“What did the buffalo say to his son when he dropped him off at school?”
“Bison.”
That’s one of the gags in the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse archive of Dad Jokes. But fathers’ desire to be present for their children is no laughing matter. The same policy and design decisions that default caregiving work to women stymie men who want to be deeply engaged parents.
This Father’s Day, American dads deserve more than golf-themed cards or Tom Brady-endorsed underpants. Lawmakers should support their contributions, too.
Discussions of family policy often focus on women. They experience the physical consequences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding; and they get saddled with the professional, logistical and economic consequences of being the primary caregivers.
Yet ignoring dads is a mistake: for them, for the women they co-parent with, and for the more than 3.5 million American children who live with single fathers or with two dads.
Too many dads are caught between a growing wish to care and structures that are changing glacially, if at all. The COVID-19 pandemic gave fathers more time than ever with their children, only for those dads to be called back to the job in-person without a larger rethinking of work-life balance.
The amount of parental leave men take nearly tripled between 2018 and 2023, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, yet one-fifth of dads worry they will lose their jobs if they take off all the time they are entitled to.
No wonder fathers, including those in the Congressional Dads Caucus founded this year, want something better
Support should start early. Having dads-to-be attend prenatal appointments with their partners — with leave from work to do so — means providers can educate men too. Doctors should make sure men as well as women get mental health screenings like the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale to catch symptoms early and intervene.
Once a baby is born, dads need more opportunities to be present in ways large and small. Forcing fathers back to work within days, as too many states and U.S. companies do, denies them a crucial window to bond with their babies or to share, say, prolonged skin-to-skin contact with premature infants
One model for the U.S. might be to allow men to transfer leave to their partners only if they take a minimum leave themselves, suggests Dads Caucus founder Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.). Linking providing and caregiving in this way could encourage men who do have access to paid leave to take it.
So can the testimony of other men. Taking 12 weeks of paternity leave “cemented confidence in my abilities to nurture and care for my daughter,” Rodrigo Stein, director of health equity at D.C.’s La Clínica Del Pueblo health service, said.
Practical tweaks also help. A dad should not have to change his baby’s diaper on a public bathroom floor or hunt all over a huge office building for the one men’s restroom with a changing table. Parenting classes and parent-teacher conferences should be scheduled to include working dads and working moms.
More than 80% of American men said they would “do whatever it takes to be very involved” in their babies’ early lives in a 2019 survey. When we spoke, Gomez paused to imagine a day when he might get to be the primary caregiver for his young son, Hodge. “It’ll be awesome, to be honest with you,” he said, with a hint of longing.
This Father’s Day, the best present for parents like him would be policies and practices that signal an end to treating dads as dopes, incompetents or emotional icebergs who flee for the fairway – and a commitment to nurturing all our caregivers.
Alyssa Rosenberg writes Opinion columns for The Washington Post.
