Number of stay-at-home dads has doubled in past decade as 'man-cession' bites

Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2012-06-19 00:42

Article here. It shows up in a UK paper but it's about US trends. Excerpt:

'Not too long ago, a father who chose to stay at home with kids while his wife went back to work after childbirth was something of an anomaly, opening the doors on countless Mr Mom jokes, but nowadays, a growing numbers of dads wear the moniker as a badge of honor.

Nationwide, the number of stay-at-home fathers - while still relatively small - has more than doubled in the past decade. There were only about 81,000 Mr Moms in 2001, or about 1.6 per cent of all stay-at-home parents.

By last year, the number had climbed to 176,000, or 3.4 per cent of stay-at-home fathers, according to U.S. Census data.'

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The number of stay-at-home dads is apparently increasing, in part because of men's difficulties in finding jobs. Also, women outnumber men at colleges and comprise 50% of the work force. Are men being shut out of the work place? That raises a question: if men can't find a job and are unmarried, how will they survive? I suspect men have at least one ace in the hole: they will do jobs women won't do, though many of those are not truly desirable jobs. Still, that may leave many men struggling just to survive. Will the government step in and create welfare programs for men? And who will pay for them? Single mothers with jobs? What a strange result: working single mothers supporting non-working single mothers and men who can't find jobs. The welfare state will likely collapse at that point. But I'm just speculating.

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Submitted by el cid on Tue, 2012-06-19 02:23

The book was set in the far future, where the shining cities were populated only by women. The men were wild things that lived out on the plains in huts and caves. When the history of this world was described, it went something like this:

Women got smarter and started doing all the jobs that men used to do. Men, outshone by the women, were reduced to all the menial labour-intensive and unpleasant jobs that women didn't want to do. Women became richer, smarter, healther, men became rougher, more physical, less educated as they didn't need it. As technology improved there were less and less of those undesirable jobs that men needed to do, since machines could do the job just as well - till the men had no role at all, and the women gently 'released' them onto the plains where they could glory in their animal sides and run free.

Suddenly it's not seeming quite so 'sci-fi'....

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Submitted by GaryB on Tue, 2012-06-19 08:35

An interesting plot for a sci-fi book. As you say, it's not so far-fetched.

Some beast is definitely slouching toward Bethlehem to be born--and we may not like that beast very much.

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Submitted by el cid on Wed, 2012-06-20 03:14