Not all men are ready to stay at home with the kids

The surge in the number of stay-at-home fathers is part of a wider, worrying trend, says Alasdair Palmer
By Alasdair Palmer Published: 6:45PM BST 10 Apr 2010 The number of fathers in Britain who stay at home to look after their children has, according some surprising new statistics, increased tenfold over the past decade. There are apparently now about 600,000 men in the UK who are "househusbands", making up six per cent of men with dependent children. It is certainly true that househusbands are much more common than they were a decade ago. But why? The main reason appears to be money: when a woman earns more than a man, the household sacrifices income when she stays at home, so economic logic dictates that he should do so instead. If money is indeed driving the trend, it should accelerate over the next few years. Girls are increasingly doing better than boys within the education system: half of all girls leaving school at 18 go to university, compared to only 40 per cent of boys. Women may soon out-earn men routinely which should mean more househusbands. But things may not be quite so straightforward. The traditional social stigma against being a "kept man" has not disappeared completely, as many of those in that role will tell you, as they recite the number of times they have been slighted from the moment they answer the question, "And what do you do?" with, "I stay at home and look after the children". It is not only other men who do the slighting: women do it, too. One female friend, whose partner does the cleaning and looks after the children while she works as a banker, admits to finding "something emasculating, de-sexing, about a man who spends all his time at home looking after children". The persistence of that attitude acts as a brake on the number of men who are prepared to take up the role. Still, the stigma against being a stay-at-home dad is less than it used to be. Men of my father's generation would simply not have considered it. It didn't matter how much more money their wives might have earned: no self-respecting man would have stayed at home while his wife went out to work. It would have been too humiliating to renounce the role of "provider". The erosion of that attitude has done much for gender equality, but it has not necessarily been an unmixed good. Providing for a wife and children is the way that most men became responsible adults instead of selfish adolescents. Without taking on the responsibility of providing for a family and without feeling obliged to take it on a lot of men never grow up, which brings a host of social problems in its wake. It is striking that, in areas of high male unemployment, the fact that women find it easier to get part-time work and thus become the main breadwinners has not produced a huge rise in the number of stay-at-home dads patiently doing housework and looking after babies. On the contrary: it has meant a huge rise in single-parent families. In such low-income areas, working women don't enlist their partners as nannies and cleaners: they prefer to live in a household without any man at all, entrusting their children to state-provided childcare. Most say they want to be able to look after their children themselves, rather than go out to work. When they are unable to do so, because the father cannot provide an income, many prefer to live separately and raise their children on their own.

There are many possible explanations for this, ranging from the inability or reluctance of the men to care for the home and the children, to the unwillingness of women to let them do it. But whatever the explanation, it does not suggest that as women's earnings continue to rise, the result will be lots of happy families with men simply taking on the domestic role that their wives used to: rather, we are almost certain to see many more single-parent families. Given the poorer educational and employment prospects for children raised in such families, their higher chance of being involved in crime and of having health problems, that is not an outcome anyone should welcome.