New Census Data: Stay-At-Home-Dads on the Rise

There were 158,000 stay-at-home dads, up from 140,000 in 2008 (about a 13%jump)…Still, the number is less than 1 percent of married couples.

The number of Stay-At-Home-Dads is on the rise & the number of stay-at-home moms are on the decline according to Census Bureau figures released Friday that was assessing the recession’s impact on families. What does “Stay-At-Home-Dad” mean in these census numbers? These are married fathers with children under 18 years old who have remained out of the labor force for more than one year primarily so they can care for the family while their wives work outside the home. Therefore, you can see these numbers are good to know, but a bit misleading or incomplete based on other definitions of “stay-at-home-dad”…because it excludes many part-time at home dads who serve as the primary caregiver, freelance dads, or dads out of work for under 12 months, etc.

Census Finds More Stay-At-Home Dads By Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer posted on Manufacturing.Net on January 15, 2010, includes more details about the census figures and some quotes from family demographer experts.

Other findings from the Census Bureau Data posted in this article include:
–There are an estimated 5.3 million “stay-at-home” parents in the U.S., based on a narrow definition in which one spouse is in the labor force for the entire year and the other spouse is not for the reason of “taking care of home and family.”
–The number of stay-at-home moms declined from 5.3 million in 2008 to 5.1 million last year. That was the lowest since 2001, which was also during a recession.
–About 22.6 percent of married couples with children under 15 had a stay-at-home mom, down from 23.7 percent in 2008.
(The 2009 data is based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which was conducted last March.)

Sam Roberts, of the NY Times, in Figures Look at Families in Recession, also makes sense of this recent census data & breaks down more of the data about families like the median age for which men marry ticked up slightly to 28.1 years of age.