The number of Korean husbands who stay home to raise the children and do the chores has leaped by 40 percent over the past three years. With more and more mothers working outside the home, a growing number of husbands are becoming full-time stay-at-home dads.

The National Statistical Office said on Sunday that the number of househusbands reached 151,000 among the economically inactive population last year. The statistics show that 5,000 stay-at-home fathers are raising preschool children and 146,000 are raising children in elementary school. The total figure increased by 42 percent from 106,000 in 2003. In 2003, 3,000 husbands were raising preschoolers at home and 103,000 were looking after elementary school children.

Samsung Economic Research Institute researcher Sohn Min-joong said, "With the growing burden of raising children, husbands of working women with high incomes are giving up looking for work." Experts attribute the trend to the increasing number of women with professional careers and the growing number of couples in which the woman is older than the man.

The number of full-time housewives who raise children and take care of household chores amounts to 6.62 million, an increase of one percent from 2003.

(englishnews@chosun.com )