Are Dads Getting Better?

Illustration by Josie Norton Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human.A few years ago, I made a new dad friend at the playground. Although we’d spent our childhoods differently—middle-class suburbia for me, poverty in India for him—we discovered that we shared a similar approach to parenthood. We both wanted to be hands-on, enlightened dads, unconstrained by outmoded manly stereotypes. Watching our sons play with trucks in the sand, my new friend recalled his father, who’d been loving but also formal and distant—content to let his wife do most of the parenting. “I want to be connected to my kids,” he said, squatting to distribute cut-up fruit from a Tupperware container. “I want to spend as much time with them as I can.”

At the same playground, I’d once seen a father reclining inside the play-structure tunnel; he watched YouTube in the shade while his toddler daughter fended for herself. Another dad sometimes paced by the swings, coaching his son’s performance in a permanent state of exasperation. In contrast, my new friend struck me as an especially attuned and gentle father. And yet all three dads, simply by being there, were representative of a larger trend. Many dads today are trying to be different, evolved, and “better”; they see themselves as part of an active effort to modernize fatherhood. Their efforts start with attention. “Since 1965, partnered fathers in the United States nearly quadrupled their daily time spent with kids,” Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, reports, in “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.”

Like so much else in America, the experience of fatherhood is polarized. One in four children live apart from their fathers (“a rate that has doubled since 1960,” Saxbe notes, though it has fallen somewhat recently) and, six years after a separation, almost a third of fathers no longer see their children. But, elsewhere, father time has expanded dramatically, beginning even before kids are born. Expectant fathers often follow their partners’ pregnancies closely; in many countries, including the U.S., it’s become “de rigueur for dads to witness their child’s arrival,” though half a century ago “a man’s stereotypical role during birth was essentially to hand out cigars to his buddies.” As their kids grow, many dads continue to spend more time with them, in part because men are now “breadwinners” in only about half of heterosexual marriages.