GoKawiilToday’s article was written with Aziz Sunderji, an economic analyst and data whiz who writes at Home Economics.
American fatherhood has transformed in the last few generations. Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.
In 1965, the typical married father barely spent half an hour each day actively engaged in childcare, according to the best time-use data we have. Today, Millennial thirty-something dads typically spend more than 80 daily minutes changing diapers, reading and playing with their children, driving them to soccer practice, and going over homework. To make time for kids, modern fathers have reduced their daily office work by more than an hour—not to mention, cut down their TV time by 30 minutes—as they pour more of their waking life into being at home.
For those familiar with the parenting norms of the 20th century, the rise in childcare might seem like a violation of tradition, as if we are moving away from the natural state of fatherhood. But as the psychologist Darby Saxbe writes in her forthcoming book Dad Brain, the role of fathers has always varied significantly around the world, much more than the role of mothers. In African tribes that require men to do lots of hunting, dads often play a small role in the lives of their kids. But barely a few hours’ drive away from these tribes, one can find hunter-gatherer societies, like the Aka community in the Congo, where fathers are constantly around their children.
The working-husband-and-housewife norm is not a biological inscription in our genes. It is an invention of the Industrial Revolution. And it is disappearing around the world. In addition to the U.S., fathers’ childcare time is surging in Canada, across Europe, and in other rich countries, such as Japan.
WHERE DID MODERN FATHERHOOD COME FROM?
The simplest explanation for the global surge in fathering is that it’s largely about the mass entry of women into the workforce.
Since the 1960s, the female labor force participation rate has risen, which meant fewer moms stayed at home to take care of the kids. As households moved toward dual earners, someone had to cover the remaining childcare— and that someone, in most households, turned out to be the dad.
As pat as this theory seems, it has some interesting flaws. If caring for children required a fixed set of hours, then we’d expect to see dads taking parenting-time hours from moms. Except, mothers’ childcare time hasn’t gone down in the last half century. It’s gone way, way up, as well. What’s more, if the decline of the “male breadwinner” household were the primary reason for the increase in fathers’ childcare time, we would expect to see these two trends happen simultaneously in the 20th century. But they didn’t. The “male solo earner” household—that is, families where the dad works and the mom stays at home—declined fastest as a phenomenon between the 1950s and the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, the steepest sustained increase in male childcare happened decades later, between the 1990s and early 2000s, during a period when household structures were relatively stable.
Even if the rise of working mothers didn’t automatically and instantly transform fatherhood, it may have set in motion a slower-moving shift in norms. In the second half of the 20th century, men who expressed more egalitarian gender attitudes were among the first to shift their time toward direct childcare, as the sociologist Scott Coltrane wrote. As a result, the definition of a “good dad” morphed—or, perhaps we should say, expanded—from the strict and narrow norm of “just a breadwinner” to the broader, multi-part role of “earner and co-parent and diaper-changer and chaperone and baseball coach and, and and …” With the rise of women’s participation, the job of being a mom became more complex, and the role of being a dad got more complex, too.
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