More Men Are Staying Out Of The Workforce To Care For Kids

Still, the 38-year-old father of two says he has no regrets about his decision 10 years ago to step away from his burgeoning career as a commercial pilot to care for his children full time. “My joke forever has been, ‘I’m retired,’ when people ask me what I do,” says Burdick, whose wife, Stephanie, 36, is a physician at a hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“I still get emails all the time from companies trying to get me to come back and fly,” he says, adding that while he occasionally misses the work, he doesn’t plan on returning anytime soon. Sons Walter, 10, and George, 7, are his focus.

Burdick’s wife was working as a resident when the couple realized that the nanny they’d just hired couldn’t cope with the demands of their on-call jobs. After reviewing other child-care options, the couple decided it would make more sense for Ryan to assume care and household responsibilities. The setup has enabled Stephanie to advance much faster in her profession, which has eased the financial strain of living on one income. “My career potential is much higher because he stays home,” she says.

The slow slide in the labor force participation rate of American men in their prime working years—defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as ages 25 to 54—has perplexed economists and policymakers, who have attributed the decline to a number of factors including shrinking payrolls in manufacturing and other traditionally male-dominated sectors, along with lagging educational attainment by men.

Some 88.5% of prime-age men were either working or looking for work last month. That’s down more than 9 percentage points from around the time the BLS began tracking the data in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the rate of workforce engagement for women has more than doubled, from about one-third of the population back then to 77% in the late 1990s; it has since leveled out. The phenomenon has been extensively chronicled in books with such fatalistic titles as and .

Men dropping out of the workforce to assume caregiving responsibilities have played a comparatively small role in the overall trend, but the numbers have been climbing and, by at least one measure, may have hit a record last year.

Often-cited government data may be underestimating the size of the cohort, because the census defines the category narrowly, as husbands in opposite-sex marriages with children under 15 who specifically say they’re not working so that they can care for family, and whose wives are either working or looking for work. Under those terms, men accounted this year for 5% of the one-fifth of US families with a stay-at-home parent, up from about 1% in the mid-’90s and representing 239,000 fathers.

According to a broader analysis by the Pew Research Center—which expands the pool to include any father of a child under 18 who hasn’t been working, regardless of reason or marital status, and also incorporates men in same-sex relationships—the number of stay-at-home dads had swelled to about 2.1 million by 2021, equal to 18% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989.

In the Pew study, 23% said the reason they had exited the labor force was to care for children, as opposed to job loss (13%), disability (34%), or being in school or retired (20%). That’s up from just 4% who cited caregiving in 1989, according to Pew.

Some men transition into full-time parenting after being laid off or becoming disabled, and may cite those instead of caregiving as reasons they aren’t working, because of lingering societal stigma, says Arielle Kuperberg, an associate professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who’s conducted her own review of federal statistics.

Kuperberg found a record 15.2% of fathers of children under 18 were not working last year, up from 14% in 2019 and less than 8% in 1980. Many men may be “functionally stay-at-home parents, even though that’s not the reason they would give on a survey,” she says.

Cultural norms on masculinity, work and family have been slow to evolve, according to Richard Reeves, the author of the new book . “We’ve recast motherhood and what it means to be a mom in such a way that moms can be breadwinners, too, now,” says Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But we haven’t recast fatherhood in such a way as to make it easier for men, both culturally and practically and economically, to become more hands-on fathers.”

Burdick concurs. “The world isn’t really built for stay-at-home dads,” he says, noting, among other impediments, the lack of diaper-changing stations in men’s bathrooms. School administrators routinely call his wife with questions and in emergencies, even though he’s listed as the primary contact.

The large-scale disruption in families’ work and school schedules caused by the pandemic forced a new division of labor in many households. Men 18 years and older spent an average of 1.91 hours a day caring for and helping household members in 2021, according to BLS data. That compares with 2.39 hours for women, but is up from 1.62 hours in 2019 and 1.67 hours in 2003, when the BLS began tracking the figures. It’s too soon to tell whether this represents a more permanent shift in gender roles.

In that regard, a more important driver of change has been the divergence in the evolution of earnings dynamics for men and women. Almost a third of women who were married or co-habiting were contributing at least half of the couple’s total earnings in 2017, up from 25% in 2000 and just 13% in 1980, according to a Pew report.

“All those years of higher-education enrollments going up for women have now started to bear fruit,” says Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who published a report last year on the increase in female breadwinners. “They have jobs that are more stable, that provide health insurance, that are unlikely to go away during a recession.”

She notes that, historically, women who were the main source of household income were mainly unmarried, divorced or widowed. In more recent decades, the increase in breadwinning mothers has been among partnered women. Their in-demand skills in fields such as health care and education have boosted their earning power, which contrasts with the “slide in inflation-adjusted earnings” among their male counterparts, a trend attributable in part to downsizing amid increased corporate mergers and the growth of contract work.

This disparity in earning potential is what helped push Jason Mitchell to take on the role of full-time parent in 2014. At the time, Mitchell was an adjunct professor of English composition at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, while his wife had a Ph.D. and a better-paid tenure-track position in information systems at the university’s business school.

