Why the best time to be a dad is now

Our forefathers had some odd ideas about fatherhood. In ancient Athens, a baby was not legally a person until its father said it was. At a ceremony called the amphidromia, the patriarch would hold up the newborn for inspection and either welcome it into his household or abandon it on a hillside to face near-certain death. Typical reasons for rejecting an infant included deformity or the mere fact that it was a girl.

All this may sound horrible today, but some of it had a harsh underlying logic. For most of history, a man had no reliable way to tell whether he was the biological father of a child and, in a world where nearly everyone was poor, most were reluctant to risk wasting bread on another man’s offspring. Many therefore asserted oppressive control over female fertility, forbidding their wives and daughters to mingle with other men and—in the Athenian case—claiming the right to kill any child they did not wish to acknowledge.

Men have long shaped the law to their advantage. Fully a third of the rules in the 4,000-year-old code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian king, cover domestic relations. Alert readers of the big phallic stone on which they are inscribed will detect a certain pro-dad bias. A son who strikes his father should have his hands cut off, for instance, and a wife who plots to murder her husband should be publicly impaled.

In “Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power”, Augustine Sedgewick, an American scholar, describes how thinking about dads has changed over time. What is striking is the sheer variety of nonsense that people have believed.

Aristotle argued that hotter sex and livelier semen were more likely to generate a male child. Sigmund Freud believed that all boys secretly yearn to kill dad and have sex with mum. (Spoiler warning: many don’t.) Saint Augustine of Hippo, an influential early Christian, observed the selfish behaviour of his infant son (who died in childhood) and conceived the notion of “original sin”: that a baby inherits wickedness from its father, transmitted by the act of sex itself. The father in turn inherits sin from his father, and so on, all the way back to Adam. This became church dogma, and was used to justify infant baptism.

Another common theme is cruelty. Martin Luther is reputed to have said he “would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one”. In 1662 Virginia’s colonial government scrapped the old English tradition that status passed from father to son, decreeing that children should inherit it from their mothers instead. This was not, as it sounds, a breakthrough for early feminism. It was so that male plantation owners could impregnate their slaves, secure in the knowledge that the offspring would also be chattel. This rule greatly increased the market value of enslaved women, since it gave the buyer ownership of all their descendants. It also “joined blackness to enslavement”, since “slavery was defined as heritable and congenital, rather than a consequence of capture, military defeat or indebtedness.” The dismal consequences of this rule are still felt in race relations throughout the Americas.

In modern times, two big changes have affected how people view fatherhood. One is that, thanks to DNA tests, “For the first time in human history, it has become possible to establish paternity with certainty.” The other is that fathers spend more time on child care than ever before. Women earn more than in the past, thanks to reliable contraception, the spread of education and the (partial) triumph of feminism. No longer needing a husband’s wages to feed and clothe their offspring, they can be pickier about whom (or whether) they marry. This in turn has allowed them to demand a fairer division of labour at home—even as washing machines and food-delivery apps have freed up time for child care. And though perfect equality is some way off, most modern dads have found that co-parenting is deeply rewarding.

Now is probably the best time ever to be a father, at least in rich countries. Many employers offer generous paternity leave; in much of Europe, they are required to. American dads do three times as much child care today as they did in the 1960s. When covid-19 forced them to stay at home in 2020-21, the habit partly stuck: when the pandemic ended, the time American dads spent on child care remained higher than it had been in 2019.

The notion that it is unmanly to read bedtime stories is now hopelessly out of date: men are more likely than women to say they wish they saw more of the rugrats. Whereas their grandads enforced discipline with smacks, today’s fathers are more gentle and talkative. Children have benefited from more-engaged dads, not least because mothers and fathers often parent in complementary ways. As Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution observes in “Of Boys and Men”, dads are more likely to encourage openness to the world and a bit of risk-taking. Paternal involvement tends to reduce adolescent delinquency. Teenage girls who are close to their fathers exhibit better mental health as adults.

Popular culture has embraced the shift towards less hierarchical households. No television studio today would produce a show like “Father Knows Best”, an American sitcom of the 1950s with a self-explanatory title. If anything, the trend is towards portraying dads as doofuses. In “Family Guy”, a cartoon, the father, Peter Griffin, is so stupid that he jealously punches a killer whale that nuzzles his wife at Sea World.

The blessings of greater equality have come with a big caveat, however. Not all men have adapted well to the new world. Whereas college-educated dads in America are spending more time with their children, their less-educated peers are spending slightly less than they did 20 years ago. They are also far more likely to live apart from their kids and hardly see them at all. This has created a class divide in parenting, with the financial advantages that upper-middle-class children have always enjoyed compounded by a more stable and stimulating home environment.

Many working-class men, meanwhile, are missing out entirely on the joys of fatherhood: now that women can afford to be pickier, more men are being left on the shelf. Many resent it intensely, and this has fed a politics of male grievance in much of the developed world.

Disappointingly, Mr Sedgewick fails to grapple with these trends. Instead, he concludes on a personal note. When he asks his young son what a father should be, the boy replies that a dad should be “funny and good at hugging”. As parenting advice goes, that is hard to beat. ■