Where Have the Helpful Dads Gone?

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The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who fought fiercely for women’s rights, was steadfast in her belief that women and men should have an equal stake in raising kids. This, she was quick to point out, is integral to ensuring gender equality.

“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation,” she said.

“Justice Ginsburg was before her time,” Dr. Julie Graves, a family medicine and public health physician, told me. “RBG often spoke about her experience balancing law school and teaching while raising her children.” Having a supportive husband allowed, in part, for Justice Ginsburg’s extraordinary success.

The pandemic brought the differences in responsibility at home into sharper focus. Men stepped up. Mothers and fathers of school-age kids had to adjust to helping children with e-learning and being together 24/7. Nonetheless, the changes in parents’ work hours resulting from increased caregiving responsibilities disproportionately affected women. When schools and daycares closed because of COVID-19, mothers with young children reduced their work hours at four to five times the rate as fathers.

Few will argue that most men helped more than usual during the pandemic. But how much and whether enough to overcome the still glaring gender gap in household workload is another story. “Even when progress is reported, the progress is slow and doesn’t convince us that we will eventually reach equality,” Francine Deutsch and Ruth Gaunt write in their book, Gender Equality at Home.

One sign that change could last comes through in the data on dads who take paternity leave. This group is more likely to be engaged with their children and they take on more childcare and housekeeping responsibilities. Children of these fathers are also more likely to perceive increased parent-child closeness.

However, when Spain introduced paid paternity leave, the fathers who took it and were active caregivers for their newborns wanted fewer children, and if they had more children, they took longer to have them—six years or more. The researchers surmise the change of heart was caused by their “increased involvement in childcare.”

For many if not most women in heterosexual relationships, holding out hope a partner will equitably share in early childcare and stay involved with household chores throughout a child’s growing up years may be unrealistic, particularly if both spouses work full-time. Generally, moms still do more planning and cope with more emotional stress.

“The fundamental time constraint is to negotiate who will be on call at home—that is, who will leave the office and be at home in a pinch,” states Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard University.

Among the parents I spoke with as part of the Only Child Research Project, fathers’ help was a mixed bag—some didn’t do much, others were super involved from day one.

Because men tend to take minimal paternity leaves, their participation can be short-lived. Nonetheless, partners who were actively involved with their children during the pandemic want to stay involved. But do they?

A Dose of Realism

Examining family-related responsibilities, a recent study indicates that men tend to return to their old ways. The investigators looked at participation at different ages—at age 25, 32, 43 and 50—challenging earlier studies that claimed a decline in women’s contributions to household duties. They found that “when women were raising children, they contributed more than average to housework, and when men were raising children, they contributed less than they normally did to household chores.”

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The study’s authors believe that “parenthood serves to reinforce traditionally gendered roles and behaviors.” We seem to be slipping back into old, typical roles of yesteryear. The changes they saw at specific ages “suggest the gendered gap in housework remains stubbornly stable and is further exacerbated during times when raising children.”

Perhaps fathers should start asking their partners what chores and tasks they can take on at home. A simple “How can I help?” just might help families realize, again, the benefits many experienced when men were home during the pandemic—and result in a fairer split in domestic tasks.

Copyright @2024 by Susan Newman

Related: “Are You Getting the Short End of the Paternity-Leave Stick?