I think there is also a degree of differences in reporting?
When my kid was younger, we had the spreadsheet fight about hours, and we basically came to the conclusion that we had a 50/50 time split once we were using the same assumptions about what counted as 'child care' and what didn't. Some of this was dumb stuff, like 'playing video games with the kid' was something she did not want to count as 'childcare,' but she did want 'playing dolls with the kid' counted on her side. There was also kind of a divide, wherein 'housework' was counted, but yardwork or garage work was not. But it was extremely useful and settled a lot of conflict to actively log time spent on split home labor between the two of us.
What I came away with was an understanding that as the woman, my kid's mom was under more pressure to effectively be the queen of the home domain, whereas I didn't feel that pressure. The social pressure led her to continually kind of both underestimate my time and overestimate her own.
So it always seems to me that these surveys have results that would differ if you dropped cameras into 1,000 houses and then meticulously coded all the time spent on any given task.
While touched on here, risk tolerance strikes me as a huge driver in each parent's respective enjoyment of parenting that deservers greater attention.
For my part, playtime for my kids involves significantly more roughhousing with dad than with mom, but I am also way more willing to tolerate horseplay between them while I do something else like cook dinner. So not only is there more physical engagement when I am directly in charge (which makes it less of a chore and more like exercise), but the level of anxiety when I am merely "supervising" is orders of magnitude less.
I'm not a better or worse parent in that regard, but it does make my life a lot easier.
Aside from intensive parenting being class-coded, its rational to use high earning potential to work less hours and spend more time on productive activities you enjoy. There's just no conventional way in US work culture to do that. I think many of us took the opportunity presented by work-from-home to sneakily rebalance our working hours and have continued to do so. Outside of companies run by certain notably workaholic public figures, most of Silicon Valley only half completed their return to office initiatives, and decided to be satisfied with only ~60% of staff showing up 3-4 days a week.
Yes - I totally agree. I interviewed a couple of Silicon Valley dads for the 'work' chapter of my Dad Brain book, and they all talked about how much the expectations for work-life balance have shifted in the last generation.
Early Retirement (FIRE) is a reasonably conventional way of converting earning potential into more leisure hours. Though if that leisure activity is young children then yeah its hard to just get part time work.
I’m sympathetic with some of the FIRE ideas, but it does often involve reducing quality of life when younger in exchange for more leisure when older, which is risky. I’m in my 50s and healthy and I’m glad my 20 something self didn’t take that trade. It looks even worse if your health degrades faster.
Absolutely true! I have a blast with my kids, whether it is the bedtime routine or something more traditionally “fun.” Not all the time, of course, but I think many dads try to make even the boring things a bit more playful.
This is so good, Darby and answers SO many questions I have been thinking about.
I was looking at the graph that shows how Millennial dads today pick up the same amount of "child care" time as previous generations of moms (the one you reference?). But it is still 80 minutes per day on average. In my opinion, 80 minutes per day = parenting + play. Not the drudgery. And I still don't think its the equivalent of 80 minutes per day for moms (but of course their average is far more than 80 min/day)
If dads swoop in only for the “fun stuff” they are effectively hoarding the joy. Balance out who does the hard shit and you also balance out the access to enjoyment. That is so key.
I love being a dad. It is a lot of fun. But I wish I could let my hair (what’s left of it) down more and enjoy doing fun things with my kids without the nagging to-do list of work and home chores and projects. How hard it is to find the time and patience to be the parents we want to be!
Interesting stat that dads feel more spousal scrutiny on their fathering. I definitely feel pressure from my wife and family (who live next-door, so we see each other a ton) to give a certain kind of correction/consequence when my 5-year-old daughter is behaving rudely or demanding attention (I’m not going to hedge this sentence). It can be hard to find the line between choosing how I want to respond and how I feel they want me to respond. And that extra pressure often means that I fall short of both! Right now, I’m just trying to find my own footing better and being on the same page with my wife so that we can have consistency and unity.
As usual, Darby has written a well-researched article that is illuminating and informative. We haven't even gotten into the helicopter parenting, which probably is a big part of parental stress and unhappiness. At no time in history have parents been so controllingly involved with every aspect of their children's lives
We cannot stress enough that while Mom plays with her kids (if she even has time for that), she is investing in a lot of emotional and domestic load during that time, which makes it less enjoyable. She plays while synchronizing that the laundry dyer is done, that she must not forget to take the meat out of the fridge to be ready for the next day, that the doctor appointment has to be made, that Valentines is coming and there are no candies to share with her kids friends, that husband is out of socks, thar she must not forget to take her supplements and plan the next vacations and that her mother in law birthday is next week. She is exhausted and is not her fault. Dads, on the other hand, just play with their kids knowing that Mom is taking care of everyone’s needs, including cleaning up the mess they do while playing. Playing, for Dads is a price, while for Moms is work.
