More Men Becoming Single Dads by Choice

Last updated: July 4, 2012 by Susan

Looks like it isn’t just women who are looking to care for children.

Whether by adoption, by artificial insemination or by choosing to care for a child from a previous encounter with a woman, more and more men are looking to care for children of their own.

This is a trend fueled by the gradual acceptance of homosexual men moving beyond the typical assumption that you can’t have children if you’re gay. The option of finding an egg donor and fertilizing that egg with sperm allows gay couples – or even gay singles – to create a family of their own.

But the growing numbers of single dads isn’t just composed of gay men looking to start a family.

Traditional gender roles for men are quickly changing as men realize they have a much more active role in child rearing than was previously thought. Men around the country are realizing that they don’t need women to take care of the children (surprising as the thought might be) and are deciding to raise kids on their own.

And if single moms have it hard right now, single dads have it just as hard – if not more so.

“I think that it’s a bias on the part of the agencies and the system itself that questions men’s ability and their intentions of why they would want to be a single father,” says Brian Tessier, founder of 411-4-DAD – a free support line with its own website devoted to helping single fathers go through the process.

Tessier points out most people have yet to accept that men can be single fathers and that not all of them have wives. Couple this with a very deep-seated paranoia of pedophiles and it wouldn’t be surprising to find people raising an eyebrow when a man requests leave to take care of his children.

In any case, single moms have waded through much tougher social and professional stigma when they were breaking through society a few decades ago. We shouldn’t be surprised if single dads are going through the same pains right now.