The paternal instinct

The number of men choosing to stay at home and raise the kids has doubled in the past 14 years. Blake Morrison asks them what it's like and why they do it

Nick Cavender wonders what's going to happen after the summer, when his four-year-old son, Ben, starts school. "I suppose you'll be going back to work," people say, which is doubly annoying: first, because it implies that what he's been doing for the past eight years, since his daughter, Phoebe, was six months old, doesn't count as work; and second, because it ignores the reality of the school day (over by 3.30pm), the school year (long holidays), and school sickness bugs (which mean a parent staying home). "Unless I get a job in a school, I'm not sure how I can go back to work," Nick says. At present his only employment is on Saturdays, with the library service. What began as a six-month sabbatical from a local government post in 1998 has become his life, with him as the homebody, while his wife, an IT systems manager ("Her career is more important to her than mine was to me"), takes on the role of breadwinner.

Nick's not sure how to describe himself. Homedad. Stay-at-home dad. Househusband. Full-time father. Male primary carer. All sound cumbersome, and none can keep pace with the phenomenon. For Nick is no freak. The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that there are now 200,000 homedads in Britain - almost double the number there were in 1993, when official records began. Over the same period, the number of stay-at-home mothers has dropped by nearly a quarter from 2.7 million to 2.1 million - evidence of a small but significant shift in British family life.

Paternal involvement in childcare isn't unprecedented. Two hundred years ago, William Cobbett moved to the country so his children could enjoy a healthy outdoor life and be educated by him at home. But Cobbett still pursued a career, whereas the men I've talked to over the past few weeks - at snatched moments, when their charges were at playschool or asleep - have abandoned their careers, sometimes permanently. These aren't men who are sharing the childcare 50-50 or "doing their bit". They're full-on, 24/7 fathers, for whom "spending time with their family" isn't (as for disgraced politicians) a confession of failure but an active choice.

The reasons they give vary widely. Some mention their partner's greater earning power, but for most it's job satisfaction rather than income that tips the balance: "She's got a job she's passionate about - even I can see it's more worthwhile than mine"; "She has a career, whereas I always relied on picking up odd bits of work." Edmund Farrow, who used to work as a computer programmer, says the decider for him was temperament: "My wife and I decided that I would be the one to look after the kids even before we had any. We were on almost identical incomes so there was no financial compulsion. But this way round best suited our personalities. For instance, last week our youngest [of three] was ill and I was pretty much stuck in the house with her for days. Elaine would have been going stir-crazy after the first morning."

Ideology - or idealism - can play a part, too. "I'm not a new age kind of guy in the least," one father told me, "but I do think there's a spiritual dimension in being around to see a child grow." Two dads I spoke to saw it in moral terms, as a choice that (unlike the manic pursuit of a career) they wouldn't have on their conscience in later life: "When I look back I'm going to feel privileged that I was there for my daughter at a crucial time"; "I'm not going to lie on my deathbed and wish I'd spent less time with my son." Going against the grain can be a motive, too, though when I tried the word "pioneering" on the actor Rick Leaf, a full-time househusband for the past two years and "more dad than actor" for six years before that (he has children of eight, six and two), he was sceptical: "I'm hardly the first. And it's not like being Dr Livingstone in the jungle. I'm just really glad to have left the fast lane to bumble along at snail's pace in the byways."

Leaf says his decision was both pragmatic - "my wife's quite a bit younger than me and her career was on a roll" - and bound up with his own childhood: "I was sent to boarding school for 10 years and I didn't want that for my own kids - I wanted to know them, and for them to know that one of us, rather than a nanny, would be there for them." Several homedads I spoke to echoed his sentiments, citing doubts about entrusting small children to childminders or day nurseries. "No matter how well trained or professional nursery staff are," Jay Roach, from Cheltenham, says, "your child is just part of their job." For Jon Absalom, the key factor was his son's birth: "He was premature and had to spend three months in hospital. After that, the thought of him going into a nursery at six months horrified us. We'd moved out of London by then, too, and for me the prospect of returning to live and work there was worse than the prospect of looking after Jack. So for three days of the week, Emily works as a journalist in London; and on the other days, she's in Dorset and we co-parent, which works just as well."

An arrangement such as this often raises suspicions that Laidback Dad will have so neglected the house during his days in charge that Juggling Mum will have to "do everything" on the other days. Absalom does admit that housework isn't his strong point: "To me the word encapsulates a whole set of skills I don't have. So yes, the house is a bit of a mess. But I do sporadic, I-can't-bear-it-any-more clean-ups. And I take good care of Jack, which is what matters most."

Emily agrees that he's a brilliant dad - like most women in her position, she's happier leaving her child with its father than with an outsider - and adds that she's even more lax about housework than he is. I push them to be more specific about the division of labour, nevertheless. Does he do the washing? "Yes." Vacuum? "Yes." (Emily: "It's true. Jack calls it Daddy's Hoover.") Do the ironing? "Hardly ever." (Emily: "We only iron for weddings and funerals.") Cook? "It's 50-50." Clean the bathroom and loo? "Er ... " (Emily: "Only I ever do that.") Buy Jack's clothes? "The run-of-the-mill stuff, yes, but Emily might buy the fancier stuff. I don't earn any money whatsoever, remember. We're living off one income and it all goes into Emily's bank account. When she goes to London she gives me housekeeping money but since I don't know how much is in her account I'm wary of spending it all - it's subsistence buying and charity shops mostly."