Besides, Moms are always wrong, no matter what we do. And we have been taught to police each other, while men are comfortable extracting our labor. Dads are applauded for doing the bare minimum. Dads earn more money once they become one, Moms are punished and hit financial and professional wall.
I’m glad they did (I can’t say that about every early 90’s band I’ve liked)! But beating out Nevermind for album of the year in Spin in 1991 means you’re doing something right.
Dads will do things with kids that mothers would never think of doing - not always wisely. I certainly remember taking my daughters by my first marriage camping in the mountains in winter when they were in elementary school. I expect that they remember it too. It was an adventure for them. The stove broke down so we cooked over an open fire at night. Frankly they would have turned their noses up at our dinner at home, but in the windy dark, it tasted good and was hot and filling, and that is all that mattered. Their mother was delighted to be staying home where it was warm - and now quiet. In the morning I took them walking among the ice flowers beside the trail. And yes, I read to them and did a lot of math with them - from their point of view, I was a BAD dad then. And I took them out for walks frequently. When they were about tweens I hiked them down to Roaring Spring below the northern rim of the Grand Canyon and back, something my artist wife included in her divorce filing. "You took them on a cliffside trail. How could you?" Kids need to be exposed to appropriate levels of risk to learn mastery. It is usually the fathers who do this.
I made sure that the kids by my second marriage learned proper firearms handling and shooting technique when they were in the tween age group. I also did the reading and math supplementation with them and would take them on regular walks - typically 2 miles a day. If nothing else, it gave my wife some peace and quiet and was good for all of us.
I agree this is true in general. There's a whole set of things, from teaching them to bicycle to archery, that I do with my sons just because my risk tolerance is more in tune with theirs. Its subtle - my wife isn't very risk averse compared to some of our friends and she doesn't dislike the fact that they do these things - but its definitely still a factor.
Is the "Parenthood Is Associated With Greater Well-Being for Fathers Than Mothers" study controlled for amount of time spent with the child? It doesn't look like it, but I couldn't fully tell.
If not, could that also be contributing to the difference?
Meaning regardless of gender, if you are in the early phase it feels more enjoyable, whereas in the end you just want to get it over with.
Sort of like how breastfeeding and weaning works.
I'm interested to see what kind of effect simply swapping the amount of time spend (exposure) will have.
I think late elementary and middle school age kids are the most fun, though. Little kids are dependent and don't understand much of what's going on. Teenagers appropriately want to spend time with their peers, not with their parents.
Yes - great question! As far as I can tell, they did not control for exposure, so I think your hunch is correct that dads might have enjoyed their children more because they had relatively less time with them. Therefore, their time felt more like a treat and a novelty vs an obligation. Here’s the relevant paragraph from the Results section of the paper and I don’t see any covariates mentioned here:
“To test our hypotheses regarding gender differences in caregiving, we created a dummycoded variable to reflect gender (male = 1, female = 0). In addition, each observation was coded to reflect whether it involved child care (child care = 1, all other activities = 0). We conducted parallel analyses regarding parents’ interactions with their children (interacting with children = 1, not interacting with children = 0). Overall, parents were slightly but significantly less happy when taking care of their children compared with other daily activities (b = −0.34, t = 2.5, p < .05, 95% CI [−0.61, −0.07]) and were significantly more happy when interacting with their children than when not interacting with their children (b = 4.02, t = 52.0, p < .001, 95% CI [3.87, 4.17]).”
Am I reading that correctly, is it saying that they distingusihed between "caring for their child" vs "interacting with their child," and the latter induces "significantly more [happiness]" in both fathers and mothers?
Yes, I think they're scoring "care" here as activities like feeding, changing, dressing, bathing, and they're scoring "interacting" as everything else (which includes play).
There's a link to the full article in the piece if you want to look more closely at how they defined everything! It's the study I describe as the "biggest and best."
I think there is also a degree of differences in reporting?
When my kid was younger, we had the spreadsheet fight about hours, and we basically came to the conclusion that we had a 50/50 time split once we were using the same assumptions about what counted as 'child care' and what didn't. Some of this was dumb stuff, like 'playing video games with the kid' was something she did not want to count as 'childcare,' but she did want 'playing dolls with the kid' counted on her side. There was also kind of a divide, wherein 'housework' was counted, but yardwork or garage work was not. But it was extremely useful and settled a lot of conflict to actively log time spent on split home labor between the two of us.
