Let's Hear It for the Dads

There’s a trend on TikTok where mothers rattle off a bunch of household and child-rearing tasks their husbands do on the regular: things like getting the kids dressed and making them breakfast in the morning, taking them to their doctor’s appointments, and not only doing loads of laundry, but folding the clothes and putting them all away. It ends with the punchline, “I didn’t marry a loser,” implying that doing these things should be the bare minimum.

Women married to guys not pulling their equal weight might be quietly reconsidering their life’s choices, but a lot of Millennial moms are likely nodding in agreement. Millennial men are arguably the most hands-on and involved dads of any generation so far. For one, the number of stay-at-home dads is on the rise (nearly 1 in 5 stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are dads), and even those working jobs outside the house spend triple the amount of time with their kids compared to previous generations.

Of course, fatherhood looked quite different in the ‘90s. Even though our dads were markedly more hands-on than their own, most of them never changed a diaper, shared parental leave with their partners, or volunteered to chaperone their kids’ school field trips. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, a lot of dads were still the sole breadwinners of their households, and housework and childcare was left to moms – whether they were stay-at-home moms or not.

That was the case in my family. My mom gave up her career shortly after she had my sister so that she could take care of us and most of the house work. Growing up, my mom did the majority of the cooking and cleaning – we ate Shake ‘N Bake and salad topped with Kraft Zesty Italian Dressing for dinner often – and helped us with homework and school projects on weeknights. She shuttled us back and forth to extracurriculars, was a “class mom” who organized pizza lunches, and took us to the library at least once a week over summer holidays. She did the grocery shopping, the gardening, the laundry, and bathed our pet dog.

That’s not to say my dad was a deadbeat – far from one. He often worked late on weekdays and would travel lots for business. But he always showed up for our concerts and swim meets, cooked meals for us on the weekends, and picked us up from dances and parties later on in high school. My dad wasn’t heavily involved in our day-to-day the way my mom was growing up, but he was there for all the big moments.

If I compare my husband to literally any dad I knew in the ‘90s, his contribution to home life is much more equal. For one, he’s changed his fair share of diapers – and continues to with our one year old. He cooks a lot of our weeknight meals, cleans our bathrooms and does all the gardening, and we split bathing and putting our kids to bed pretty evenly. He was involved in the painful process of sleep-training our kids, and when they were just newborns, he was up in the middle of the night almost as much as I was.

To be fair, I wouldn’t have had kids with him – or married him even – if I feared this wasn’t the case. We were already splitting housework evenly in the years we lived together before marriage, and he supported my career aspirations outside the home as much as I valued his ability to cook, clean, and eventually nurture children.

This isn’t to say that dads couldn’t be doing more (and in some cases, a lot more) to continue raising the bar. Plenty of moms are still carrying the invisible labour of running a household: managing schedules, coordinating childcare, and holding everything together while also working full-time jobs. In the U.S., dads in two-parent families are far less likely to volunteer or get involved in their kid’s school and extracurricular activities. The bar for fatherhood has risen, but it’s still uneven. Still, it does feel like this generation of dads is making life better for their kids by being present. They’re also making life better for the moms involved by sharing the load.