Househusbands: Families Discover ‘90s Alternative to Day Care : Fathers: Men who are raising children while their wives work are a growing minority. Few can get paternity leave.

Jeff Sieglen quit his marketing job to stay home and raise two sons while his wife works as a physician. But try telling that to his old pals at work.

“Even now,” he said, “the guys I used to work with ask me, ‘So what are you really doing?’ I keep telling them I’m staying home with the kids. That’s my job. That’s what I do.

“They say, ‘Uh-huh, but what are you really doing?’ ”

Small wonder his friends are confused. Sieglen is one of about 257,000 men between ages 25 and 54 who are raising children while their wives work. These stay-at-home dads make up less than 2% of all married people with children under 18, according to U.S. Labor Department figures.

And though the number of househusbands has increased by about 50,000 over the last 20 years, most employers still have made little or no provisions for fathers who want to take time off.

Unlike the Mr. Moms of the ‘80s recession era, it is economic opportunities rather than hardship that has landed many of these latest converts in the nursery--economic opportunities for their wives, that is.

While women’s overall earnings still lag behind men’s, the number of women earning more than $50,000 a year has quadrupled over the last decade, the U.S. Census Bureau says. The fastest-growing segment of the work force today is married women with children under 2, according to 9 to 5, an organization that follows working women’s issues.

“Being the provider is no longer a mandate for a man,” said Ronald Levant, a Brookline, Mass., family psychologist who conducts seminars for parents and co-wrote “Between Father and Child.”

“It is now possible for men to consider themselves a primary care-giving parent and not suffer any loss of their sense of masculinity or worth,” he said.

Marcelo Seabra said he hopes his decision to stay home will enhance his image in his son’s eyes.

“I want Luke to feel proud of his father--and close,” said Seabra, a self-employed contractor whose architect wife went back to her $50,000-a-year job with a Manhattan firm eight months after Luke was born in February, 1990.

Sieglen’s wife earns four times as much as an anesthesiologist as he did selling pharmaceuticals. He said he already can see a strong bond between himself and his two sons, ages 7 and 4.

“As much as they love their mother, when things go bad, they look to me. I’m the one who’s here all the time. I’m the steadying influence,” he said from the couple’s Princeton, N. J., home.

While many mothers would love to stay home themselves, their ample salaries or substantial medical insurance benefits force them to kiss their babies and husbands goodby in the morning and head for the office.

The husbands who watch them drive away sometimes feel lingering guilt.

“My wife is sacrificing her motherhood so we can do this,” said Peter Candela, whose wife, Mary, went back to her $30,000-a-year job testing cosmetics for Avon Products Inc. 13 weeks after giving birth to their son last winter.

Candela has put his career as a music composer on hold and is committed to staying home in Wayne, N.J., until their son goes to school.

Economics dictated the couple’s choice, but it was much easier to accept before the baby was born, Mary Candela said.

“You don’t want to send them to day care, so you think ‘We’ll have the baby stay home with a parent. Why should it matter which parent?’ When the baby is actually here, it’s really hard,” she said.

David and Sarah Burris of Zanesville, Ohio, wanted their daughter, Alexandra, to be raised by a parent. To keep her medical benefits, Sarah returned to her $20,000-a-year job as program director for the Girl Scouts of America three weeks after giving birth last autumn. David, a stage manager, stayed home.

“My wife feels she misses out on the little things, like the first time Alex rolled over and the first time she sat up. But it would upset us even more if it happened at day care,” he said.

If Mom at work and Dad at home is an economic equation for some families, for others it is a way to satisfy personal needs.

“My wife wasn’t interested in staying at home. She wanted to get back to work as quickly as possible,” said Philippe Henri of Berkeley, Calif., whose wife, Carol, returned to work as a computer analyst with IBM eight weeks after Natalia’s birth in September, 1989.

“Her career is very important to her. Very, very important,” Henri said.

A high school math teacher whose $30,000-a-year salary is about half what his wife earns, Henri said he needed a break from the working world. He took a 10-month paternity leave and, when it was over, said he felt confident Natalia was “ready” for day care.

“My year was filled with fun,” he said. “So few fathers have the chance to spend time with their kids at that stage and get to know them in a way that most men don’t.”

The Small Business Administration found that most companies offer some kind of maternity leave, but fewer than 8% offer paternity leave. And when it is available, paternity leave often is brief. A 1988 Conference Board survey of 521 large companies found the maximum length of leaves was an average 56 days for mothers and 18 days for fathers.

Corporations that have lengthy paternity leave policies don’t always encourage their employees to take it. In fact, most discourage it, according to a forthcoming study by James Levine, author of “Who Will Raise the Children?” and director of The Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute in Manhattan.

“We’ve actually encountered instances where a supervisor has recommended a guy use his vacation instead of the official paternity leave because it will ‘look bad,’ ” Levine said.

This summer, Congress is expected to vote on a bill that would require companies with 50 or more employees to allow leaves of up to 12 weeks for men or women for important family developments, such as the birth of a child. A similar bill was passed last year but was vetoed, and President Bush is threatening to shoot it down again.

For many men in the corporate world, the only way to spend more time with their children is to do something drastic--such as quit. That’s just what Sieglen did.

“My family has always been the most important thing to me. I was making decent money, but not enough to have everybody suffer,” he said. “The children were feeling the pains of our two demanding careers. In the morning they would come to us and say, ‘Well, who’s going to be home tonight?’ It didn’t make us feel too good.”

His sons, Michael and Andrew, are much happier now that Dad has been home for three years, he said. He is committed to being there even after the youngest goes to school this fall.

To the boys, their father staying home and their mother going to work is normal.

“Daddy says, ‘Good night. I love you, and see you in the morning,’ ” said 4-year-old Andrew. And every morning, “Mommy goes to work. We see what car she’s taking,” he said.

“At my son’s nursery school, I had one little girl come up to me and tell me she wished I was her daddy because I spent so much time with my son,” Sieglen said. “It was a funny feeling.”

But the reaction from adults can be much different.

“I called my mother to tell her,” he said, “and she cried.”