This Father’s Day, Thank Dad for His Hard Work
New study busts 'myth of the lazy father'
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Dads are sometimes labeled lazy, but they don't deserve to be, a new research brief from the Institute for Family Studies argues.
In the past several years, both entertainment media and the think-piece-industrial complex have tended to paint a not-so-friendly pictures of dads. Moms are said to be suffering under "second-shift motherhood," while the "working dad" commands less and less respect, thanks to the perception that he does not pull his weight.
But is every dad really a shiftless Homer Simpson? Not quite, according to new work by IFS research fellow Robert VerBruggen. In honor of Father's Day, he looked at data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a time diary study that tracks how Americans spend our days.
"Among married couples living together with kids, if anything, it's dads who do more work in total—adding up paid work, housework, child care, and even shopping," VerBruggen wrote. "Moms do work more in some specific circumstances, but the data acquit fathers as a group of the slacking charges so frequently leveled against them."
To reach this conclusion, VerBruggen looked at the behaviors of respondents to the ATUS who were married, with kids, and living with their spouse. Combining data on how much time parents report spending at work, doing household chores, and caring for kids shows that in the aggregate men outpace women. Specifically, dads do about 59 hours of work per week, while moms do about 55.
Part of this finding is a function of difference between the two groups—if moms are more likely to stay home and work less, and dads go to the office, that could explain the gap. But VerBruggen compared working moms and dads apples-to-apples and found that in all but one configuration, dad put in more time.
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