I spent the early days of Covid talking to hundreds of American parents of all different backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and circumstances about how the pandemic affected their lives. While the overall picture was raw and depressing, there was often a glimmer of positivity: Many moms and dads felt lucky to be spending more time with their families. American fathers, who statistically speaking spend less time with their children and work more hours than mothers do, seemed especially smitten with the additional bonding time.
An article in Vox about pandemic fathering from June 2020 quoted a Chicago dad: “Every morning, the kids come in the room and we get to snuggle for five or 10 minutes. Who gets to do that on a Tuesday? That’s the stuff I’m kind of clinging to, because that’s the stuff you don’t get back.” That same month, the Swedish journalist Martin Gelin noticed how much American dads were enjoying themselves and wondered in a guest essay for Times Opinion if these shifts in caregiving might become more permanent, and whether American dads could become more like Nordic ones.
Five years later, we have an answer: American dads are still spending more time with their children than they were pre-Covid. We found this out by asking Misty Heggeness, the co-director of the Kansas Population Center at the University of Kansas, to crunch the numbers for us. She and her team at the Care Board, a new dashboard that collects and analyzes data around caregiving in the United States, found that fathers of children ages 10 and under were doing about seven minutes more per weekday and 18 minutes more per weekend day, for a total of 1.2 hours more child care a week. (The year 2020 is excluded from this data set because it was such an outlier.)
When you narrow the age range of fathers from 25 to 44, which is roughly the millennial generation, fathers are doing 17 more minutes of care per weekday and 32 more minutes per weekend day, for a total of 2.5 hours more child care a week.
If you select for dads who are 25 to 44 and also part of the sandwich generation — that means in addition to having at least one kid under 10, they are also caring for older family members — the pandemic fatherhood effect is even more pronounced. Millennial sandwich generation dads are doing more than seven hours more child care per week than they did 10 years ago.
Where is this time coming from? In general, dads are working fewer hours and replacing leisure time with child care, Heggeness noted. They are also multitasking, so while that seven hours seems like a ton, it’s probably not the case that they’re spending every minute of that time solely focused on their kids. This might look like kids tagging along while parents run errands, dads checking email on the sidelines at a baseball game or fathers tackling the yardwork while their children look for four-leaf clovers.
Heggeness & Co. pooled statistics over five-year periods to make the comparison between pre- and post-pandemic fatherhood, so the above charts used data from 2011 to 2015 and then 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to show the change over time. When you look at the data broken down by year, there was a big jump in dads performing child care from 2019 to 2021, and that change really stuck.
When I saw the data broken down, it made intuitive sense. We have known for a long time, based on data on paternity leave in other countries, that when dads spend more time with their babies, those patterns of care can be sticky. I also wondered if some of the increase in child care was because of the generational change between Generation X and millennials; by the pandemic, the majority of parents of young children were born in the ’80s and ’90s. Gen X was largely raised by the silent generation, and millennials were raised by post-sexual-revolution boomers, who had more progressive ideas about gender roles.
Finally, though many companies and the federal government are clawing back remote and hybrid work, it’s possible that the increase in flexible working locations from 2021 to 2023 allowed some dads to spend a few extra hours with their kids around the edges of work.
We’re in a retrogressive political and cultural moment, when the valorized ideal of the American family involves a woman managing all domestic labor. But that’s not the reality that a plurality of American families are living, and it’s not what a lot of dads appear to want. They want to be more involved in their children’s lives, from surprise morning snuggles to bedtime reading and everything in between.
End Notes
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Nothing right: One of the mainstays of my no-screens bedtime routine is reading dead-tree books I have read before. Last week I recalled an exquisite book of short stories, Antonya Nelson’s “Nothing Right,” from 2009, and pulled it off my shelf. It is as wonderful as I remembered — truly empathetic fiction about imperfect humans. My favorite of the stories, “Shauntrelle,” about a recently divorced woman and the unexpected bond she has with a random roommate, ran in The New Yorker in 2007.
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