Stay-At-Home-Dads Are One in a Million

Do a search on Amazon.com and you will only find eight books on Stay-At-Home-Dads. Three of these are written by women. Four are written by men and one is written by someone named Kris—could be either. The point is that there is still only a small segment of our population that has embraced this role reversal. I assume in the early fifties there weren’t many books discussing how women could succeed in business, no matter how hard they tried.

What does this tell you, someone who has realized the many benefits of quitting the outside workforce and being the primary parent? More to the point, how does this lack of media attention affect you? Should you be discouraged by the lack of support and expert advice? Is this an indication that maybe your decision was a bad one? If you want to be like everyone else, this might be the wakeup call you need to get back to work. Since you already know you’re in an unusual situation, I’m guessing that conformity is not one of your strongest values. Read on and see how poorly you fit in.

You probably already know how unique you are. If your wife has any sense (and I will assume she does) she tells you how lucky she is every single day when she gets home from work. You wake every morning and leap out of bed, knowing that your unique brand of parenting is just the thing to aim your children in the right direction so that, when they are adults, they can lead the rest of the country onward into a bright and promising future! The SAHD Revolution will change the world!

A bit too dramatic? Let’s look at the numbers. Five years ago, “They” estimated that there were two million Stay-At-Home-Dads in the country. I don’t know who “They” were, but they must have been pretty believable because that number popped up in a lot of places. Last year, the Census Bureau apparently wanted to be “Them” so they looked real hard and came up with a different number: 98,000. Either the number of SAHDs declined dramatically in four years or the definition of SAHD changed. Either way, “They” now say that there are less than 100,000 of us roaming about.

To put that into perspective, there are 293.7 million people in the United States. 5.5 million are Stay-At-Home Parents. 5.4 million of those are women. That means that of the parents who decided that daycare was not the answer for them, only 2% decided that Dad is best suited for the job. Of Stay At Home Parents, you are one in fifty-five.

102.8 million Americans are adult men (over twenty years old). There are 102.7 million men who either do not have kids or do not stay home with them during the day. While you may not be one in a million, you are, you are—quite literally—one in a thousand. Actually, you’re one in 1049.

Merry Christmas, Super Dad.

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