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When dads stay home

Some couples find that having dad leave a job to care for the kids works out well financially and emotionally.

By CHRISTINA REXRODE
Published April 16, 2006

Jeff King used to spend Monday to Friday as a software analyst at Nielsen Media Research in Oldsmar. He was at his desk by 8 every morning for the TV audience research company.

But that changed when his daughter, Lily, was born in 2004, and he left Nielsen to be a full-time dad. Now he spends most days playing with puzzles and watching Dora the Explorer at home in Odessa. A 40-hour week? Forget it. A paycheck with his name on it? That's gone too. And since Emily was born March 14, his workload has doubled.

Good trade, said King, 34.

"I enjoy every day," he said, "being a father and being here with my children."

Jeff and his wife, Amy, didn't want to put their children in day care. Financially, it made more sense for Jeff to stay home. Amy's job, as a research director at Cox Target Media, paid more than Jeff's. And if Jeff and Amy were both in the work force, he said, they would probably pay more than $1,000 a month for day care for their two children.

"It would be almost as if I was working half my time just to pay for day care," said King.

It's hard to pin down the number of King's fellow stay-at-home dads. The Census Bureau estimates there are 98,000 at-home dads in the United States, compared with 5.4-million at-home moms. But Peter Baylies, author of The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook, said those numbers are misleading because the Census definition of an at-home parent is someone who makes no money in 52 weeks. He thinks the number of at-home dads is closer to 2-million, up from 1-million when he became an at-home dad in 1993.

Sympathetic employers and new technology have made it easier for more dads to stay home, simultaneously decreasing the stigma against men leaving the 8 to 5 work force.

Generation X parents are more family focused than work-centric boomers, said Elizabeth Miller, a spokeswoman with the nonprofit Families and Work Institute in New York. Companies are starting to respond.

"They realize that you don't check your personal life at the door," she said. "In the past, you see people get on their career paths and stay on till they jump off at retirement. Now you see periods of working and not working."

Laptops, high-speed Internet, handheld wireless devices and phone forwarding systems allow companies to be flexible in letting dads work from home, she said.

And for dads who want to step away from the corporate world entirely for a few years, some companies are starting to accommodate for that, as well, she said. IBM and JP Morgan, for example, have implemented reorientation programs for employees who take time off. Deloitte's "Personal Pursuits" program lets participants leave the company for up to five years.

A program like Personal Pursuits, Miller said, makes good business sense because it helps the company recruit and retain employees. Giving employees time off is cheaper than losing them, she said. Deloitte said it costs $150,000 to lose a professional, but far less if one leaves and returns.

A CareerBuilder.com survey estimates that 40 percent of working fathers would give up their jobs to be stay-at-home dads if their spouse or partner earned enough money for their family to live comfortably.

So it should be no surprise that when full-time dad Rob Aeschbach, 38, retired from the Marine Corps after his first son, Connor, was born in 2003, other fathers told him: "That's what I want to do. I wish my wife would let me do that."

For couples who assume that two paychecks will give them more income than one, Baylies begs to differ. Day care can eat up half of a person's salary, he said. And there are lots of hidden expenses inherent in the work force. "You buy presents for people at work, you eat out for lunch, you get expensive haircuts, dress shoes," he said.

Staying at home, he said, has allowed him to save money by giving him time to learn how to make household repairs.

He knows dads who make extra money by selling merchandise online, tutoring students from home and freelancing as Web designers.

"You don't really have to do much to make ($10,000) or $15,000 a year," Baylies said. "Plus you add the money that you save (on work expenses), and you do pretty good."

Chris Dufrene, 34, became a stay-at-home dad last summer, when his wife, Cara, took a nursing job at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola. He makes extra money by selling paintball equipment on eBay and taking online surveys after the kids - Helena, 6; Claire, 3; and James, 1 - go to bed.

He tried mystery shopping, but with less success.

"It's hard to take secret pictures at Lowe's with three kids along," he said, laughing.

For Stephan Snavely and Michael Premo, former workers at Clearwater's Tech Data Corp., full-time fatherhood offered them the chance to re-examine their careers.

Snavely, 29, and his wife, Kelsey, 31, were Web designers at Tech Data. But Web design wasn't Stephan's passion, and Kelsey's paycheck was bigger. So his staying home with Jeremy, now 4 months old, was a no-brainer.

He's thinking of starting a business, but he's happy being just a dad.

"I love it," said Snavely of New Port Richey. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

For the Premos, the decision was equally easy. Kathleen's job, as a lawyer at the Tampa Shriners Hospital, paid triple what Michael's did. And Michael, a marketing planner at Tech Data, was itching to pursue a writing career.

"We had talked about her staying home with him and living on my income," said Premo, 35, who lives in Largo. "And that would have meant moving out of our house into a much smaller home in a much different area, downscaling the cars, things like that."

So when Nathaniel, 14 months, naps, Premo does research for a historical novel.

"I'm out of the corporate work force," he said. "I'm done."

But for those who do want to return to the corporate world, Baylies, the Handbook author, has some advice. Dads come to him all the time and say: "This is a big blank on my resume. What do I do?"

He tells them not to worry. Employers know that if you can handle your kids, you can handle your co-workers, he said.

That's advice Aeschbach, the former Marine, has heeded. He has an engineering degree from the U.S. Naval Academy but isn't sure if he'll use it when he returns to work. Because he has spent his adult life in the military, "I don't really know what it's like to go chasing down jobs," he said.

Aeschbach, who lives in Valrico, is not worried. "Maybe I'm just overconfident in the fact that I feel like I'm an intelligent person," he said, "and if I make that known to people then they'll give me a job."

But at-home dads can take steps to help ease their future transition back to the work force, even if they can't work from home, Baylies said.

Keep up with old contacts and colleagues, he said. Join a professional society. Take online classes to maintain skills or learn new ones. Read trade publications. Schedule informational interviews to meet executives at companies that may become future employers.

Dufrene, who worked as a processor at a law firm, worries sometimes about being able to return to work.

"A 40-year-old guy who hasn't worked in five years? I could be pretty difficult to market," he said.

The prospect bothers him for only a minute. "And then I see James standing on top of the couch and I run over and get him before he falls," he said, "and it just doesn't bother me any more."

[Last modified April 16, 2006, 19:35:50]