Time for the Annual AHD Stat Attack

Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 by rebel in at home moms, at-home dads, census, stats

It always sneaks up on me, but the folks at the Census Bureau have again dropped their annual at-home dad statistics numbers for me to chew over. (This is a bit of an overstatement: the Census actually puts out a whole bunch of stuff under the title “Familes and Living Arrangements”. If you want the at-home dad numbers, it’s cleverly hidden in table FG8, in cell H7. The press release also mentions the stat.)

This year, the number of at-home dads is 158,000, which is a bump from last year’s 140,000. Last year was likely a statistical hiccup, and this year’s stats are much closer to other recent years. As I say every year, when you’re dealing with numbers this small, it’s hard to discern year-to-year differences, but when viewed over a longer time period, the trends become clearer.

Each year, it’s important to look at the caveats. The number of at-home dads actually counts only dads who are exclusively at home for 52 straight weeks without looking for work and whose spouse was fully employed for all of those 52 weeks. If you work part-time, you’re out. If you went to school, you’re out. Needless to say, this undercounts the number of at-home dads by at least an order of magnitude, and in today’s increasingly flexible work environment, the difference between the actual number of at-home dads and the number of dads meeting the official definition is growing each year. It would not be absurd to say that there are in excess of 2 million at home dads, though the (legitimate) math you’d have to use to get there is quite different than what the Census folks offer.

The obvious question is what impact the recession is (or isn’t) having on these numbers. And the short answer is: I have no idea. The numbers are gathered in March and stretch back 52 weeks, so they certainly don’t capture the full extent of the joblessness we’ve seen (though it captures a lot of it). Some of this may be driven by the fact that a lot of guys who are nominally at-home dads are beginning to look for work, therefore ruining their “eligibility” for at-home dad status. In an uncertain economic time, the number of job-hunting AHDs no doubt swells. But I’m no demographer, so I’m always open to theories. Next year should prove interesting: those stats are being nailed down as we speak.

(Interestingly, the number of at-home moms was down 200,000, the second straight drop of that magnitude. Again, the number of at-home moms is under-counted, too, for the same reason. It does suggest that even as the number of parents at home rises, fewer and fewer at-home parents can afford not to spend at least a little time testing the job market.)