Stats for stay-at-home dads rising

Singapore culture is yet to catch up with the new-age parenting concept of staying-home dad and breadwinning mothers.

As working dads seek to spend more time with their children, they’re facing a question already familiar to working mothers: how do you balance career progression with parental responsibilities? Even as UK and US legislators consider proposals for more family-friendly working policies, many fathers still feel they face a choice between active parenting and career success.

The solution is flexible working. In research for Regus, 58% of people globally said flexible working is more family-friendly. Giving employees choice over where and when they work enables them to reduce their commuting, work at hours that fit with family life, and cut down on expensive paid childcare.

Here's more from Regus:

There’s plenty of evidence that fathers are changing their working lives to spend more time with their families. From stay-at-home dads to those who split the childcare, the stats are on an upward trend:

· In the UK up to 1.4 million men are children’s main carers

· 43% of fathers of school-aged children provide care before/after school

· In the US 32% of fathers with a working wife take care of children at least one day a week, compared to 26% in 2002

· The number of stay-at-home dads in the US has doubled in the last decade.[1]

Even in Japan, where the long-hours culture means that over half of Tokyo dads spend less than two hours a day with their children in the week, they compensate at weekends, with over half spending ten hours or more a day with their children.

Flexibility and productivity

Offering employees flexibility over the times and places they work is not an act of business altruism. In research for Regus, 72% of companies say their productivity has increased as a result of flexible working practices, and 68% link flexible working directly to increased revenues.

The shift to new ways of working has been made possible by technology. Work is now work-anywhere, with performance judged by results, not presence at the office. Businesses all over the world are looking at new working practices, such as:

· Letting employees fit their location to their activities – working sometimes in the office, sometimes at drop-in ‘third spaces’ like business centres, which offer all the facilities of the office at more convenient locations

· Virtual offices services, which allow, for example, the self-employed and SMEs to work from home, but to present a strong corporate image with professional office address and telephone answering, and access to meeting rooms.

The greater availability of flexible working practices appears to be much appreciated. The recent Regus Work-Life Balance Index shows that, despite working harder than they did two years ago, people are enjoying their jobs more and feel they are more productive than two years ago. Four out of ten people worldwide say their companies are trying to reduce the time that staff spend commuting, aware of the heavy toll of long commutes on family life and staff morale and output.