Mike Brandfon holds his daughters Abby, left, and, Sophie, in Chicago in 2012. Brandfon lost his public relations job in December 2009 and was a stay-at-home dad. Last September when the girls were about 3, he landed a job.

NEW YORK — The number of U.S. fathers home with their kids full-time is down, from a peak 2.2 million in 2010, the official end of the recession, to about 2 million in 2012, according to a report from the Pew Research Center.

The slight decrease was driven chiefly by employment gains since the recession eased, the report said, defining stay-at-home fathers as those not employed for pay at all in the prior year and living with children 17 or younger.

The largest share of at-home dads, 35 percent, said they were home due to illness or disability. Roughly 23 percent said it was mainly because they couldn’t find a job, and 21 percent said it was specifically to care for home or family, the researchers noted, relying on census and other government data.

By contrast, 1.1 million men were at-home dads in 1989, the earliest year reliable government figures are available.

Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher who worked on the report, said fathers comprised 16 percent of parents at home full time in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1989.

While unemployment is a factor overall, Livingston said that the “continuing convergence of gender roles” between moms and dads is key. “It’s becoming more acceptable for dads to be caregivers, and it’s becoming more acceptable for moms to be responsible for breadwinning,” she said.

But Livingston warned that affluent, highly educated dads at home to raise children remain a subset.

“It’s important to note that a lot of these dads are actually not doing that well economically and they tend to have lower income levels, too,” she said.

And despite a greater acceptance of dads staying home to raise kids, other Pew research shows 51 percent of the public believes kids are better off when the mother stays home, compared to 8 percent that cited dads.

“There clearly has been a lot of gender convergence in recent decades, but then at the same time, you know, some things haven’t changed as far as people’s perceptions of the roles,” Livingston said.

Mike Brandfon, 48, of Chicago falls into the laid-off category. He lost his job at a public relations company in December 2009, at a period when he and his wife had been thinking about having kids.

Brandfon joined a dads’ group for park outings with the kids and the occasional night out for a beer. Once the girls were nearly 3 years old, he began looking for work again and landed a job last September as media director for Web2carz.com, an online-only auto and lifestyles magazine.

In the end, he was thrilled with his time home as primary caregiver.

“I couldn’t get those years back,” he said. “Looking back, it was amazing, seeing these little things develop into real people.”