Family

Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do With Parenting

Modern fathers are more involved in their children’s lives than ever. Jokes about “dad bods” and “dad rock” haven’t caught up to that reality.

By Saul Austerlitz
baby mobile with a can of beer, a man in a recliner, and a guitar
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad.” “Dad rock” is guitar-driven music, typically from the time of the Nixon or Ford administration, with bonus points for extended drum solos or albums that feature double-gatefold illustrations of imaginary planets. “Dadcore” is the art of clothing yourself without wasting any energy thinking about fashion. “Dad friends” are kindly and endearing, but not necessarily the most fun at parties. A “dad bod” is desirable but poised on the brink of middle-age sprawl. “Dad energy” involves being goofy and acting like a 40-something guy, whether or not you actually are a 40-something guy. “Dad jokes” are mostly terrible puns.

These phrases all paint a picture of someone who is uncool, modestly embarrassing, and blissfully unconcerned with others’ judgments. But they have something else in common: They bear little relationship to the actual work of raising children.

The mom descriptor typically gestures at being harried (classic “mom brain”) or nurturing (like a “mom friend”). Meanwhile, dad as an adjective hints at someone shorn of all responsibilities. The idea seems rooted in an earlier era, when men had the time to get really into classic rock or craft beer, because they didn’t change many diapers or prepare many lunches. But although snoring in my recliner sounds mighty appealing, I have an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old to care for. I hardly have the time—nor do most of the other fathers I know.

Read: ‘Mom brain’ isn’t a joke

Of course, women still do considerably more child care than men do. According to Pew Research, mothers in 2016 reported devoting 14 hours a week on average, while fathers devoted only eight. But the gap has shrunk substantially over the past half century or so. Dads now spend more than triple the amount of time caring for children as they did in 1965. There’s definitely variation—some still do far too little—but for many, the hours keep going up. According to 2021 and 2022 data, college-educated fathers who were living with their children spent more than 10 hours a week caring for them, the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, recently reported. “More men feel like they want to do more hands-on parenting,” Natasha Cabrera, a University of Maryland professor who studies parenting and childhood development, told me. “Men want custody of the children. They want to engage with the kids. They spend more time reading and doing caregiving.”

The old model of fatherhood—the hands-off, financial-provider stereotype that involved little participation in bath time or homework—bears less and less resemblance to reality. But cultural conceptions of what a “dad” looks like still seem to reveal a lingering discomfort with masculine caregiving, the central work of fatherhood. Just look at TV fathers, who tend to be either mournful absentees like Ted Lasso, neglectful workaholics like Kendall Roy, or scatterbrained, incompetent sitcom dads like Homer Simpson. Jokes about dads on Father’s Day cards, in television commercials, or on social media mention interests any middle-aged man might have, kids or no kids—golf, grilling, and so on. I love dad rock as much as the next 45-year-old guy does, but I’ve come to believe that clinging to this outdated version of fatherhood prevents us from envisioning a new one—one that can be both silly and serious but that, most important, centers caretaking above all else.

Read: The terrible stereotypes of Mother’s and Father’s Day cards

Until then, all of the discussion of “dadcore” and “dad bods” will continue to undersell actual involved fathers, calling attention to their goofiness rather than to the hard work that raising kids demands. As dads have taken on more child-rearing, they’ve been confronted with many of the challenges that caregivers have long faced, including the absence of affordable child care, professional lives that relinquish vanishingly little space for family responsibilities, and a lack of nationally guaranteed paid parental leave. But these issues are still often thought of as the province of mothers alone. The tired stereotypes are a distraction from the support that fathers, and all other parents, desperately need.

You can make fun of me for listening to 30-year-old hip-hop songs and (wrongly) thinking that I’m a badass. Point taken. (Wu-Tang forever!) But don’t come at me for being incompetent and clueless as a parent. If you’re going to make fun of me for my dad energy, pick on my strong feelings about children doing homework or my tin-eared lullaby renditions instead. Mock my obsessive editing of my son’s birthday-party invitation or how liberally I encourage my children to quote from The Simpsons in response to all of life’s prompts, large and small. Perhaps future stereotypes will still playfully take dads down a peg while also reflecting how deeply entwined fathers’ lives are with the work of caring for children. Rest assured, though, that some things will never change: Dads will keep on making terrible jokes.

Saul Austerlitz is a freelance writer and an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era and Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century.