Earlier this year, a new acquaintance asked what signs of hope I see for our society. It’s easy enough to list what’s wrong, he observed. We all play the critic. But what’s good and getting better? What’s encouraging?
For a moment, I was flummoxed. My first ideas didn’t seem serious enough for the conversation we’d been having. Then it came to me: the dads.
Without exception, every millennial and zoomer dad I know is a great dad. I know that’s anecdotal, but there are numbers to back this up, and I’m not alone in noticing that something here has shifted. Yet I don’t see much attention to what this shift will mean long-term. What harvest will we reap in 20, 30, 40 years from today’s good fathering? How will the dad dividend pay?
I don’t want to overstate the change at hand. There are good fathers in every generation and plenty of bad ones kicking around now. But I’m confident the difference I see is real and will prove important.
Here’s what this looks like in the data: American dads are spending more time with their kids. Compared to just five years ago, millennial fathers specifically “are doing 17 more minutes of [child] care per weekday and 32 more minutes per weekend day,” as The New York Times’ Jessica Grose recently reported, “for a total of 2.5 hours more child care a week.” That stacks on similar growth at the start of this century and the end of the last. Men are doing more around the house, too, and support for paternity leave is also rising.
Faithful Fathers
Here’s what it looks like on the ground: “Millennial fathers—at least the ones I hang around—are more interested in being great fathers than anything else in life,” in the words of Andrew O’Donovan, who writes about modern fatherhood on Substack. “In the case of almost all of these fathers, they came from broken homes, homes with absent fathers, homes with angry fathers, homes with emasculated fathers, or homes with a smattering of any of the above. We’ve known for some time that [we] want to be better fathers.”
In my observation, they’re succeeding. When the dads in my circles take their kids out without the moms—and they do, and it’s not “babysitting”—they don’t need to be handheld about what the baby’s eating these days or where to find the swimsuits. They know. And they know how to phone the pediatrician and how the church nursery works and what makes their toddler feel better when he has gas.
Beyond knowing, they do. They change diapers and handle bedtime, answer teacher emails and go to medical appointments. They don’t need to be persuaded to avoid a time-suck commute if feasible, or to take as much paternity leave as they can, or to be as helpful as possible during the birth and the newborn period. They may be professionally accomplished and ambitious, but it doesn’t come at the expense of their families.
Time spent on chores and childcare may or may not be evenly split between spouses, depending on a given family’s work arrangements. A homeschooling mom, for instance, will almost always spend more time with the kids than her formally employed husband, and mothers tend to gravitate toward jobs with more flexible schedules. But however those roles shake out, the dads I know are true partners, neither dominating their wives nor expecting them to manage the household alone. They do not wall off whole swaths of parenting and family life from the male purview. They do not utter the dread phrase I’d help if you’d just tell me what to do.
And it’s not only the responsible side of child-rearing in which these dads excel; just as significant is that they have friends and hobbies. They watch sports, go to concerts, and enjoy a beer. They exercise, join book clubs, learn new skills, and actively cultivate their marriages. They’re enthusiastic about their churches and small groups. And crucially, they do all this in front of their kids. They model fatherhood as a life of rest along with work, play along with discipline, joy along with duty.
These dads make parenthood look natural and normal, not the death knell of fun and freedom. They father in a way that debunks the inequality of mothering and fathering as verbs, the one commonly used to mean lifelong care and the other the act of a single night. They delight in their kids and show them that this delight does not subsume all the other goods of life. They demonstrate daily that entrance into fatherhood, while not always easy, adds far more than it takes.
Now, again, many men in older generations were excellent fathers, and the time-use improvements aren’t equally distributed. Dads who don’t marry or go to college are not increasing their weekly childcare time, and changing attitudes around cooking in particular suggest that religiosity strongly correlates with willingness to help around the house. (And many millennial men, of course, are not becoming dads at all.)
In other words, the dads I know—dads who are, almost universally, married college grads who go to church every week—are to a degree exceptional. What I’m seeing in my husband and our friends and family is not the average.
Yet neither is it some wild outlier, and even if only a minority of dads are as dedicated to good fatherhood as my dad friends are, that still matters. That will still change things.
How differently will my sons and my friends’ sons think about fatherhood because of the fathers they know now? Perhaps they will be less ambivalent about the whole project of becoming parents than our generation has been.
Or how differently will our daughters think about marriage, about trusting someone enough to take the plunge of raising children together? Perhaps they’ll take vows with justifiable assurance that, as O’Donovan proclaims, the “Homer Simpsonification of the modern father is dead.”
And how differently will all these children think about God if their earthly father, though imperfect, is an aid instead of a hindrance to understanding the Father’s love?
We cannot help but draw the connection, I suspect, and surely we are intended to draw it. Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount. “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” he asked. “Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9–11).
How much more will a generation shaped by good dads multiply the good gifts they’ve received? I wait in hope to see it.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
