After five years at home full time with his two children, Martin Banks was itching to get b ack to the adult world of work. But how to explain the gap on his r?sum?? ?I decided to make it a job, because by golly, that?s what it was,? Banks said. ?It was work.? Under ?Temporary Retirement? on his r?sum?, he wrote: ?Devoted five years to raising my son and daughter. Responsibilities included changing diapers, preparing meals, making boo-boos feel better.?

Banks, 42, a former video technology engineer in San Diego who is married to a lawyer, is one of a small group of fathers in the United States who have temporarily chosen domestic life over the workaday grind. Like many stay-at-home mothers, these fathers often go back to work after some time at home. But when the time comes to trade the dishrag for a briefcase, many stay-at-home fathers are rejecting all-consuming corporate jobs and trying to re-enter the work force on their own terms.

?Men, especially the younger generation, want to craft their own careers and not feel dependent upon the rigid structure of the workplace,? said Kathleen Gerson, a professor of sociology at New York University who studies gender, work and family issues. ?Taking care of children can become a time out for them to rethink their careers and make a shift.?

Many mothers who take time off from work to raise children grapple with ways to balance home and work life. But for men, cutting back on work for the sake of family life is still uncharted territory. ?People think, ?Isn?t it odd that he dropped out? What?s wrong with him? Where?s his wife??? said Libby Gill, an executive coach in Los Angeles and the author of a 2001 book, Stay at Home Dads: The Essential Guide to Creating the New Family.

?Men are meant to go drag a side of beef back to the cave,? she said. This spring, Banks turned down an offer of a job running the San Francisco office of a video equipment supplier in favour of opening a business doing the same thing.

?I wanted to determine my own lifestyle,? he said. ?If I had a staff job, I wouldn?t be able to pick the kids up from school, take them back to the office and say, ?Sit on the couch and watch this movie while I finish work.??

According to Census Bureau statistics, there were 105,000 stay-at-home fathers of children under 15 who were not in the work force in 2002, compared to 5.2 million stay-at-home mothers. But the number of fathers who are essentially the primary caregiver for their children is higher, according to stay-at-home dad groups and work and family researchers, because many also do some part-time work or consulting from home.

?We?re at the point where there is always somebody who knows somebody who is a stay-at-home dad,? said James A. Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work Institute in New York.

Moreover, even fathers still on the job feel a greater pull toward home. In a study published by the institute in April, 68 per cent of the men who responded said they would take advantage of flextime at work if it were available.

That was not far below the 79 per cent of women who said they would probably use flextime if it were offered. Tom Brown, 43, of Highland Park, New Jersey, was working 60 hours a week for a large pharmaceutical firm in New Jersey before he was laid off in 2002. After a year, he and his wife, a librarian, decided he would stay home temporarily with their daughter, who was then eight, while his wife worked full time. He wound up taking a part-time job after a few months and is now back in the market for full-time work, but he is willing to sacrifice half his former salary as a technology expert to get a job in the non-profit arena .

His old job created ?an insane lifestyle,? he said. He recalled that when he was first laid off, his daughter looked up from her meal one night and exclaimed, ?Daddy, you?re at the dinner table.?