Dads’ Quiet Revolution
Something surprising triggered a massive priority shift.
Welcome to What Could Go Right?, where even we have to admit that sometimes the “height of human folly” Hollywood scripts write themselves.
The 1970s and ’80s were a transformational period for the American household. As women increasingly exited the traditional role of housewife and entered the workforce for good, the time that women and men spent working versus homemaking began to converge. By 1992, the gender gap in hours spent at a formal job had shrunk nearly in half.
Famously dubbed the “quiet revolution,” this era was unique both because of its rapid pace of change and the novel shift in women’s identities. For the first time, they could be a wife and mother and a careerist.
But the workplace vs. household time convergence between the genders never quite, erm, reached equilibrium. Though it did continue into the millennium—albeit more slowly—by the late 2010s, it had largely stopped.
Then the pandemic happened.
In a new paper, Ariel Binder, a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), documents a shift during the Covid years that was even speedier than the quiet revolution’s. This time, however, it’s not women working more that has driven the trend. It’s men working less (and for fathers in particular, increasing time spent on cooking, cleaning, and childcare). The change is especially stark among college-educated fathers, who between 2019 and 2024 “cut their paid work hours by six per week and raised housework and childcare by more than four.”
As Richard Reeves, a member of The Progress Network and president of AIBM, put it on a podcast, this is the “biggest increase in the amount of hands-on fathering . . . in half a century.” Millennial dads now spend as much time taking care of their kids as moms did in 1985.
After reading all that, I suspect you may have some hypotheses about what’s going on. Perhaps it’s an economic difficulty story: Men today struggle to find employment, and less time working is just the unfortunate byproduct. Or perhaps, more positively, it’s about improved work-life balance, after the pandemic shot remote working into the stratosphere. No commute equals more time with junior.
Those are good theories—and wrong ones. Binder’s number crunching found that those factors explain “very little.” And while it’s too early to say for sure what his findings do mean—and even whether the trend will persist—what they are consistent with is a massive voluntary realignment of gender norms. Non-college educated men, for instance, whose working hours declined less than those of college-educated ones, pulled their extra housework time from that spent previously on relaxation and leisure. Men may be living a quiet revolution of their own: from breadwinner to the now more strongly valued identities of husband and father.
Pondering American fatherhood’s transformation since the Silent Generation, economic analyst Aziz Sunderji writes that it “might seem like a violation of tradition.” But, he argues, “The working-husband-and-housewife norm is not a biological inscription in our genes. It is an invention of the Industrial Revolution.” Neither is it a strictly American development. As Sunderji notes, fathers’ childcare time is “surging” across Europe and in other rich countries, too.
Indeed, it’s telling that Binder found that the most well-off fathers—those with the resources and flexibility to decide how to spend their time—increased homemaking hours most. Dads seem to be more involved in family life now more than ever because they want to be.
Future research will have to answer some lingering questions, but I am especially curious what it was about the pandemic, if not remote work, that triggered such a priority readjustment. Was it the crisis of childcare caused by the lockdowns? Our close brush with mortality? Something else? Let me know your theories in the comments.
—Emma Varvaloucas
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What Could Go Right? S8 E6: Real Progress: Why We Ignore How Good We Have It | with Nick Gillespie
Why does historic abundance breed widespread cultural anger? Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large of Reason magazine and host of the Reason podcast, joins host Zachary Karabell to unpack the great conundrum of the 21st century: why humans have more security and financial means than ever before, yet feel increasingly dissatisfied. | Listen now
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In my friend group, all the dads are the cooks. My husband does all the cooking and grocery shopping. When we have friends over, I usually look around and notice the men are in the kitchen cooking and I am sitting on the couch chatting with my lady friends, and watching children. It's pretty great.
Hurray for these engaged dads! I am delighted to see dads pushing strollers and watching their children in the park, and to hear about sharing household responsibilities.
One thing that saddens me immensely is also seeing many dads, as well as moms looking at their cell phones while pushing a stroller, while their little ones play, and while at restaurants for a supposed family meal. Sometimes the whole family is looking at their cell phones. Who knows how much screen time is happening at home. It won't really matter whether it's mom or dad at home if relationships aren't being nurtured.
My best wishes to families who want to parent thoughtfully in the ever present technology surrounding us!
Nancy N. Vancouver, B.C.