A Great Leap Forward for American Fathers
I spent the early days of Covid talking to hundreds of American parents of all different backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and circumstances about how the pandemic affected their lives. While the overall picture was raw and depressing, there was often a glimmer of positivity: Many moms and dads felt lucky to be spending more time with their families. American fathers, who statistically speaking spend less time with their children and work more hours than mothers do, seemed especially smitten with the additional bonding time.
An article in Vox about pandemic fathering from June 2020 quoted a Chicago dad: 'Every morning, the kids come in the room and we get to snuggle for five or 10 minutes. Who gets to do that on a Tuesday? That's the stuff I'm kind of clinging to, because that's the stuff you don't get back.' That same month, the Swedish journalist Martin Gelin noticed how much American dads were enjoying themselves and wondered in a guest essay for Times Opinion if these shifts in caregiving might become more permanent, and whether American dads could become more like Nordic ones.
Five years later, we have an answer: American dads are still spending more time with their children than they were pre-Covid. We found this out by asking Misty Heggeness, the co-director of the Kansas Population Center at the University of Kansas, to crunch the numbers for us. She and her team at the Care Board, a new dashboard that collects and analyzes data around caregiving in the United States, found that fathers of children ages 10 and under were doing about seven minutes more per weekday and 18 minutes more per weekend day, for a total of 1.2 hours more child care a week. (The year 2020 is excluded from this data set because it was such an outlier.)
When you narrow the age range of fathers from 25 to 44, which is roughly the millennial generation, fathers are doing 17 more minutes of care per weekday and 32 more minutes per weekend day, for a total of 2.5 hours more child care a week.
If you select for dads who are 25 to 44 and also part of the sandwich generation — that means in addition to having at least one kid under 10, they are also caring for older family members — the pandemic fatherhood effect is even more pronounced. Millennial sandwich generation dads are doing more than seven hours more child care per week than they did 10 years ago.
Where is this time coming from? In general, dads are working fewer hours and replacing leisure time with child care, Heggeness noted. They are also multitasking, so while that seven hours seems like a ton, it's probably not the case that they're spending every minute of that time solely focused on their kids. This might look like kids tagging along while parents run errands, dads checking email on the sidelines at a baseball game or fathers tackling the yardwork while their children look for four-leaf clovers.
Heggeness & Co. pooled statistics over five-year periods to make the comparison between pre- and post-pandemic fatherhood, so the above charts used data from 2011 to 2015 and then 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to show the change over time. When you look at the data broken down by year, there was a big jump in dads performing child care from 2019 to 2021, and that change really stuck.
When I saw the data broken down, it made intuitive sense. We have known for a long time, based on data on paternity leave in other countries, that when dads spend more time with their babies, those patterns of care can be sticky. I also wondered if some of the increase in child care was because of the generational change between Generation X and millennials; by the pandemic, the majority of parents of young children were born in the '80s and '90s. Gen X was largely raised by the silent generation, and millennials were raised by post-sexual-revolution boomers, who had more progressive ideas about gender roles.
Finally, though many companies and the federal government are clawing back remote and hybrid work, it's possible that the increase in flexible working locations from 2021 to 2023 allowed some dads to spend a few extra hours with their kids around the edges of work.
We're in a retrogressive political and cultural moment, when the valorized ideal of the American family involves a woman managing all domestic labor. But that's not the reality that a plurality of American families are living, and it's not what a lot of dads appear to want. They want to be more involved in their children's lives, from surprise morning snuggles to bedtime reading and everything in between.
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In addition, alcohol warning labels depicting liver cancer or negative alcohol consequences have been shown to reduce drinking and drunk driver situations. A 2024 meta-analysis showed with 'moderate certainty' that alcohol warning labels might decrease selection of alcoholic drinks and drinking before driving. However, there was 'low evidence' demonstrating that warning labels might reduce alcohol drinking per occasion, or alcohol drinking speeds, which would be important considerations at parties and social gatherings. A 2020 study showed that alcohol selection was lower for all kinds of alcohol warning labels compared with no warning labels. Specifically, alcoholic drink selection was 56% with warning labels that consisted of an image and text, 49% for image only, and 61% for text only. During the 1990s and 2000s, physicians and public health experts learned a lot about how to motivate patients to quit smoking. One successful public health approach was the use of the transtheoretical model, where patients go through various stages, such as precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance, when trying to decide when to quit smoking. This behavioral modification model could be used for alcohol prevention too. Key public policy interventions also helped, including a tobacco taxation, advertising bans, and tobacco marketing restrictions in smoke-free zones. Similar interventions could work well for alcohol. Alcohol taxation can be used to deter heavy drinkers and young drinkers who don't have as much money to spend, given that tobacco taxation was successful for smoking reductions. Furthermore, policies could be set to maintain minimum unit pricing to prevent the sale of ultracheap liquor. States could also limit the hours of alcohol purchasing or even the days, such as banning alcohol sales on Sunday. These public health strategies could work in tandem to help decrease alcohol drinking rates in the United States. Alcohol and smoking are very similar social activities that for years were depicted as stylish and cool in movies and on TV. Then smoking ads were banned on TV through the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1970. During the 1970s, cigarette companies shifted their advertising from TV to print. So, it would be important in the future to ban alcohol ads from all media and printed marketing. As highlighted by the World Health Organization, advertising bans and restrictions were helpful in Nordic countries with decreasing the per-capita drinking amount. Finally, physicians should screen patients for heavy alcohol consumption using the validated AUDIT- C questionnaire and biomarkers such as phosphatidyl ethanol. When needed, Alcoholics Anonymous or a similar 12-step program can be offered to patients who drink heavily to reduce alcohol consumption. Tips to Reduce Alcohol Consumption Here are some helpful tips to encourage patients and friends to reduce alcohol consumption. Set a quit date and avoid triggers such as meeting friends at bars. Drink mocktails at social gatherings and parties. Patients can also choose from a plethora of innovative and tasty alcohol-free beers when drinking with friends. Several beer companies, such as Heineken, Budweiser, Guinness, and Samuel Adams, have developed great alcohol-free beer alternatives, which are extremely helpful for patients trying to remain abstinent and also for those trying to prevent cancer. Mass media initiatives such as the Ad Council and celebrity public service announcement television spots could be used to shift social norms around alcohol consumption. Public service announcements could also be shared at sporting events and concerts where alcohol consumption is common. Public health campaigns could place posters in bars and liquor stores informing consumers about the link between alcohol and cancer. Social media could teach target populations about alcohol reduction in fun and engaging ways. By talking with patients in clinic and working on public health campaigns, gastroenterologists have a unique opportunity to inspire behavioral lifestyle changes in patients and to prevent many cancers.
