The number of single-father households has risen sharply in the US in the past decades, from less than 300,000 in 1960 to 2,670,000 in 2011.

Mike, who lives in Washington DC and does not want to reveal his surname, has been a single father since his wife passed away a couple of years ago, leaving him to take care of their adopted daughter from China. As his job requires frequent business trips, Mike finds it tough to raise his 12-year-old daughter alone.

Mike said that he used to pick up his daughter after work and rush back home to cook dinner. He was not good at cooking and worried that as a man, he was unable to take good care of his daughter as she entered puberty.

He recently hired a Chinese baby-sitter, hoping that she could speak Chinese with his daughter and provide better care for her.

The rise in the number of single-father households has far outpaced that of single-mother families in the past five decades.

A 2013 Pew survey indicated that about eight percent of households with young children in the country are headed by a single father, up from one percent in 1960. In comparison, single-mother families expanded much more slowly over the same period, from 1.8 million in 1960 to 8.6 million in 2011.

The increase stems partly from the soaring divorce rate and downward marriage rate. As American society becomes more open to homosexuality, more couples choose to adopt children or find surrogate mothers, which also contributes to the increase in the number of single-father households. Two-thirds of single fathers in the US are aged 30 to 49, more than half of them are white and 17 percent have bachelor's degrees.

"It seems like with the mother it is a birthright, but with the father they have to go through all these hoops to prove themselves and what they are capable of and everything else," Sean Kennedy at Community Fatherhood was quoted by media as saying.

Public attitudes toward the father's role in raising children are changing. Many people tend to think that men are not only responsible for being breadwinners, but also for taking care of the whole family, including nursing children.

A recent Pew survey showed that American men spend more time doing housework and caring for children. More people believe that fathers play more important roles in helping their kids form their sense of value and giving emotional and financial support.

Fathers are more capable of providing better financial support for children since 24 percent of single-father families live under the poverty line and 43 percent of single mother families stay poor. The average annual income of single-father households is $40,000 while single mothers can only earn about $14,000 on average, statistics show.

Although single fathers do better than what people had previously thought, two-parent households are still better at raising children than single-parent households. Love from mothers and fathers are both needed and important during the process of a child's growth, experts say.