[phil21]

I was curious about this and looked into it some. Unfortunately couldn't find any source material reliable or concise enough for me to consider linking here - but my overall take on the data is that stay at home dads certainly increased in number, but nowhere near the change these graphs depict.

Numbers vary, but even as of today there are low-single-digit millions of stay at home fathers (under the liberal definition of "18+ male with children in the home who does not work") vs. about ~1m total in the late 80's. Seems like it may account for a point or two on the graphs, but not much more.