My level of patience has dramatically increased after six years of being a stay-at-home parent.
The amount of times that you are interrupted mid-sentence.
I can go get them.
I have a feeling he pooped his pants.
My name is Christopher Hughes.
I have two children, and I've been a stay-at-home dad for six years.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for 13 years.
And I have been a stay-at-home dad for approximately eight years.
I officially became a stay-at-home dad about three and a half years ago.
There is a new report out about the stay-at-home dads.
Two of my good buddies are stay-at-home dads.
The work, it is tough.
It's... I couldn't do it.
We've seen a couple of incredible, tremendous changes in the United States since the 1960s and
second wave feminism, first and foremost, the dramatic increase women's presence in the paid labor
force. The other pretty
significant change, much more recently, just in the last generation, is how involved fathers are in
child care.
We've seen a significant increase in the share of hours that fathers spend on household chores and on
child care. That said, there still is a big gap between the amount of time that mothers devote.
So while we've seen a little bit of a closing of the gap, there still is a significant difference
between mothers and fathers.
And part of the change that we've seen is attributable to the fact that many more mothers are
working outside of the home now.
My
wife is a physician and a professor at a medical school.
I could have two kids during my medical school training and residency because, you know, I had a
great support person and who was willing to give up his career.
I began working in restaurants when I was 15 and then worked until I was 30 before I gave up my
career to start staying home with the kids.
I was in law school, and then we implicitly decided that it would be best if I stay home with our son
and she'd go off and bring home the bacon, so to speak.
I never made the assumption that I would stay home.
The assumption that is my wife would.
I loved what I did, and I was good at it, but I would never make the money that she did.
I had a great opportunity to stay at home.
I was a police officer in Detroit, and I got hurt on the job.
So I was given, I guess you would call it like an early retirement.
It probably would have cost $60,000 a year to have somebody watch our kids.
Because of the prices, I mean, not working full-time, we decided that if I were to start
working part-time, that would barely cover the costs of the daycare.
We were paying something around $1,500 a month for child care, which was a big chunk of my paycheck
that I was bringing home.
And it did get bothersome to me that I was working basically to have someone else watch my kids.
People still say that women should be the primary caretaker.
They should be the ones who take time off of work when the new child enters the family and vice versa.
Public polling data says that men are expected to be the breadwinners.
So there's this sort of tension between what's going on in the labor force and the achievements and
advances that women have made.
But then these societal attitudes that are kind of lagging some of those trends.
My mom definitely thought that it did not sound very ambitious to want to be a stay-at-home parent.
A friend of my wife told her that she cannot ever marry a man who's not working.
Well, my job is here with me at home when I'm teaching him in school and feeding him and bathing
and make sure he does his homework, playing with him.
Job does not always mean paycheck.
Job to me means responsibility.
The experience of stay-at-home dads today really mirrors the experiences of stay-at-home moms for
generations. The feelings on one hand have kind of isolation and alienation from others and the
challenges: the mundane, repetitive nature of parenting day after day after day.
You want to give all your Barbies away, OK?
The challenges would be the feeling of not being appreciated sometimes.
Like if you spend a whole day doing something and you're so excited, like when your spouse comes home
and you want them to notice that you did something or got something done, and that can be tough
sometimes because the kids definitely don't, at their age, show much appreciation.
One of the biggest struggles that we have is the isolation and your value and self-worth.
It is a difficult question to answer because you don't have that external paycheck or that promotion
to show you what you're worth to your family.
The isolation and just that sense of being in prison, it can take a toll.
When you're caring for a little one, you can't have a conversation with him outside of Barbies
in the play house and everything.
And there's times when you just want to talk to someone.
I don't believe that I know any other stay-at-home dads in person.
I have friends that are stay-at-home moms that I can kind of express our common
struggles. They're not identical struggles.
It's really hard because even like some of the Facebook groups and stuff, it will be stay-at-home
moms, stay-at home-moms, stay-at-home moms.
But the large majority, I would send an invite to them, and I would I would never hear anything back
from them.
Our co-founder, Matt Schneider, tried to join a local moms group in his neighborhood, and they very
politely said, "You seem like a really good guy, but the way the rules are for our group, it's too
uncomfortable." You know, a lot of guys feel isolated and lonely and we're definitely
able to foster a sense of belonging and community to these guys.
We were baby wearing our little ones at museums, we were going for strolls over the Brooklyn Bridge, and
we were taking parent meet classes.
And just being surrounded by this really active, hands on community of dads really
enabled me to embrace my role as an at-home dad.
I wrote a book called The Ultimate Stay at Home Dad, Your Essential Manual for Being a Full-Time Father
that comes out October 2021, and I hope that that book is able to help the dads in a way that I didn't
have when I first started.
If we compare U.S.
families with those of comparable nations in northern Europe, Scandinavia in particular, we find
that U.S. family leave policies are pretty meager.
So in order to foster gender equality and gender progress, what the countries did is they passed use
it or lose it policies whereby men had to take X number of weeks or months of paid family leave,
otherwise it would just disappear.
So that policy change really led to a cultural shift whereby it has become more acceptable for men
to be stay-at-home dad.
If the United States wants to have similar changes to our gender, to our work family arrangements,
dynamics, we need to pass generous paid family leave policies.
We've seen another spike in the number of stay-at-home dad and moms.
Many of those dads by force enjoyed spending time with their kids and like parenting, but ultimately
they wanted to get back into the workforce.
Their identity was wrapped up in their work.
We compared them with stay-at-home dads who chose to stay at home in agreement with their partners
typically, they were the ones who were much more comfortable with this new situation.
I still enjoy cooking and I feel that it definitely strengthens my ability to be a stay-at-home parent.
And feeling the kind of accomplishment that you do at a career is different than the kind of
accomplishments that you feel as a stay-at-home parent, because when you stay at home, you look more
in the accomplishments of your family as a whole.
I'm in training to be a part-time firefighter for the city of Farmington Hills and the need to be an
asset to the family more than I already am.
I feel that I can return to law school when I feel the time is right.
And in the meantime, I am the father, the cook, the counselor, the nurse.
I have all these different hats and different professions as a stay-at-home dad.
Look, I can chop wood, I can fix cars, I can drink whiskey, I can write a novel, I can do all that.
And I can also sew, and I can bake, and I can give people hugs.
You know, the misconception that my masculinity is tied to my job is a myth.
Some experts are saying this economic downturn unfairly targets women.
It actually does fall on women disproportionately at home during this time period, the home schooling,
the cooking and the housework, etc., the child care.
We found that working mothers felt like they were having to sort of pick up more of the slack in terms
of the child care responsibilities, whether they had kids who were at home doing school or whether
their daycare was closed.
And then we also found that women were more likely to say that the challenge of sort of working and
raising kids during Covid had negative impacts on their careers, that they felt that they couldn't
give 100% at work.
I think if you're two working parents right now or a single parent, it has got to be some of the most
difficult times in your life.
I do not know how you juggle a job and teaching and housework all the same time.
If I do this professionally, I'm a professional stay-at-home dad, and if I'm struggling, then my
heart goes out to you.
Do you have to run right in to your appointment?
When my wife is working from home and seeing patients, the kids have definitely either barged
into the office and interrupted her calls or banged on the door and tried to get in.
And it's definitely challenging for her.
I would say that staying at home with my children has aided my wife and her success throughout her
career in order to pursue everything and accomplish what she has.