Leaving ‘Mr. Mom’ behind
Percentage of stay-at-home fathers has increased dramatically over past 30 years
As a father of two, Gerard Gousman enjoyed his career as a tour manager, working for artists including DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power.
But the job required him to travel about six months out of the year. So when his wife, Quaneisha Gousman, became pregnant in 2018, he crunched some numbers. Gousman, now 45, quit his job to stay home to care for the children while his wife, who has a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering, continued working in user experience research in Seattle, where the family lives. Becoming a stay-at-home father, he said, “was an easy decision once we realized it was viable.”
Gousman, who has since joined the board of the National At-Home Dad Network, said the move has allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”
The percentage of stayat-home parents who are fathers has risen dramatically over the past three decades. Pew Research Center, using the Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, published a report over the summer showing that almost 1 in 5 American parents who do not work for pay are fathers. From 1989 to 2021 (the latest Pew data), that represented a 63.6% increase — the result of rapid growth in the share of fathers who do not work for pay and a slight decrease in the share of mothers who do not work for pay. (The share of women working is at an all-time high, driven by mothers of children younger than 5 who have generally been likeliest to stay home.)
The continued rise may be partly attributable to the pandemic and its associated recession, when some men lost their jobs and liked being at home; or to the recession of 2008, the high cost of child care and higher rates of women working in jobs that require graduate degrees than men, creating more job stability for the former.
For many families, a stay-athome parent is not an option — they need two incomes to make ends meet. Others decide it’s economically beneficial for one parent to stay home — employers pay disproportionately more to workers who can be on-call at work, meaning another parent has to be on-call at home, and child care can cost more than a parent’s takehome pay.
Stephanie Coontz, a
historian and author of the forthcoming “For Better and Worse: The Problematic
Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage,” said shared labor is not necessarily a new development. Before the 20th century, couples were partners in work like “setting up a farm or small business,” she said. In colonial households, women were often referred to as “deputy husbands,” because if the husband had to leave (to fight, for instance), it was up to the wife to keep the business running.
But in the 20th century and early aughts, being a stay-athome dad came with stigma. In fact, the notion of a father as primary caretaker was considered so absurd that it produced comedies like “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Daddy Day Care” (2003) and “Cheaper By the Dozen” (2003), to
name a few.
Today, the stigma is lessening for some — as one bellwether, dad humor is all over social media — as more men become stay-at-home dads by choice.
Hector Jaeger, who ran a small business and worked in carpentry, became a fulltime stay-at-home father in 1990, when his second of three daughters was born. Education factored into the decision: Jaeger has a high school diploma, while his wife, Nancy Jaeger, who runs a psychotherapy practice, has a master’s degree.
Jaeger, who lives in Bath, Maine, said the stigma of being a stay-at-home father in the 1990s was isolating: When people asked him what he did for work, his answer was usually a conversation ender. “People didn’t know what to do with that,” he said. “I felt very much like a misfit.”
“It was very lonely for him,” Nancy Jaeger said. “That would be a regret I had for him,” adding that still the roles made sense because her husband is “a natural nurturer.”
Some fathers were able to find community with other stay-at-home dads.
Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked for a metal-stamping company before becoming a stay-at-home father in 2003, would often take his daughter, Marianna, to meet up with three other stay-at-home dads — whose wives worked at the same insurance company as his — and their children at a park near their home in East Dundee, Illinois.
Some stay-at-home parents have, of course, made a lucrative business of it.
Bryan Lambillotte, 38, of San Diego, California, always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. In March 2022, he and his husband, Christopher, who is the chief operating officer and co-owner of a medical device company, welcomed twins — a son and a daughter.
In 2021, the couple decided that Lambillotte, who had lost his job as a sales manager at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego during the pandemic, would be the primary caregiver.
That year Lambillotte began chronicling the couple’s path to parenthood on Instagram. (The couple also has a TikTok account with more than 1 million followers.)
The couple’s following grew, and Lambillotte turned it into an LLC and hired an agent and manager who help facilitate brand collaborations. The couple hired a nanny for three days a week so Lambillotte could focus on his business part time.
As a result, he has tweaked his title: “stay-at-home working dad.”