Lies, damn lies and statistics

Rebel Dad is one of my must read blogs, not super chatty, just filled with a good round up of stuff and stats and news. It always makes me think and I always feel a bit smarter when I'm done. Recently he did his annual round up of the US Census Bureaus stats on stay at home dads. You can read it here.

I started thinking about it again last night on the way home from another overeating extravaganza family gathering at my mother-in-laws. We got a lift there and took a cab home. The cabbie was a gruff sounding/looking guy who, after about a block of Lucas prattling away with his taxi riding chant ("on est dans le taxi, le taxi est la" and repeat), asked how old he was and offered that his daughter was 16 months.

This lead to a conversation about kids, hospital trips, colds and, as is always the case, childcare arrangements.

Because he is the owner of the cab and can work 24 hours a day, he takes care of his daughter until his wife comes home from her job at the Dorval airport in the mid afternoon.

This got me to wondering, does the Census Bureau in the US or Stats Canada here closer to home count people with this kind of arrangement? Because it my mind he is at least as much the SAHD as the mother is stay at home...

I'm going to look into this a bit, stay tuned.

UPDATE:

Apparently my reading comprehension sucks before 9am on a Sunday

Rebel Dad has this paragraph in his comments on these stats:

"Let me quickly lay out two caveats. One is that the number is still a gross underestimation of our numbers, the same reasons I harp on every year. By excluding part-time workers, shift workers, seasonal worker, students, husbands of maternity-leave-taking working women, etc. etc., the overall number remains suppressed by a factor of 20. Two is that the because the number of at-home dads counted remains small, there's a larger margin of error. For all I know, the real jump was more modest. But with a 53 percent increase showing in the stats, I'm confident there was some sort of real jump"

So, now I know about the US, I'm still going to look into this for Canada.