More fathers quit their jobs and take full-time childcare

By Jung Hae-myoung

The number of men who are taking on full-time childcare without any additional employment has been increasing since last year, especially among men in their 30s, according to a report, Monday.

It shows the trend shows gender stereotypes are being broken.

According to a Statistics Korea report on employment trends, 7,000 men who were unemployed last month said they were committed to taking care of their children full time. The number did not include working dads taking paternity leave.

This figure was only around 3,000 in October last year, but shot up to 6,000 the following month. The numbers fluctuate from month to month, but the average monthly figures this year have been larger than those of last year.

The increase was largely influenced by men in their 30s, as the number of retired men in their 60s taking care of their grandchildren did not increase, the statistics showed.

The trend is notable in that the number of men taking on full-time childcare has increased while the numbers of marriages and newborns have been decreasing.

The number of babies born in the first eight months of this year was about 226,000, 8.7 percent down from the year before ― to break that up, fewer than 30,000 babies were born monthly on average, the lowest figure recorded in the 37 years the nation has been collecting the data. During the same period, around 19,300 couples were married, a 4 percent decrease from the number in 2017 and the lowest since 2003.

The number of men taking paternity leave also increased to 8,463 in the first half of this year, which is a 65.9 percent increase compared to the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Employment and Labor.

Both the increasing numbers of people taking paternity leave and of fathers committed to childcare, despite the low birthrate, show the barrier of traditional gender roles collapsing within households.

“Such trends show that the stereotype in Korea that women should take care of children is slowly fading away,” an official at Statistics Korea said.