RebelDad

Slate Says Dads Are Liars (And Why That’s Good)

Posted on 17. Jun, 2010 by Brian Reid in research

So I thought yesterday’s piece on dads and hormones was likely to be the most fascinating piece I read on fatherhood during this Father’s Day week. But Slate gave it a run for its money with an article that suggests that the results of a recent Boston College study that showed that dads are getting closer to 50-50 when it comes to the kids is bunk.

The BC findings — based on self-reported information (this is important) — said that dads spent about 3.3 hours a day with the little ones, a finding that author Katherine Reynolds Lewis points out is far, far more rosy than would be suggested if you looked at more rigorous measures of how much time dads spend with their kids.

In all fairness, no one doubts that dads are more involved than they used to be — this is reflected in every study using every methodology. Katherine’s point is that dads are now inflating their child-care hours when researchers ask: proof that fathers think being daddy is important. So important, they’ll even fudge the extent of their involvement. It wasn’t all that way. Per Katherine:

When [Ellen] Galinsky was studying New Jersey factory workers in the 1980s, she knew from her research that they were heading home so their wives could make the night shift at the hospital, for instance, but they would lie to their co-workers and say they were going out drinking. “It wasn’t OK in their macho world to say, ‘I’m going to tuck in my children,’ ” she recalled.

So this Father’s Day, lets lift a glass to celebrate the strange but happy trend of dads wanting to be seen as spending lots and lots of time with their kids.

(Standard whine: Katherine takes the current Census stats at face value, which I think is unwise. But I’ll let that one pass.)

(Standard disclaimer on Katherine: for the better part of three years, she sat across from me in the Bloomberg DC newsroom. I consider her a friend. But I also think she’s a great reporter and a thoughtful commentator on modern parenthood, and I like to think that’s a perfectly objective assessment.)