Modern fatherhood, my new obsession

Launching an AIBM initiative, substack, and much more...

I’ve come to believe that if there is a one-word solution to the challenges of boys and men it is this: fatherhood.

Dads matter for kids. Dads matter for families. And being a Dad matters, a lot, for men themselves. Fatherhood is the ultimate expression of mature, pro-social masculinity. Of men giving more than they get. It provides men with structure, purpose and grounding. Fatherhood is a load-bearing wall in any flourishing society.

This is not a new issue for me. In fact one of my very first published articles, in the UK’s Fabian Review in 1993 (I think), was titled “Fathers Are Parents Too”. I argued there for equal access to paid leave for fathers, not least in order to promote gender equality.

I was not a father then. Now I am a BoyDad to three sons; or I guess I should say a ManDad, given that they are now 30, 26 and 24 years of age. I’m much nearer to becoming a grandfather than a father (or at least, so I hope, but of course no pressure lads).

So, speaking as a Dad…

Fatherhood was an important sub-theme of my last book, Of Boys and Men. It’s been an animating motivation for much of my policy work, both in and out of government: urging at least some statutory paternity leave in the UK while serving in the 2010 Coalition Government; serving on the Brookings-AEI Paid Leave working group; and much more besides.

Fathers, fatherhood, and father figures are now going to be a big feature of my work going forward. It is already a core theme of the work of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), the think-tank I founded and run. We have now launched a Modern Fatherhood Initiative to broaden our work in this space. See some of the work we’ve already done in this space, including:

• Ari Binder’s superb empirical paper on the impact of the pandemic on gender roles, showing a sharp narrowing in the gaps in paid and unpaid work. One standout finding for me was the difference in weekly paid work hours among college-educated parents with a child under 6 closed by about six hours per week—from 16.7 to 10.7 hours—in just five years.

• From June Carbone and Clare Huntington, a powerful argument showing how family law is “punitive and moralistic” towards unmarried fathers, largely from working class backgrounds, and so “exacerbating the isolation of men in their families and undermining their place as caregivers”. Drawing on their Columbia Law Review article, they have some ideas for reform in this area. U.S. family law was written for a world that no longer exists, and it’s long overdue an overhaul.

• A descriptive research brief summarizing the evidence on how fathers matter for child outcomes from AIBM’s Ben Smith with Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, and Jay Fagan. Echoing Binder, they show the dramatic rise in hands-on parenting by Dads, and their distinct contributions to child development “through play, teaching, challenging, and modeling behavior”.

• More recently, a paper from Anders Knospe and me showing that, contrary to many recent headlines, fathers have massively increased the amount of parental leave they are taking, especially in states with strong, supportive policies. We show that leave-taking rates have roughly tripled since 2019.

On these Substack pages you’ll see regular offerings from me, along with guest contributions and some conversations with leading fatherhood scholars and practitioners. And I’m also delighted to be writing a book on the subject for Penguin Random House. So, watch all these spaces! I’m pretty excited.

I’m especially interested in the importance of fatherhood for fathers themselves; for the role of “father figures” (coaches, mentors, uncles) in the lives of young men especially; and in the distinctive characteristics of fathering in a modern world reaching for gender equality but not androgyny. (More on all these in the weeks and months to come).

Fatherhood for fathers

One of the things I have gotten badly wrong in my previous work, from that Fabian article more than thirty years ago to Of Boys and Men just four years ago, is to neglect the importance of fatherhood not just for kids and families, but for fathers themselves. Becoming a father, or even just the prospect of becoming a father, has a salutary effect on men, not only emotionally, but economically, culturally and physically.

I am a great admirer of the work of Darby Saxbe and her new book Dad Brain, which sets out clearly the evidence for the way that the bodies and brains of fathers undergo changes that are similar to those experienced by mothers, so long as they are involved in hands-on care. That is why I was delighted to be interviewed for her book, as well as to provide the following endorsement:

Superb. Engaging, authoritative and uplifting. Saxbe shows how men become fathers at the level of biology, exploding stubborn myths about Dads not being suited for parenting. Impressive and inspiring. A book for everyone.

As Saxbe writes, the changes in mothers are essentially “obligate”, since motherhood has always and everywhere involved direct, close-contact infant care, while fathering has been much more variable.

There has been much discussion recently of the idea of “matrescence”, a catch-all term for the shifts in identity that occur for women after becoming a mother. There is reportedly an effort to add the word to the Oxford English Dictionary. I’d support that. This period of profound transformation needs more attention from healthcare providers and policymakers. It’s far from all bad, to be clear. Developmental scientists like Saxbe and others see the process of becoming a parent as a period of plasticity and growth akin to puberty. But I’d insist on including “patrescence” too. The transformation of men into fathers may be slower, less dramatic and less visible than the one for mothers. But it is no less significant.

You’ll be getting more Saxbe on these pages soon, I promise. For now I really can’t recommend her book strongly enough. I meant what I said in the blurb: it is essential reading for anybody interested in these issues, and is also, and unusually, refreshingly free of ideological blinkers.

I’ve tended to treat fatherhood like an input to child development, or even to gender equality, rather than as an end in itself. But I’ve come to believe that children are as important for men as fathers are for children. It’s no surprise to me that young men now seem to rank having children as higher up their list of priorities than young women. There is real wisdom here. At some level I think men know that being responsible for children - likely your own, but also those in the tribe more generally - is an important ingredient in their own development, and their own sense of having a place and stake in the world.

Some myth-busting, of course

There’ll be some necessary myth-busting, too. The stereotypes of the deadbeat dad, the doofus dad or the layabout dad are proving harder to shed than some of the other pernicious identity-based ones of recent decades.

I’m not ashamed then to say that there will be a pro-Dad sensibility in much of this work. This does not mean ignoring tough questions about when Dads do fail, often in deeply damaging ways. But it does mean providing some necessary corrective to the current tendency towards a deficit-framing of fatherhood, of judging fathers by what they are not doing rather than by the contributions that they are making.

As some of the AIBM work mentioned above shows, fathers are generally being pretty awesome when they are encouraged and enabled to be so. It’s not just us, of course. A new paper from the Institute for Family Studies by Lyman Stone shows the transformation in the role of fathers in recent decades. As he writes:

Far from the stereotype of dads leaving their wives as golf widows or hunting widows, the real story is that modern dads are grinding harder than ever before, shedding hobbies and friendships, and devoting themselves to their families to an unprecedented degree.

Lyman is absolutely right about this. He’s also right to gently question whether fathers can keep it going at this rate. The demand for more flexible working is now coming from Dads at least as much as Moms. He also confirms our work showing that in couples, mothers and fathers work equally hard, and that the gender gap in unpaid work is narrowing in a striking fashion:

Please do share this post so other folks know about our work in this area. And a very happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and father-figures out there.