Growing Number of Dads Home with the Kids

Photo Credit: Aurimas / Creative Commons By Gretchen Livingston.

The number of fathers who do not work outside the home has risen markedly in recent years, up to 2 million in 2012.1 High unemployment rates around the time of the Great Recession contributed to the recent increases, but the biggest contributor to long-term growth in these “stay-at-home fathers” is the rising number of fathers who are at home primarily to care for their family.

The number of fathers who are at home with their children for any reason has nearly doubled since 1989, when 1.1 million were in this category.2 It reached its highest point—2.2 million—in 2010, just after the official end of the recession, which spanned from 2007 to 2009. Since that time, the number has fallen slightly, driven mainly by declines in unemployment, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.3

While most stay-at-home parents are mothers, fathers represent a growing share of all at-home parents – 16% in 2012, up from 10% in 1989. Roughly a quarter of these stay-at-home fathers (23%) report that they are home mainly because they cannot find a job. Nearly as many (21%) say the main reason they are home is to care for their home or family. This represents a fourfold increase from 1989, when only 5% of stay-at-home fathers said they were home primarily to care for family.

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Dissolving the Institution of Marriage

By Taylor Lewis.

For years, opponents of same-sex marriage fretted that the unleashing of gay nuptials would open the door for all types of sexual decadence. Last presidential cycle, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was panned heavily for comparing gay marriage to polygamy at a New Hampshire stop on the campaign trail. After a college student questioned his vigorous opposition to same sex couples being wed, Santorum responded in turn: “If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong?” The remark was met with boos from students and condemnation from the liberal press.

Less than two years later, Santorum ran a victory lap after a federal judge struck down a ban on polygamy in Utah. The ruling didn’t enshrine the right to polygamy in the state per se; it only held that polygamous individuals can’t be discriminated against under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. They still don’t have the right to marry, but give it time.

The judge’s decision was easily predictable. Shortly before the Supreme Court struck down the federal non-recognition of same-sex marriages last summer, one liberal writer had already moved on to advocating for legalized polygamy. The berating of conservative slippery-slope hysteria? Quickly forgotten for the sake of more freedom.

Since at least the Reagan Era, the early proponents of same-sex marriage in America assured traditional folks that they only wanted the same monogamous love enjoyed by heterosexuals. Andrew Sullivan, the passionate gay marriage supporter who broke cultural and political barriers as head of the New Republic, wrote in 1989 that marriage “provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone.” It was this institution Sullivan wished to incorporate into gay life. While admitting that “gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical” he found being both “gay” and “bourgeois” to no longer be “an absurd proposition.”