Introduction: Why Study Men and Caregiving in 2026?

In the past decade, the public interest in men’s attitudes about and involvement in caregiving has swelled. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fractures in U.S. workplace and child care and older adult care systems. As schools and care facilities closed and many offices sent employees to work remotely from home, the caregiving that sustains most individuals and families became more visible than ever. Millions of family members were forced to take on unpaid care for older loved ones as the pandemic led to a severe shortage of paid caregivers.¹ For many households, the old order of work and care, which has never been easy in the United States, became unsustainable. As Better Life Lab has reported, some men became much more involved in household and child care labor, understanding the power and difficulty of care work in new ways.² Research found fathers’ shares of housework and child care increased early in the pandemic.³ Analysis of the American Time Use Survey has suggested that some men continue to increase their child care involvement and reduce their paid work time, even several years after the pandemic.⁴ One economist found that a growing number of men did not work for pay in 2025 because of child care or older age care responsibilities, representing a total of about 3 million men.⁵

Still, other indicators suggest potential retrenchment regarding gender and caregiving. Men played a deciding role in the 2024 U.S. election, contributing 55 percent of the votes to re-elect Donald J. Trump as president.⁶ On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to protect women “whether the women like it or not,”⁷ while close allies at the Heritage Foundation promoted Project 2025’s vision of reinvigorating the “biblically based family.“⁸ Young men, including young Hispanic men, were more likely to vote Republican than in years past,⁹ prompting widespread discussion of whether young men are increasingly conservative on a number of issues, including gender roles. 

Social media algorithms have given the so-called manosphere outsized reach in promoting misogyny, male supremacy, and rigid views of masculinity tied to “incel” lifestyles and sexual violence.¹⁰ Some research finds young men are more likely than older men to believe that the proper place for women and mothers is at home, yet they still approach their own future arrangements of family life with a degree of flexibility.¹¹ Such generational findings have prompted a surge in “heteropessimism,” a skepticism about whether a happy, domestic life between men and women is possible or will be in the future.

The public has also engaged in a more urgent and widespread conversation about findings of loneliness and a lack of purpose among men, despite the fact that men and women self-report similar rates of loneliness. The global nonprofit Equimundo finds that over half of American men say “no one really knows me.”¹² The American Enterprise Institute’s American Perspectives Survey finds that while Americans generally report having fewer friends today than in the 1990s, men have experienced a steeper decline. Today, 15 percent of men say they do not have a single close friend.¹³ More troubling is that men are more likely to feel distressed and isolated, even if they have comparable social networks to women. An analysis of the 2024 Making Caring Common Survey by the American Institute for Boys and Men found men were more likely to say they felt irrelevant or that they lacked meaning or purpose in their lives.¹⁴ Men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women.¹⁵ Findings that fatherhood and caregiving give men a sense of happiness and mattering¹⁶ make it ever more critical to understand the opportunities for, experiences of, and barriers to men giving care.

Adding to these ongoing conversations about the role of men in caregiving is the baseline increase in caregiving needs the United States has experienced in recent years. The U.S. population is aging, with an estimated 7 million more adults ages 64–85 between 2025 and 2030.¹⁷ The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 70 percent of older Americans will need long-term care.¹⁸ Even as the demand for home health workers grows, low wages and a lack of investment at the state and federal levels hamper efforts to expand the workforce.¹⁹ Furthermore, cuts to long-term care policy and to Medicaid under the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or HR1, are expected to place additional pressure on family caregivers as well as on the finances of aging and disabled adults.²⁰

The pressures on and expectations of parents have also increased. Parenting is now more demanding of time, emotional attention, and resources than in past decades.²¹ Additionally, parents juggle demanding paid work with today’s more intensive parenting. As of 2024, 70 percent of children under the age of six had all available parents in the workforce, a 5 percentage-point increase from 2014.²²²³ Demand for child care outpaces supply, and the cost of child care continues to outpace inflation.²⁴ A December 2025 working paper published by the Better Life Lab showed aggressive immigration enforcement was shrinking the child care workforce, where one in five workers has been an immigrant.²⁵ That, in turn, has forced tens of thousands of American-born women out of paid work.

Between 2019 and 2021, the Better Life Lab published six reports related to men’s attitudes and experiences of caregiving based on a 2019 nationally representative survey conducted by NORC and supplemented by a series of online focus groups and original reporting. The reports found that:

• Men wanted to give care, overwhelmingly saw its value, and wanted to share care equally but didn’t, and often felt they couldn’t. 
• Men anticipated needing leave at the same rate as women but took less of it, in part because leave is often unpaid in the United States. 
• Far from the stereotype of absent Black fathers, Black fathers looked like all other fathers in terms of involvement, tasks, and beliefs. 
• Men’s caregiving experience shaped their attitudes and behaviors: Those with caregiving experience were more likely to identify as caregivers, value caregiving, and be willing to overcome stigma and barriers and in order to provide care.
• Men with more intensive caregiving responsibilities—caring for an adult or a child with above-average needs—performed many of the same hands-on tasks that similar women caregivers did and cut back their hours or dropped out of the workforce to provide care at similar rates. 
• Fathers valued being emotionally in tune and involved and were more likely to consider giving affection to children as “very important” than being a financial provider. 

To understand the current state of caregiving among American men and women, the Better Life Lab has once again partnered with NORC to survey Americans about these critical questions. 

In the 2026 follow-up survey, the Better Life Lab sought to examine how its earlier findings were trending seven years later and to offer new insights into the status of men and their relationships to caregiving: 

• Have men’s attitudes about caregiving shifted since 2019?
• Has their involvement in caregiving increased or decreased?
• What do men say they want when it comes to combining time and space for caregiving and paid work, and how does that compare with women?
• How do young men compare with older men and with their women peers when it comes to caregiving and attitudes about caregiving?
• Do those who give care identify as caregivers? 

In the 2026 survey, we oversampled young men, men of color, and fathers of young children to better understand differences among men by demographics and the intensity of their caregiving experiences. Unlike the 2019 survey, we did not oversample men in professional caregiving roles.

As in 2019, survey respondents were also asked if they would be willing to speak to a reporter. In this report, we have supplemented these findings with original interviews with willing survey participants to better understand the contexts in which particular beliefs, practices, and desires around caregiving have emerged. Our findings follow.