The New and Improved Dad

In the 1980s, a new, more intensive, and feminine brand of paternity took hold in the United States. The media quickly labeled it “The New Fatherhood,” a style of parenting prescribing a high level of involvement on the part of dads. More specifically, “the new fatherhood” was a method or approach of parenting in which men looked to women for inspiration when it came to raising children. That decade also gave rise to the “superdad,” as the work-hard, play-hard ethos of the 80s infiltrated the universe of parenting.

Since then, the concept of “the new fatherhood” has continued to blossom as research made evident the positives of involved fatherhood for children. For the past few decades, studies have revealed that actively involved dads are instrumental in helping kids grow up to be mature, resilient adults. Children benefit in a number of important ways from having a committed father around, research has showed. More emotional stability, better social skills, and a more positive worldview have been attributed to kids whose dads sent a lot of love their way, psychologists have found, with just the reverse for fathers who were not around.

Armin Brott, author of many books on fatherhood, concurs. “Kids with involved dads are happier, more confident, and more independent,” he has stated, citing studies that indicated that kids with active fathers also got better grades in school and were more likely to attend college.

Research documenting the significant contributions fathers made to child development has illustrated how dads differ from moms as parents, however. A study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in 2009, for example, showed that fathers had a greater impact on young children’s language abilities than mothers; dads are much more than good play buddies.

Hard research and personal stories confirming the positive influence of fathers counter the argument some have made that any kind of parental love, rather than a particular makeup of a family, was all that a child truly needs, implying that nurturance has no real basis in gender differences. Stephan Poulter, author of The Father Factor: How Your Father’s Legacy Impacts Your Career, strongly disagrees with the “love” thesis, believing that fathers are essential for a child’s well-being, both psychologically and socially. This is especially true for daughters, Poulter argues: Because a father was typically the first man a girl loved, he explained, their relationship served as a template for how she would relate to men throughout her life.

Poulter adds that dads should not fall into the common trap of trying to be a child’s “best friend,” however, as parenting is a very different thing than friendship. Not surprisingly, Poulter considers a child’s teen years as the most challenging for each party, making it especially important for fathers to try to stay involved as much as possible.

To that point, fathers are spending more time with their kids than they used to. The average father devoted roughly seven hours per week to “primary childcare” in 2009, one study found — twice as much time as in 1965. Of course, fatherhood has changed not just quantitatively over the decades but qualitatively. A new kind of parenting book has appeared on bookshelves written by men who investigated their role as fathers as if they were exploring any other subject. Michael Lewis’s Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood and Sam Apple's American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, each published in 2009, were two such books.

In Home Game, Lewis made the rather alarming claim that nobody admired dads, not even their families. Fathers were doing much of the work of parenting but not getting much acknowledgement for it, he argued, a complete reversal of some critics’ claim that dads were being given too much parental credit as “the new fatherhood” movement gained traction. “The American father of a baby is really just [considered to be] a second-string mother,” Lewis wrote, believing that men had received little in return for the new paternal responsibilities they had taken on. Going further, Lewis proposed that wives looked at their husbands as “unreliable employees,” that children preferred their mothers when things got tough, and that Americans as a whole viewed fathers condescendingly, feeling sorry for them more than anything else. Lewis had three children of his own, but clearly did not embrace the idea that fatherhood was the role of a lifetime. Men “got fleeced,” he concluded, thinking that the parental deal they had struck with women over the last few decades was not a good one.

Regardless of such less-than-positive views of dads, “the new fatherhood” remains a radical, perhaps even revolutionary style of parenting for its embrace of maternal-style love and devotion to one’s children. From a historical perspective, the attitudinal and behavioral transformation of men challenged many of the suppositions about the dynamics of family and gender, something worth recognizing, especially on Father’s Day.