When Michael Toribio became a father in 2021, he figured he was about a year away from being promoted to assistant principal at his K-8 school in Orlando, Fla.
But after adding up the cost of child care and the toll of 12-hour work days, Toribio instead took a remote job for a digital curriculum company. The move came with a roughly 30% pay cut, but the 34-year-old said it was a worthy trade.
“We’ve saved so much money in child care by having that flexibility with me working from home,” Toribio said. His wife, Melanie Toribio, works as a university academic adviser on a hybrid schedule.
He made an increasingly common trade among American men: A new study finds college-educated fathers are working significantly shorter hours than before the Covid-19 pandemic, and are spending more time with their families.
Fathers with degrees and young children slashed their time on the job by six hours a week and increased their time spent on housework and child care by more than four hours a week, according to analysis of federal time-use data from the think tank American Institute for Boys and Men. The study compared the three-year period through 2019 and the three-year period through 2024, the latest data available.
That marks a significant shift from the two decades leading up to the pandemic, when the amount of time fathers spent on child care and household chores barely budged even as more mothers of young children joined the labor force.
The study’s findings come as the American labor market looks increasingly sour for men. Over the past year, nearly all net job growth has come from healthcare and social assistance, a traditionally female-dominated sector. Sectors with heavily male workforces have been losing jobs.
Yet employment numbers have remained stable for fathers, which researchers say is evidence that personal choices are the big factor driving fathers to spend more time at home. The share of fathers working or looking for a job—known as the labor-force participation rate—was nearly 94% in 2025, little changed from its prepandemic level, according to Labor Department data.
The unemployment rate for dads with kids under age 6 was 2.8% in 2025, up from postpandemic lows of 2.2% in 2022 and 2023, but still well below the average overall jobless rate of 4.3%.
“Instead of spending those extra few hours trying to get ahead at work, trying to meet a project deadline, those hours are being spent on family now,” said Ariel Binder, an economist and the new study’s author.
Women’s workplace gains are likely playing an equal role, along with personal preferences, in driving men to spend more time on housework, said Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas.
Mothers of young kids still spend nearly 15 hours more a week than men doing unpaid work like cooking, cleaning and child care at home, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men study. But for decades, women have graduated from college in higher numbers than men, and women earn the majority of master’s and doctoral degrees. The share of couples in which the wife earns as much or more than the husband has jumped in recent decades.
“What we’re seeing is the shift in power of women to be able to bargain for their preferences within the household,” Heggeness said. “I’m not sure that if we see a labor market that sours that it’s going to revert to traditional gender norms in the home—it might actually accelerate what this study was showing.”
In 2021, tech worker Mike Anderson moved from Atlanta to Rabun County in northern Georgia with his wife and then-teenaged children. Around that time, he turned down a chief technology officer role that would have required longer hours and returning to an office.
“I walked away from about $130,000 a year extra on top of what I’m already making and I’ve never regretted it a single second,” said Anderson, age 48. His current 9-to-5, remote job still gives him more time to spend with his wife, parents and now young-adult children. Plus he can more easily hit the gym, travel and volunteer.
In return for more flexibility, “there’s no sitting in traffic now going to and from work, and we took less money but we were happy to take less money,” he said.
Write to Harriet Torry at harriet.torry@wsj.com