivalent to between 8 percent and a little more than 19 percent of a median family income per child in paid care, according to the brief.
The price of child care played a role in Cannon Ingalls’s decision to stay home after he, his wife and five children moved in 2017 from Missouri to Minneapolis.
Ingalls’s children struggled to cope with the change from living in suburban Missouri to an urban environment. So, he and his wife discussed having one of them stay home to help make things easier for the kids.
Ingalls’s wife made more money as a nurse practitioner than he did as a paramedic.
“From a financial standpoint, most of my paycheck was going towards child care and putting gas in the car and that was about it,” said Ingalls. “Everything else was being paid for by my wife.”
Jeff Carlson, a 43-year-old stay-at-home dad in Breckenridge, Colo., also said that a lack of access to affordable day care played a part in his decision to stay home full-time with his son.
Like Ingalls, about 80 percent of Carlson’s salary was going towards child care at one point, he said.
“That wasn’t enough, with my wife’s business being successful, to lose out on time with him,” he said.
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