In the past week Sam Thomas’s two-year-old son, Ossie, has been busy. First he added ￡52 to the PlayStation bill by pressing random buttons, next he bashed a chunk of plaster out of the wall. Then, as his final act of mischief, Ossie left his father stranded in a high-up storage cupboard after he removed the step ladder. A bribe with a biscuit secured the ladder’s return.

Capricious toddlers aside, the 40-year-old father of three (he has two older daughters whom he describes as a “walk in the park” by comparison with his son) is proud of his role as the spouse overseeing the household, or “domestic engineer” as he jokingly likes to call himself. He is one of a small but growing number of fathers who stay at home. His wife, Lucy, is the breadwinner and commutes from their home in Essex to the City of London for her job as a lawyer at Ashurst.

Figures released recently by the Office for National Statistics show that the number of stay-at-home fathers has doubled in the past 20 years. There are now 229,000 men in this role. At the same time, the number of women at home has fallen in the past year by 45,000 – to 2.04m. In the US, statistics reveal a similarly small but growing number of stay-at-home fathers. According to Pew Research, about 550,000 men were stay-at-home fathers in the first decade of this century – double the number in the 1970s, when the figure was about 280,000.