Posted on 30. Apr, 2004 by Brian Reid in General
One of the great drawbacks in the expanding pool of at-home dad bloggers is that you’re less and less likely to hear the news of the day from me. Case in point: Peter Baylies’ At-Home Dad blog got right on the latest U.S. Census release yesterday, before I even had a chance to digest it. (By the way, Pete’s blog has settled into its final home at www.athomedad.com. Please update your bookmarks, and I’m sorry if this caused any confusion.)
To add what to Pete wrote, let me first say the nice folks at the Census Bureau seem to be having second thoughts about their low-ball estimate of our numbers. While that number — 105,000 at-home dads — is still in this year’s press release, they also add that 2 million preschoolers have dad as a primary caregiver. While this stat makes zero sense next to the 105,000 number (and even less sense when you count the 600,000 gradeschoolers that have dad as primary caretaker), it’s nice to have it included, to offer a competing view.
(I’ve discussed before the wide divergence between the Census Bureau’s household survey data — from which the 2 million number comes from — and the labor market data, where the 105,000 number comes from. Suffice it to say that there hasn’t been a big effort on their part to explain that difference.)
These numbers have become my great white whale, and I actually took a chunk of naptime yesterday to pull out the raw data from the SIPP survey that gives us the big numbers to see if I could better estimate the current at-home dad numbers. But I gave up after a struggle … I’m no demographer. If any of you are, I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.
amy
30. Apr, 2004
come on, man, strike through the mask!
(heheheh. I love getting a chance to say that.)
Elizabeth L-B
03. May, 2004
Hey, nice site. I followed the link back from your cafepress store.
The reason the numbers are so different is that they’re asking very different questions.
The 2 million figure is the answer to: when mom is at work, how often is it the father who is caring for the children (under age 15) for most of the time? Especially in working-class families, it’s very common for parents to work different shifts in order to avoid having to pay for child care.
The 105,000 figure is based on the father a) being completely out of the labor force — not self-employed, not part-time, not looking for work — for an entire year, and b) saying that the reason they’re not working or looking for work is that they’re caring for home and family. This is a much more narrow definition of a at home dad- someone who has no paid employment, and who is doing so deliberately and voluntarily.
Tell me your definition of an at home dad, and I’ll see if I can coax anything meaningful out of the data.