It's one thing for the Census Bureau to horribly undercount at-home dads in well-buried government documents. It's quite another to have the largest paper in the United States unquestioningly parrot those numbers. But that's the world I awoke to this morning. A3 in USA Today. The Census report has its problems and its interesting points (more on them below), but let me start by taking the story (by Sharon Jayson, who I don't believe is on staff) to task. Fair warning: the story only touches briefly on dads, but moms are being undercounted, too.

Story:

Tuesday's report finds that 20% of stay-at-home moms live in households earning $100,000 or more, while 2.3% are in households earning less than $10,000.

Mothers who stay home are concentrated in the top 5% of household incomes and the bottom 25%, says Stephanie Coontz of the non-profit, non-partisan Council on Contemporary Families.

Wrong. Sure, 20 percent of moms are in the six-figure bracket, but the bulk of at-home moms are in a much more modest income bracket. The first paragraph seems to make that clear. Why the author would then choose to make the at-home trend into a fringe lifestyle for the rich and very poor, I have no idea.

Story:

About 98,000 dads also stay home, but only 16% say they were out of the labor force to care for children; others cite illness or disability (45%); could not find work (11%); going to school (9%); or other reasons.

Misleading: This makes it sound like only 16 percent of the 98,000 guys (15,680) are true at-home dads. The report, however, makes clear that 16 percent of the one million dads at home can be considered at-home dads. As reported, it's staggeringly confusing, if not wrong.

Story:

Experts say the data don't signal a return to the days of the male breadwinner.

No kidding!: year-over-year, at-home mothers are up a whopping 3 percent. Sure, the numbers have been inching up over the past decade, but USA Today makes no effort to provide that context.

Story:

The definition used for this report is based on married couples with kids under age 15 in which one parent worked and the other was out of the labor force for the previous year to care for home and family.

That's it? That's the entire treatment of how the numbers were calculated? I've mentioned before the ways that such a measure underestimates the impact of at-home parenting, but there's no thoughtful analysis here. Too bad. On my street, six of seven moms would probably answer yes to the question "are you an at-home mom"? (The seventh is Rebel Mom, FYI). But the Census folks would have to throw out four of those women for not meeting the definition. On my block alone, then, the number of self-identified at-home moms is 200 percent higher than the Census stats.

Let me get to the report itself, which uses the numbers first highlighted by Half Changed World two months ago. For starters, it offers an interesting breakdown of at-home income levels, age, number of children, etc. But it also offers a look at how it excludes fathers from the "at-home dad" category.

There are a million fathers at home with kids under 15. But demographers then throw out the 455,000 who are ill/disabled, the 108,000 who are retired, the 90,000 in school, the 111,000 who "couldn't find work", the 88,000 "other" and the 59,000 whose wives were out of the labor force for even a single year. The final tally: an anemic 98,000. And don't even get my started on the bizarre notion of throwing out anyone who does part-time work, no matter how little.

The final irritation: the report dismisses the Bureau's own "2 million at-home dad" estimate of the 1990s, mentioning that 1.6 million of those guys were actually working. That assumes, then, that .4 million -- 400,000 guys -- really were at-home parents. But even that low number is four times higher than the current estimate.

My head is now hurting. Read At-Home Dad's take if you want to get deeper. (Please note: Peter Baylies apparently tried to explain all this to the reporter, apparently to no avail.)