What I came away with was an understanding that as the woman, my kid's mom was under more pressure to effectively be the queen of the home domain, whereas I didn't feel that pressure. The social pressure led her to continually kind of both underestimate my time and overestimate her own.
So it always seems to me that these surveys have results that would differ if you dropped cameras into 1,000 houses and then meticulously coded all the time spent on any given task.
Yep, time diary data is always a bit squirrelly and there’s some evidence that each partner tends to overreport their own housework share.
While touched on here, risk tolerance strikes me as a huge driver in each parent's respective enjoyment of parenting that deservers greater attention.
For my part, playtime for my kids involves significantly more roughhousing with dad than with mom, but I am also way more willing to tolerate horseplay between them while I do something else like cook dinner. So not only is there more physical engagement when I am directly in charge (which makes it less of a chore and more like exercise), but the level of anxiety when I am merely "supervising" is orders of magnitude less.
I'm not a better or worse parent in that regard, but it does make my life a lot easier.
Such a great point! Risky play is also really good for kids developmentally —it helps them tolerate anxiety and better regulate emotion + arousal.
Aside from intensive parenting being class-coded, its rational to use high earning potential to work less hours and spend more time on productive activities you enjoy. There's just no conventional way in US work culture to do that. I think many of us took the opportunity presented by work-from-home to sneakily rebalance our working hours and have continued to do so. Outside of companies run by certain notably workaholic public figures, most of Silicon Valley only half completed their return to office initiatives, and decided to be satisfied with only ~60% of staff showing up 3-4 days a week.
Yes - I totally agree. I interviewed a couple of Silicon Valley dads for the 'work' chapter of my Dad Brain book, and they all talked about how much the expectations for work-life balance have shifted in the last generation.
Early Retirement (FIRE) is a reasonably conventional way of converting earning potential into more leisure hours. Though if that leisure activity is young children then yeah its hard to just get part time work.
I’m sympathetic with some of the FIRE ideas, but it does often involve reducing quality of life when younger in exchange for more leisure when older, which is risky. I’m in my 50s and healthy and I’m glad my 20 something self didn’t take that trade. It looks even worse if your health degrades faster.
Absolutely true! I have a blast with my kids, whether it is the bedtime routine or something more traditionally “fun.” Not all the time, of course, but I think many dads try to make even the boring things a bit more playful.
This is so good, Darby and answers SO many questions I have been thinking about.
I was looking at the graph that shows how Millennial dads today pick up the same amount of "child care" time as previous generations of moms (the one you reference?). But it is still 80 minutes per day on average. In my opinion, 80 minutes per day = parenting + play. Not the drudgery. And I still don't think its the equivalent of 80 minutes per day for moms (but of course their average is far more than 80 min/day)
If dads swoop in only for the “fun stuff” they are effectively hoarding the joy. Balance out who does the hard shit and you also balance out the access to enjoyment. That is so key.
Stoked to see The Beths getting a shoutout!
I love being a dad. It is a lot of fun. But I wish I could let my hair (what’s left of it) down more and enjoy doing fun things with my kids without the nagging to-do list of work and home chores and projects. How hard it is to find the time and patience to be the parents we want to be!
Interesting stat that dads feel more spousal scrutiny on their fathering. I definitely feel pressure from my wife and family (who live next-door, so we see each other a ton) to give a certain kind of correction/consequence when my 5-year-old daughter is behaving rudely or demanding attention (I’m not going to hedge this sentence). It can be hard to find the line between choosing how I want to respond and how I feel they want me to respond. And that extra pressure often means that I fall short of both! Right now, I’m just trying to find my own footing better and being on the same page with my wife so that we can have consistency and unity.
As usual, Darby has written a well-researched article that is illuminating and informative. We haven't even gotten into the helicopter parenting, which probably is a big part of parental stress and unhappiness. At no time in history have parents been so controllingly involved with every aspect of their children's lives
We cannot stress enough that while Mom plays with her kids (if she even has time for that), she is investing in a lot of emotional and domestic load during that time, which makes it less enjoyable. She plays while synchronizing that the laundry dyer is done, that she must not forget to take the meat out of the fridge to be ready for the next day, that the doctor appointment has to be made, that Valentines is coming and there are no candies to share with her kids friends, that husband is out of socks, thar she must not forget to take her supplements and plan the next vacations and that her mother in law birthday is next week. She is exhausted and is not her fault. Dads, on the other hand, just play with their kids knowing that Mom is taking care of everyone’s needs, including cleaning up the mess they do while playing. Playing, for Dads is a price, while for Moms is work.
Besides, Moms are always wrong, no matter what we do. And we have been taught to police each other, while men are comfortable extracting our labor. Dads are applauded for doing the bare minimum. Dads earn more money once they become one, Moms are punished and hit financial and professional wall.
