Editorial:
From the article [1]:
...
The role of fathers as caregivers is up again, slightly, the bureau says in a report called Who's Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2010 [2].
Of the 12.2 million American children under the age of five whose mothers are in the paid workforce, nearly a third (32 percent) are "regularly" cared for by their fathers, compared with 26 percent nine years ago.
This reinforces numbers released in an earlier report by the Bureau, which found that the number ofstay-at-home fathers nearly doubled [3]to 158,000 between 2003 to 2009, and at least one academic's estimate that the number of single fathers raising children rose to 2.79 million this year [4], twice what it was in 1990.
Which hardly means that fathers come close to mothers in the numbers that are the primary or regular caregivers for their children. Still, if the goal is eventual parity at home and work, this is a small (but statistically significant) step in the right direction. Right?
Maybe.
On the one hand, the reason for the increase in fathers as caregivers is not that men have "opted out" of the workforce in swarms, motivated by a new yearning to be with their children. Most of them left their jobs because they lost them. The Great Recession was dubbed the "Mancession" by economists, because it fell far harder on men than women. Another of its results -- that women now account for 50 percent of all workers [5] for the first time in history -- is a similarly unclear "victory." Women caught up not because they sped up, but rather because men slowed down. I'm not sure that counts as progress.
And yet, change is born of new norms. If you see something often enough, it becomes what you expect to see. The more we see fathers staying home with children, whatever their reasons, the more accepted it becomes for fathers to be at home with children. Dads who are clearly involved, whether by choice or by circumstance, lead us to eventually assume that's just what Dads do. The more men are "regular" caregivers, the more they will be perceived as such -- even presumed to be such -- and the freer they will be to take on that role.
It's a start.
...
Source:
Huffington Post
URL:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/stat-at-home-dads-recession_b_1137330.html
Date:
December 11, 2011
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