Caring Men

More men are quitting work to look after children or parents

-  Jordan Yadoo

For Ryan Burdick, the incessant questions about when he plans to go back to work have gotten old. So has the "Mr. Mom" label.

Still, the 38-year-old father of two says he has no regrets about his decision 10 years ago to step away from his burgeoning career as a commercial pilot to stay at home, where he now cares for his sons Walter, 10, and George, 7, full time. "My joke forever has been, 'I'm retired,' when people ask me what I do," says Burdick, whose wife, Stephanie, 36, is a physician at a hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Burdick's wife was working as a resident when the couple realized that the nanny they'd just hired couldn't cope with the demands of their on-call jobs.

After reviewing other child-care options, the couple decided it would make more sense for Ryan to assume care and household responsibilities. The setup has enabled Stephanie to advance much faster in her profession, which has eased the financial strain of living on one income. "My career potential is much higher because he stays home," she says.

The slow slide in the labor force participation rate of American men in their prime working years-defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as age 25 to 54-has perplexed economists and policymakers, who've attributed the decline to a number of factors including shrinking payrolls in manufacturing and other traditionally male-dominated sectors, along with lagging educational attainment by men.

Some 88.5% of prime-age men were either working or looking for work in October. That's down more than 9 percentage points from around the time the BLS began tracking the data in the 1950s. The phenomenon has been extensively chronicled in books with such fatalistic titles as The End of Men and The Boy Crisis.