Are Dads Getting Better?
A few years ago, I made a new dad friend at the playground. Although we’d spent our childhoods differently—middle-class suburbia for me, poverty in India for him—we discovered that we shared a similar approach to parenthood. We both wanted to be hands-on, enlightened dads, unconstrained by outmoded manly stereotypes. Watching our sons play with trucks in the sand, my new friend recalled his father, who’d been loving but also formal and distant—content to let his wife do most of the parenting. “I want to be connected to my kids,” he said, squatting to distribute cut-up fruit from a Tupperware container. “I want to spend as much time with them as I can.”
At the same playground, I’d once seen a father reclining inside the play-structure tunnel; he watched YouTube in the shade while his toddler daughter fended for herself. Another dad sometimes paced by the swings, coaching his son’s performance in a permanent state of exasperation. In contrast, my new friend struck me as an especially attuned and gentle father. And yet all three dads, simply by being there, were representative of a larger trend. Many dads today are trying to be different, evolved, and “better”; they see themselves as part of an active effort to modernize fatherhood. Their efforts start with attention. “Since 1965, partnered fathers in the United States nearly quadrupled their daily time spent with kids,” Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, reports, in “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.”
Like so much else in America, the experience of fatherhood is polarized. One in four children live apart from their fathers (“a rate that has doubled since 1960,” Saxbe notes, though it has fallen somewhat recently) and, six years after a separation, almost a third of fathers no longer see their children. But, elsewhere, father time has expanded dramatically, beginning even before kids are born. Expectant fathers often follow their partners’ pregnancies closely; in many countries, including the U.S., it’s become “de rigueur for dads to witness their child’s arrival,” though half a century ago “a man’s stereotypical role during birth was essentially to hand out cigars to his buddies.” As their kids grow, many dads continue to spend more time with them, in part because men are now “breadwinners” in only about half of heterosexual marriages.
This greater degree of closeness, Saxbe shows, affects men profoundly, not just emotionally but physically. Studies suggest that expectant and new dads who spend lots of time with their partners and children experience changes in their brains and hormones that roughly parallel what happens for women; the changes are greater the more time they spend. In new mothers, for instance, an increase in the hormone prolactin helps lay the groundwork for breastfeeding. But it turns out that prolactin rises in new fathers, too, making them more alert not just to their own children but to other people’s. Neuroimaging studies have found that men’s brains, like women’s, shrink a little around the time when kids arrive: in both sexes, this is a form of pruning rather than atrophy, with more “streamlined” brains contributing to the intense focus new parents can bring to the challenges of parenting. (Broadly speaking, the brain regions that change in fathers have to do with caring what other people think.)
Saxbe reports on research showing that dads generally have lower testosterone than non-dads; the more time they spend with their kids, the lower their testosterone goes. This is another change that makes them more dadlike. The anthropologist Lee Gettler speculates that “low-T” fatherhood is basically an adaptation to circumstances: when new dads are immersed in the work of parenting—bathing infants and changing their diapers, or helping older kids navigate the emotional complexities of middle school—it simply doesn’t make sense for them to be “hormonally focused on competition and aggression.” Conservatives such as Tucker Carlson have lamented a decline in testosterone among Western men, seeing it as a crisis. But the decline—which Saxbe notes could be caused in part by obesity, nonsmoking, and other factors—might also simply reflect the fact that lots of dads are spending lots of time with their kids. The more men parent, the more they transform, quite literally, into family men. Such fathers don’t just act differently—they are different.
Does this make today’s dads better? That’s a surprisingly thorny question. In a chapter titled “What Makes a Good Dad?,” Saxbe draws on the work of Barry Hewlett, an anthropologist whom she describes as studying “the most hands-on fathers on the planet”—the men of the Aka, who live in the rain forest of the Congo Basin. The Aka gather honey and caterpillars to eat, and hunt much of the rest of their food. While living with the Aka, Hewlett found that fathers of babies had them within arm’s reach half the time, often carrying them while working or socializing. “Men might gather with a group of other men to drink palm wine, each of them holding an infant in their arms,” Saxbe writes. Meanwhile, the fathers of the Kipsigis tribe, who live as shepherds in Kenya, “rarely feed, bathe, or dress their infants,” and “consider it unmanly to carry a baby around outside the house.” They understand masculinity as so incompatible with babies that “fathers are not supposed to see their newborns for the first weeks after birth, lest they damage the infants with the ‘strength’ of their gaze.”
When Saxbe asks Hewlett “why the Aka are better dads than the Kipsigis,” he takes issue with the premise of the question. He concedes that “the Aka are more hands-on,” but argues that “better” is subjective. “Kipsigis dads support their families too,” Saxbe notes. “They serve as protectors, providers, and role models.” A comparatively hands-off father who is focussed on bringing home food “increases the odds that his child will survive past infancy. . . . Good fathers in any given culture are the ones who give kids what they need to thrive within their specific world.”
What kind of world do we live in? For fathers, this question is caught up in further questions about the shifting role of men. People with widely diverging political views agree that “men are in crisis”—but their views re-diverge over whether men aren’t manly enough or, in contrast, are “toxically” masculine. (Dip into the manosphere and you’ll think both complaints are true.) In his widely-read book “Notes on Being a Man,” from last year, the business professor and podcaster Scott Galloway surveys the challenges faced by men and boys. “If we can’t convince young men of the honor involved and the unique contributions inherent in expressing what makes them male,” he writes, “we’ll lose them to niche, rabid online communities.” They are growing up without social skills: nearly half of men between eighteen and twenty-five “have never approached a woman in person.” They are doing badly in school and in the job market. Misled by “a parade of fake men selling distorted versions of what it means to be a man,” they don’t know how to act or how to raise boys to act well.
And yet, simultaneously, many fathers are spending more time with their kids than ever. This contradiction—men in crisis, men being present—is part of our reality. Parenting has to happen regardless of whether you have all the answers, and so these many committed dads have all sorts of improvised theories about how to best approach their common task. Another researcher cited by Saxbe “thinks contemporary industrialized societies are in transition” between “ ‘high-T’ and ‘low-T’ models of fatherhood.” Anecdotally, I’d say that, for all the progressive, feminist, “low-T” dads I know (and I’d include myself in that group), I know an equal number of old-school, “high-T” dads with more traditional outlooks.
It’s interesting to see where their approaches converge. Galloway’s book is an attempt to conjure such a convergence: often, he articulates virtues that are fundamentally ungendered using rhetoric that makes them sound manly. A man “provides stability, support, love, and trust for his family, community, and himself,” Galloway writes, and is “a ballast that absorbs the dramas taking place around him without giving in to them”; being a dad—or a “male provider”—“means making hard decisions on behalf of your family.” Even as he writes about dads, Galloway tells stories about his “strong mother,” showing repeatedly that her success as a parent revolved around the same kinds of good deeds. Is there anything uniquely manly about being a good father? Maybe not. Maybe a good father is just a good parent who happens to be a man.
And yet one of the lessons of Saxbe’s book is that fathers are embodied individuals—not collections of ideas, but human beings with their own brains and internal chemistries. Looking around at the many dads I know, the differences among us are obvious. There are football dads and Lego dads, bookish dads and surfer dads, trans dads and gay dads, young dads and old dads. A father isn’t just a parent who happens to be a man; he’s a parent who happens to be a particular kind of person. It’s inevitable, therefore, that we’ll wrestle with what the content of fatherhood should be. We’ll probably never agree. But if we can’t agree about content, we can converge on form. Parenthood is a container. What matters is filling it with the best you have to offer. ♦