When a woman holds the purse-strings, other role reversals might be expected to follow. But Absalom says he still performs traditional male tasks ("I'm good in the garden and on the allotment"), and other homedads say they're still the one expected to maintain the car, cut the grass, sort out bills etc. Inevitably, they get the odd comment from male friends, "snide remarks about who's wearing the trousers", as Leaf puts it. But an equally common reaction is envy: "I haven't really had any negative reaction from friends," Roach says, "but I do get a lot of, 'Oh, I wish we could do that but we can't afford to.'" And then there's the affirmation that homedads get from women. "Checkout girls are really nice," Leaf says, "and women of a certain age go gooey-eyed and whisper 'I wish I'd found someone like you.'" In some ways, Jon Davies tells me, it's tougher for the female partner, who'll not only be envied for her domestic set-up but be given a harder time by bosses and colleagues: "It's a double-whammy. The assumption is: How can she possibly be knackered when her husband does everything at home? It deprives her of the right to complain."

Davies has an interesting perspective on househusbands, as he chose that route as long ago as 1988, when he was deputy leader of the local council (his two sons are now teenagers): "I'd lots of social contacts, so I wasn't as isolated as I might have been. But if I went to the One O'clock Club, say, the suspicion was I was there to pick up women or must be strange. But then I always have been a bit strange. I used to sit at council meetings with a baby strapped to my chest and people wouldn't know he was there till suddenly he'd wake and burst out, like something out of Alien. I suppose it was a political statement on my part - a challenge to the assumptions of that time. I used to run special coach trips for fathers and children and as we left there'd be mums in tears worrying that dad couldn't cope and would fail to bring the child back in one piece. Now all that's changed and society is creating an expectation that men will parent."

That expectation can have miserable consequences when a father actively involved is cut out of childcare because of divorce. Davies is now the director of Families Need Fathers, a pressure group that provides help to 3,000 men: "The law is very uneven. We get thousands of calls from upset fathers." Happily, most of the homedads I talked to were still living with their partners, and the one exception, Jawad Al-Nawab, was positive about sharing the care of his daughter, Rahima, who spends half the week with him. The main downside, which he feels especially keenly as a single parent, is isolation: "There's no map. You're learning as you go. And it can be lonely. But I've recently discovered a Dads Only session and I appreciate that space. Not that I'm for segregation, but historically women have been associated with childcare so there's the idea They Know Better, and you can feel left out, especially when the conversation is all about breastfeeding."

A recurrent metaphor used about homedads, one you're less likely to hear used about homemums, is self-sacrifice: all those careers surrendered for the sake of wives and children! Al-Nawab doesn't approve of such romanticism: "There's this sentimentality surrounding homedads: 'Aren't they great!' But I don't have a halo. It's what I should be doing." Others argue that, despite the hard work and lack of affirmation ("no colleagues to pat you on the back for doing a good job"), there's also plenty of self-interest: "Every smile, every mannerism and every word is a reward,"; "I've met people I'd never normally socialise with - it's been great." Last year, Leaf turned down a part in a big new Stephen Fry series because it left him only two weeks to find childcare: "And I couldn't do it. So I let it go. People said, 'You're an idiot - you can't turn down an opportunity like that.' But now I look at mates with their drive to succeed and I think: Stop! Smell the flowers! I feel blessed in comparison. The world looks different. You can't put yourself in the middle of your life any more."

The remark reminds me of a poem in which Philip Larkin looks pityingly at a group of young mothers: "Something is pushing them,/To the side of their own lives." But rather than feeling marginalised, homedads tend to describe their experience as character-building and talk of the "transferable skills" they're acquiring at the highchair. Whether prospective employers see it that way is more doubtful. When Davies quit a promising career to look after his sons, "it left a whacking great hole in my CV. So at interviews I had to have strategies to explain, in a way a woman would never have to, what I'd been doing all those years. It made me quite defensive. It would probably have been easier to say I'd been in prison." But many homedads are not that fussed about climbing back on the career ladder, anyway. "There's no way I'll ever go back," Absalom says. "I'm two operating systems behind now and I'd be up against spotty 22-year-olds." "Anybody can earn money," Roach says. "I would prefer to do without a few things."

Liberated though they might feel from the workplace, few homedads can survive without computers - and the network they tap into. Several I spoke to have set up websites. Cavender's was launched in 2000. Paul Smith's includes readers' rants against the lack of baby-changing facilities in gents' loos. Andy Johnston, a homedad in Preston ("the only one I know in this town"), has a blog recounting his adventures looking after baby Molly. Farrow's website,, offers the definitive word on the highs and lows of househusbandry: "The hours are long, the holidays are rubbish, the pay's a joke and there's heavy exposure to toxic biological waste. On the plus side, there's plenty of fresh air, exercise and hugs, relatively little stress, strong job satisfaction and an army of amusing minions. You also get to play Hungry Hippos and call it work."

Al-Nawab looks forward to the day when a public figure follows his example: "That would be validation - if a David Beckham or a David Cameron put their career on hold to look after their kids." Perhaps, 20 years from now, homedad-dom will be an everyday phenomenon. Meanwhile, the vanguard are celebrating their incursion into foreign territory: "Looking after my kids is the best job I've ever had. It's been women's best-kept secret for too long."

· This article was amended on Monday June 18 2007. Paul Smith's website is, not The link to was also incorrect. These errors have been corrected.

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