Introduction

This study shows that fathers feel positively about the care they provide and about their role as fathers. The vast majority of fathers believe care work is valuable and are proud to talk about their caregiving with others. They also consider being an involved father to be an important part of being a man. They also believe care work in the home is as valuable as the paid work that takes place outside of it. These findings suggest it is not a lack of interest in caregiving or a sense that it is not valuable work that keeps fathers from doing more of it on a more frequent basis.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, parents in the United States faced immense challenges in providing financially for their children while also providing the care, education, support, and attention children need and parents hope to give.¹ As mothers and fathers struggle to find or hold onto decent paying jobs, they also face unprecedented demands on their time at home. With many schools and early care and learning facilities still closed, families increasingly need all parents on deck to provide care to children.² The importance of both men and women engaging in child care and development has never been more urgent.

Fatherhood has changed immensely in just 50 years. Through the first half of the twentieth century, men’s role as parents consisted mostly of providing financially for their children. The hands-on work of child care—feeding, bathing, nurturing, and emotionally supporting children—was reserved for mothers.

Throughout modern American life, families have organized themselves in diverse ways, and showed flexibility of roles for particular family members.³ But the model of a nuclear family in which a mother and father took on separate but complementary roles has nonetheless existed as both the norm and the ideal.⁴ Under the idealized “separate spheres” model of family life, a mother’s domain was the household and her responsibility caring for all members of the family, and the father’s domain, the workplace, with his responsibility mainly lying outside the home, in managing the family’s economic life. For the most part, when dads did engage at home, it was in the mold of either a playmate or a disciplinarian.⁵

Conforming to this norm was never achievable or desirable for many in America, including those living in poverty who could not afford to have just one adult family member working. Low-income women have worked outside the home as well as inside of it throughout the history of the United States.⁶ This separate spheres ideal also did not capture the experiences of people of color, especially Black Americans, who were excluded from middle- and high-wage jobs, and who were expected to perform waged work regardless of gender and, at times, even age, until late in the twentieth century.⁷ Though U.S. welfare policy was initially designed to allow war widows to stay at home, care for their children, and avoid paid work, the “welfare queen” narrative of the 1980s and 1990s led to welfare reforms that instead required mothers to enter the paid workforce in order to receive benefits.⁸ Fathers of color and fathers in poor families have also been stigmatized as uninvolved, even as they are often encouraged to put engaging in paid work above being present in their families, no matter how low the wages they can earn.⁹ Public policy and the low-wage labor market have put many families in lose-lose situations, where they can neither engage in paid work nor in care work in ways that meet their families’ needs, leading to the perpetuation of poverty in the next generation.¹⁰ As wages have stagnated for the bottom quartile of Americans and public policy has nudged all parents into the workforce, despite the instability of U.S. jobs and lack of adequate child care, women have entered the labor market in staggering numbers in recent decades.¹¹

The separate spheres model has all but disappeared for the majority of American families. There is no longer a “typical” American family.¹² Women’s entrance into the labor force has coincided with men’s increased responsibility at home. In general, dads today are more hands-on, domestically oriented, and emotionally in tune with their children and their children’s needs than fathers of past generations. Prior research suggests that since the 1960s, fathers have tripled the amount of time they spend on childcare and housework.¹³ And for the most part, fathers have welcomed this evolution of their role.

As one focus group respondent in this study said, “I think I and my generation are far more involved actively as dads. We take our role seriously and try to do our best to share equally the parenting and domestic responsibilities. My father didn't change diapers. My father didn't do the school carpools. He didn't have any interest in child teacher conferences or the day to day on homework. He was a big picture guy. My dad was a great father and taught me a lot of really great life lessons before he passed away and I don't fault him for not being a more ACTIVE dad in our early childhood. He had a job and that was what was expected of him. It was always an exciting big deal when he could free himself up to come to a baseball game instead of my mother who was at every game. … I'd like to step up to be more present for my kids and more supportive and equal with my wife.”

Despite sentiments like this becoming more commonplace, inequalities between fathers and mothers persist. Mothers continue to do the bulk of unpaid labor around the home even as their engagement in paid work has increased significantly. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1975 fewer than half of mothers with minor children engaged in paid work. In 2019, 72 percent of mothers with children under age 18 were active in the labor force.¹⁴

Women’s greater time spent in caregiving is associated with low wages, disruptions to their working lives, and greater stress.¹⁵ Men who engage in caregiving and domestic work demonstrate significant benefits to their health, their happiness, and even to their work lives.¹⁶ This report shows that a new model of fatherhood, based on affection and teaching, rather than providing, has already emerged, and that both men and women show a demonstrable yearning for greater equality in parenting. The report also points to the main barriers to achieving that equality today.

The Men and Care survey was designed to capture the experiences of caregiving of all fathers in the United States. Respondents included 1,158 men and 677 women who affirmed they were the parent or guardian of at least one child. In our sample, there were 828 fathers and 410 mothers with a child under the age of 18. Our sample included both residential and non-residential parents, that is, those who live full-time with their children and those who do not. The parents who responded to the survey were diverse across socioeconomic status, age, and race, and our findings among these demographic groups are representative of the overall population.

Parents of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities were included in the study. However, the number of these respondents was too small (87 fathers and 42 mothers identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) to allow for analysis of these demographic groups.

Additionally, 35 percent of fathers and 41 percent of mothers in this study have provided care to a child who needs extra medical care, mental health, or educational services compared to a typical child of that age.

The survey findings were supplemented by online focus groups with 16 fathers with children under age eight from across the United States. Participants answered a series of questions about their experiences as fathers, designed to give the researchers greater understanding of the survey findings. Quotations and anecdotes from those focus groups appear throughout the report when relevant to survey findings, with pseudonyms to protect the privacy of respondents and their family members.