The couple juggled their teaching schedules as best they could after the birth of their first child. That no longer worked with the arrival of baby No. 2. “We were sort of like two ships passing in the night,” recalls Mitchell, 40, who now cares for a brood of four, ages 4 to 11. “Honestly, my English job was not going to be sufficient to cover child-care costs for more than one kid.”

The pandemic drove up America’s already high child-care costs by causing many day-care centers to close while also triggering an exodus of staff seeking higher-paying jobs. In a recent survey, 58% of families said they would spend upward of $10,000 on child care this year, compared with the 45% who said they’d spent at least that much in 2019.

Even once his youngest starts going to school full time, Mitchell says he doesn’t see himself returning to work, “only because there’s so much to do” managing the home and coordinating the schedules of four children.

He considers himself lucky. “I thought I would miss teaching, and I do sometimes,” he says. “But it sort of pales in comparison to being able to watch the children grow and spend as much time with them as I get to.”

Of course most American families don’t have the luxury of living on a single income. Kristopher Park, 34, resigned last year from his job with the state of Delaware as an intake processor for food benefits and other government-assistance programs upon realizing, after comparing options, that his roughly $1,000 biweekly paychecks wouldn’t cover the $2,500 monthly cost of day care for his sons, now 5 and 2.

It made more sense for his wife, Nicole, 32, to accept a $50,000-a-year job as an accountant with the Wilmington Housing Authority and to care for the kids (their third, a daughter, was born in October) than route all of his earnings to a nanny or day care, he says, lamenting the lack of affordable choices.

Although he’s committed to full-time caregiving for the time being, Park uses his spare hours to develop his skills in computer programming and 3D modeling, hoping this will open the doors to better-paying jobs that would make working outside the home worthwhile. “The reality is, with her income alone, we have basically no buffer in the event of an emergency,” he says.

The rise in child-care expenses mirrors an increase in elder-care costs. Out-of-pocket expenses for elders increased 41% from 2009 to 2019. The number of elder-care workers, like the number of child-care providers, remains stubbornly below its pre-pandemic level.

The dearth of affordable options is what motivated Mario Matthews to move in 2020 from Los Angeles to his native Oklahoma City to care for his 60-year-old mother, Kathy Grant, who’d been diagnosed two years before with early onset dementia.

“Some days she remembers her name, other days she doesn’t,” says Matthews, 42, who left his job as a server at celebrity hotspots such as Beauty & Essex and Soho House after Grant’s waning independence and depleted savings effectively pushed her out of the $5,000-a-month assisted living facility where she’d been residing.

Grant can no longer eat or get dressed without assistance. She speaks in patterns, rather than sentences, says Matthews, and is now gripped by a fear of falling down, even when moving about her home. “I have seen it in her eyes,” he says of her anxiety, noting that she now requires sedation for routine checkups at the dentist and eye doctor.

Men accounted for almost 39% of family-care providers in 2020, up from 27% in 1997, according to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. “We see more men are self-identifying as caregivers than they did before, perhaps underscoring the culture shift that is taking place around caregiving, who provides it and who is comfortable talking about it,” says Fawn Cothran, a research director at the NAC.

Some 9% of caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia gave up working entirely last year, figures from the Alzheimer’s Association and the NAC show. Some 18% went from full- to part-time work or cut back hours.

Matthews considered looking for a 9-5 job after he moved to Oklahoma City, but quickly determined that his wages would go entirely to cover the cost of a nurse. He says that in many ways he prefers to look after his mother himself than having to screen potential caregivers. Although Kathy has lost many of her abilities, she responds positively to music and lights up when Matthews dances around or makes funny faces. “It is very fun to see her laugh,” he says.

For some families, caregiving responsibilities shift, with men and women trading places and dipping in and out of the workforce for different stretches of time.

About 70% of American mothers can expect to be the primary breadwinner in their household for at least one year before their first child turns 18, according to a recent study by Glass, the professor in Austin. The average time such mothers can expect to spend as primary earners is about six years, her research showed.

Having one parent at home was always a priority for Andrew Molitor and Meg Bartelt, who chose the town of Bellingham, Washington, in part for its more manageable expenses. “The cost of living is not low, but it’s not San Francisco and it’s not Brooklyn,” says Andrew, 56, who left his $150,000 a year software engineering job at Hewlett-Packard in 2016 to swap caregiving responsibilities with Meg, who was eager to start her own financial-planning firm after years of dipping in and out of part-time work. “If you have one reasonably good job, and you happen to have a cushion of cash to fall back on like we did, then you can actually make this work. You can have that kind of 1950s lifestyle here.”

has a modern twist, with Andrew doing the dishes and tending to daughters Alice, 13, and Beatrice, 9, while Meg works out of a detached office at the back of their property. Marriage counseling, which the couple began before swapping roles, has been key to their success, says Meg: “We went, not because we were on the brink of divorce, but because we wanted to be able to communicate more effectively, comfortably and lovingly with one another.”

Andrew describes their decision-making and child rearing as “a steady process of negotiation and renegotiation,” and says he has no misgivings about leaving his corporate job behind, despite some challenges at the beginning. “After about two years of more or less continual meltdowns, hysteria and freak-out, I kind of got the hang of it.”

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