What do Moms have to do? Being Dads.
Teenage Fanclub! 🤘
So good, right!?
The 4 album run from Bandwagonesque to Songs From Northern Britain is unimpeachable. My favorite keeps shifting.
They could have stopped at Bandwagonesque, but they kept going!
I’m glad they did (I can’t say that about every early 90’s band I’ve liked)! But beating out Nevermind for album of the year in Spin in 1991 means you’re doing something right.
Kurt Cobain said they were the best band in the world!
It’s kind of amazing they were able to keep making (good) records. That’s so much hype and pressure, especially in the UK.
Dads will do things with kids that mothers would never think of doing - not always wisely. I certainly remember taking my daughters by my first marriage camping in the mountains in winter when they were in elementary school. I expect that they remember it too. It was an adventure for them. The stove broke down so we cooked over an open fire at night. Frankly they would have turned their noses up at our dinner at home, but in the windy dark, it tasted good and was hot and filling, and that is all that mattered. Their mother was delighted to be staying home where it was warm - and now quiet. In the morning I took them walking among the ice flowers beside the trail. And yes, I read to them and did a lot of math with them - from their point of view, I was a BAD dad then. And I took them out for walks frequently. When they were about tweens I hiked them down to Roaring Spring below the northern rim of the Grand Canyon and back, something my artist wife included in her divorce filing. "You took them on a cliffside trail. How could you?" Kids need to be exposed to appropriate levels of risk to learn mastery. It is usually the fathers who do this.
I made sure that the kids by my second marriage learned proper firearms handling and shooting technique when they were in the tween age group. I also did the reading and math supplementation with them and would take them on regular walks - typically 2 miles a day. If nothing else, it gave my wife some peace and quiet and was good for all of us.
I agree this is true in general. There's a whole set of things, from teaching them to bicycle to archery, that I do with my sons just because my risk tolerance is more in tune with theirs. Its subtle - my wife isn't very risk averse compared to some of our friends and she doesn't dislike the fact that they do these things - but its definitely still a factor.
Hi, thanks for sharing this piece!
Is the "Parenthood Is Associated With Greater Well-Being for Fathers Than Mothers" study controlled for amount of time spent with the child? It doesn't look like it, but I couldn't fully tell.
If not, could that also be contributing to the difference?
Meaning regardless of gender, if you are in the early phase it feels more enjoyable, whereas in the end you just want to get it over with.
Sort of like how breastfeeding and weaning works.
I'm interested to see what kind of effect simply swapping the amount of time spend (exposure) will have.
Thanks again for this interesting piece!
I think late elementary and middle school age kids are the most fun, though. Little kids are dependent and don't understand much of what's going on. Teenagers appropriately want to spend time with their peers, not with their parents.
Oh, I just realized I wasn't very clear in my writing.
What I meant is
if dad's are spending significantly less time with kids on average than mothers, wouldn't that also explain a lot of the differences in emotions?
You'd expect dads to be more excited to spend more time with kids vs moms who are simply past that phase and wanting a break.
So I was curious if it was controlled for exposure.
Put it another way, I was wondering if dads would still have the same emotions if they had spent 6-8 hours with their kids everyday for years.
Yes - great question! As far as I can tell, they did not control for exposure, so I think your hunch is correct that dads might have enjoyed their children more because they had relatively less time with them. Therefore, their time felt more like a treat and a novelty vs an obligation. Here’s the relevant paragraph from the Results section of the paper and I don’t see any covariates mentioned here:
“To test our hypotheses regarding gender differences in caregiving, we created a dummycoded variable to reflect gender (male = 1, female = 0). In addition, each observation was coded to reflect whether it involved child care (child care = 1, all other activities = 0). We conducted parallel analyses regarding parents’ interactions with their children (interacting with children = 1, not interacting with children = 0). Overall, parents were slightly but significantly less happy when taking care of their children compared with other daily activities (b = −0.34, t = 2.5, p < .05, 95% CI [−0.61, −0.07]) and were significantly more happy when interacting with their children than when not interacting with their children (b = 4.02, t = 52.0, p < .001, 95% CI [3.87, 4.17]).”
Am I reading that correctly, is it saying that they distingusihed between "caring for their child" vs "interacting with their child," and the latter induces "significantly more [happiness]" in both fathers and mothers?
I want to make sure I am not missing something...
Yes, I think they're scoring "care" here as activities like feeding, changing, dressing, bathing, and they're scoring "interacting" as everything else (which includes play).
There's a link to the full article in the piece if you want to look more closely at how they defined everything! It's the study I describe as the "biggest and best."
Thanks for the clarification!