Dads Are the New Moms. How’s That Going?
It is summer 2025 and the dads are talking. The dads are talking, in fact, more than I expected. They are opening up, tearing up, reaching for tissues, telling me how hard it’s been. They are laughing at themselves, affecting embarrassment, turning away briefly to blow their noses, but pressing on through their discomfort. On a playground in New York City on a beautiful June morning, they tell me about their loneliness. On calls from their man caves and home offices, they tell me about the grueling early months. In coffee shops for a stolen hour, a stolen half hour, they tell me about the postpartum mood disorders that brought them to their knees, the loss of romance in their relationships, the loss of sex. It’s important to talk about this stuff, they say.
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, nearly one in five stay-at-home parents are now dads, up from about 1 in 10 in 1989, and, according to a 2023 Center for American Progress study, 45% of moms earn at least half of their family’s income. Economic, educational, and cultural trends have tilted family life toward women’s participation in the workforce, and while many of us were experiencing the worst year of our lives during the pandemic, a watershed moment occurred in domestic care work. The New York Times recently called it “a great leap forward for American fathers,” with dads forced by circumstance to pitch in. Apparently, it has stuck. Gender equality! We’re getting there, one negotiation over who skips work to pick up the sick kid at a time.
How is this going? The dads have been waiting to be asked. If you thought the dads would be reticent, private, undemonstrative, you’d be wrong. The response from the dads is nothing short of an outpouring. They tell me about their substance use issues, their unplanned pregnancies, their childhoods with fathers they really loved, fathers who were wonderful but unavailable, fathers who did unspeakable things to their mothers. They tell me about the communities of their upbringings on farms and in cities, in the suburbs, in the South and West and Midwest and Northeast. One dad tells me his weight unsolicited:180, down from 215 a few years ago.
I hear about the stigma—still, incredibly—surrounding dads doing the care work. The snide comments from boomer aunts and uncles. One dad, a first generation Mexican American, says his family makes disparaging comments about his masculinity, which he calls cultural. Another reports an unusual amount of positive attention when he’s out with his kids; he believes this is because he is Black. Adoptive dads struggle with biases within the system; for instance, the difficulty of getting paid leave. Gay dads struggle with how to divide care work without gender norms to fall back on. The dads have issues that have never before occurred to me.
When I Zoom with the dads, they max out the allotted free 40 minutes, and I have to pay to upgrade on the fly. The dads need almost no prompting to open up, as if they’d been composing replies in their heads during late-night feedings, at school pickup, while being shunned by the mothers and nannies in the park, looked at askance at the indoor playspace and at the library.
