Stay at home Dads

‘Home dads’, ‘house husbands’ or ‘Mr Mums’, are fathers that opt to stay at home to look after the home and family whilst the mother becomes the main income earner for the family. This is a relatively new development in the family structure, as it has only been considered socially acceptable for women to work full-time and maintain a family for less than a century. In some regions, ‘stay-at-home dads’ are still stigmatised as being second-rate or lazy, and working mothers are criticized for replacing their husbands as the main bread-winner of the household. This can perhaps be explained as a remnant of a society passed, where it was expected that the woman would be the parent to give up her job and stay at home.

Life as a stay-at-home dad is really quite similar to that experienced as a stay-at-home mum. As the parent who spends the most time caring for the home and children, it is up to you to supervise homework, to carry-out school runs, to organize and be present for play-dates, to wake-up and organize the kids in the morning and to wash and feed them before bed time. If your children participate in extracurricular activities – such as music lessons or sports – you may need to drop them off and pick them up from practice and be present for important matches or performances. Obviously no family is the same, so it may be that some of these jobs are taken up by your partner whilst you undertake others.