SAHDs during lockdown

[peekaboob]

Where can I quickly find figures that would point to how many men are SAHD and have had to deal with homeschool etc during lockdown?
We have a dad, who for background works pt opposite his pt wife and so shares the homeschool, has cleaners and gardeners, no money worries - in our class chat. Someone was struggling with wfh and doing homeschooling and how lockdown has made them feel inadequate. Another mum posted a message of support straight away saying that mums do have it hard right now as the menfolk are off doing their big important jobs and we are left to do the rest as well as homeschool. Dad came back with: and Dads. Whilst I do acknowledge that there are some dads out there doing this, he's not one of them BUT where can I find figures that would let me know how many? I'm guessing maybe 1/100 households may have the dad as the non-breadwinner/homeschooler?

I thought Fawcett or the Women's Budget Group had done some work on this but cant find it!

However this article implies not many men "took the lead" on home schooling metro.co.uk/2020/05/06/mums-are-homeschooling-lockdown-teaching-still-considered-womens-work-12663148/

I don't know the figures. It must be very low. My husband is one of these men; I earn about 95% of the family money and he does 95% of the children's home education, but that was our arrangement even before lockdown. For us very little has changed, but we were always in a very tiny (and privileged) minority.

My DH is one of these men too. He can WFH and I can't (both key workers). It's very rare the men are homeschooling in our group.

I don't expect you'll find much official stats at that stage. Anecdotally, in our household we both work from home, and made sure to split the homeschooling/childcare duties roughly 50/50, but it was a concious effort... And in the end I've been much more proactive re: liaising with the school... But using my husband's account, because it was more convenient than login into my own! So if the school was tracking that (I doubt it!) it would distort the final picture.

This might have some. The guardian still have many articles about impact on sex based rights - I am quite imagine there are 2 camps among the journalists

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/23/the-coronavirus-backlash-how-the-pandemic-is-destroying-womens-rights

My DH is one of them too, he has been a SAHD for years though. I am a keyworker and although I do help on my days off he does most of the homeschooling, cleaning and cooking. His friend is a SAHD too, wife a keyworker. Both of our families have 3 kids and children with disabilities. Another male friend has still been working nights and managing his kids in the day more too as his wife has had more shifts in ITU. It has been tough for them just like it would for the women who are the main caregivers in a family, dealing with the changes in lockdown. More women are in this position than men though. A lot of people have been struggling.

There is 1 dad in this position in my daughter’s primary class of 32.

(In a rapidly gentrifying part of greater Manchester, for context).

There aren’t any stats I could find for U.K.
For US, it’s 20% of SAHPs are dads, 80% are mums.
So it’s 1 in 5, not 1 in 1000.

Dh was one. Ive been working at home 9-5 and he's done all the homeschooling.

He's been a SAHD for 5 years though so it's our normal.

He's got a few SAHD mates although most work part time too. I would say maybe 20% feels about right for the people we know locally.

We have a SAHD, he would have done the home-schooling but our son stayed at school throughout due to his disabilities.

My DH is not a sahd but has picked up my slack so that I can get a balance for my mental health.
He's made sure everyone eats, so I can slip out for some headspace and exercise. I've actually had more freedom with my day than I normally would as a home educator.
I've done the bulk of the home educating as usual. Hats off to anyone who has fit schoolwork around their work.

In a feminism group it's more likely that male partners will muck in?

It will be a tiny proportion of fathers.

V unlikely to be 20% of fathers being SAHDs, anywhere in UK. Will be less than 5%

I don’t know the numbers, but my DH was furloughed from 23rd March to 1st June. I was working part time, DH was home keeping a 3 and 5 year old occupied and homeschooling the 5 year old.

The percentage of SAHDs is pretty tiny, but you seem to be equating any household where there isn't a SAHD with one where the woman does everything, which is quite a dubious assumption. In most two-parent households both work, if not necessarily the same number of hours - having a SAHM is also a minority (and a much nicer and easier position to be in for the last few months than a household where both parents work and had to juggle childcare or homeschool around that). There's no doubt that the domestic burden under lockdown (and always) has fallen disproportionately on women but only counting male domestic work if they're SAHDs is quite a disingenuous way to discuss that.

You seem to think that this man can't include himself as a parent who has struggled during lockdown because he's in a minority, and because you seem to dislike him for irrelevant reasons, such as them having a gardener. That's unfair and pretty unpleasant. Tbh what the first woman said about men with big jobs and women doing everything else would have pissed me right off too, because it doesn't describe my house at all and it's also patronising in its assumption that women have the 'little jobs'.

At our school pick up it's about 30% dads on average (though it varies as many couples seem to do different days). That's more than it was pre-lockdown. I think as some Dads have been furloughed they have picked up the slack for still working mums.

In my friend circle (mostly Pakistani and Bangladeshi though I am Indian) it is the dad’s usually who do the formal homeschooling as well as beint the breadwinner, as they are often married to women who aren’t as educated as them, or as confident in English. The mums do all the Islamic / Urdu / Arabic homeschooling and running around to and from mosque etc.

Actually @Hardbackwriter the dad in question, and his wife, are very good friends of mine so I know they have not struggled ever. That is a fact.
I have managed to find a report from the ONS but it's written up by the daily fail and I'm diving into the ONS site to try and find the source and whether the figures have been updated since. Calculating the figures puts it as 12% for 2018 and the news story was how this number was falling so I imagine it's less now.
I'll keep digging but thank you everyone for your input.

There was a link to this in the guardian article that Gwynfluff shared:

IFS: How are mothers and fathers balancing work and family under lockdown?

I'd share that with the group if I were you, but I'm like that

@Dozer

V unlikely to be 20% of fathers being SAHDs, anywhere in UK. Will be less than 5%

You misread the stats from the US. It is that 20% of stay at home parents are dads. That’s only measured against families with a stay at home parent, not all families and therefore not all dads.

@Hardbackwriter
Agree with you on your point that just because men are a minority of stay at home parents, it doesn’t mean they can’t speak out. That little job comment also made me a bit upset. The comment the OP shared was 100% sexist stereotyping.

You've got two different things going on. DH is juggling work and homeschooling, as am I, but neither of us is a SAHP. It presumably depends more on the mix of jobs, you could have men with big high powered jobs but if they're married to an ICU nurse presumably they've got to be doing something in the 12 hours she's at work?

I found this on ONS
“In April to June 2019, 3 in 4 mothers with dependent children (75.1%) were in work in the UK. This compared with 92.6% of fathers with dependent children.”
Assuming that number of mothers/fathers who are just temporarily unemployed are about the same, we can think the proportions would hold true for those who are choosing not to work to be SAHPs.

So, rounding, this means 3.89 SAHMs for every 1 SAHD. Rounded it’s 4 to 1 ratio. So the U.K. is around same 20% of SAHPs are SAHDs.

I just don't get why you want to prove this man 'wrong'? If DH was having a moan about the fact he's taken on the bulk of childcare and housework during lockdown (which he has) and someone started quoting statistics about how many more women than men have done that at him I'd think they were a bit of a twat. You're going to make yourself look a complete idiot in your WhatsApp group if you reply to his pretty innocent comment with your dossier of research in response.