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I have a special appreciation for fatherhood. As I’ve shared many times before, I was raised by my blind father. With rapidly deteriorating vision, he had to leave the workforce, and my mother became the primary earner in our home.
So when my husband Pav and I had baby Roman, my standards for a good dad were incredibly high. When I told my mother I was pregnant, I’ll never forget what she said to me: “You’ll find out soon if you married one of the good ones.”
I married one of the good ones.
Pav is a present and engaged dad. He changes diapers, never misses bath time, sings, rocks the baby to sleep, and understands how every piece of baby tech works. As I write this newsletter, he is cleaning the nursery top to bottom, boxing up old clothes, cleaning toys, and moving everything into the garage.
I spent an entire week at Cannes Lions, but I didn’t worry about Roman for a second. Don’t get me wrong, I missed him deeply, but I didn’t worry. I knew Pav had everything handled, between caring for Roman and helping me run my business.
As it turns out, there is an important trend happening in fatherhood, and it’s a topic I wanted to dive into this week.
The trend is positive.
Fathers spent 2.5 hours a week with their kids in 1965, according to Pew Research's analysis of federal time-use data. By 2011, that number had nearly tripled to 7.3 hours. Housework followed the same curve: fathers now spend more than twice as much time on it as they did in the 1960s, 10 hours a week versus 4.
The trend hasn't slowed since. Institute for Family Studies research puts the current average at 7.8 hours a week, climbing to 10 hours and 12 minutes for college-educated dads. Married fathers went from 6.8 hours a week in 2003 to 8 hours by 2021.
The Budget Lab at Yale found that Millennial fathers of young children now spend more time on childcare than Gen X fathers did at the same stage, and that the increase comes paired with less paid work, not more hours pulled from nowhere. Separate research from the American Institute for Boys and Men found the same pattern accelerating hard since the pandemic: college-educated fathers cut paid work by six hours a week between 2019 and 2024 while adding 4.4 hours a week to housework and childcare.
Remote work explains part of it. The researchers attribute the rest to something less measurable: fathers weighing time at home against time at the office differently than they used to.
Here’s the part that shouldn’t be true, but is.
Dads are doing more unpaid work at home, working somewhat fewer hours, and still earning more than childless men for it.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the $591K motherhood penalty, the pay gap that opens the moment a woman becomes a mother. That same research showed the other side of the ledger: full-time fathers earn 25% more than childless men, $76,388 versus $61,308 a year, according to Bankrate's analysis of 2024 Census earnings data. Compounded over a 30-year career, that gap adds up to more than $400,000.
There's also a rougher, more literal number. Each year, Insure.com prices out the 17 unpaid household jobs a typical dad does, lawn care, tech support, chauffeuring, using BLS wage data for each task. This year's tally: $59,484, down slightly from $60,957 last year. The dip is noise, not signal, more a reshuffling between categories like coaching and dispute-settling than dads doing less overall. And it still undercounts the job by definition. Nobody's pricing out being on call.
This matters now more than ever.
Raising a kid got expensive enough that opting out of parenting labor stopped being affordable. Brookings estimates a middle-class family now spends north of $310,000 raising one child to 18, with inflation alone adding more than $26,000 to that bill since the model was first built. Two full incomes stopped being optional in most households, which means two full sets of parenting hours have to come from somewhere.
Companies started offering paid paternity leave, and men started taking it. Census Bureau data on recent first-time fathers found just over 50% now take paid leave, with another 12.6% taking unpaid time off. Before the Family and Medical Leave Act passed in 1994, 77% of new fathers took no leave at all. That's the fastest-moving number in this entire piece.
And the identity shifted underneath all of it. Involved fatherhood stopped being a nice-to-have and became the baseline men measure themselves against, the same way breadwinning was the baseline for their fathers.
The other side of the coin.
A Pew Research report published this June found that even among married or cohabiting parents who both work full time, 52% still say mom does more of the day-to-day parenting tasks, versus 39% who say it's split evenly. Mothers are still doing more unpaid labor at home, full stop. And stay-at-home dads, while growing, still make up only 18% of stay-at-home parents, up from 11% in 1989, but still a small share of the total.
Fatherhood changed more in the last twenty years than in the previous fifty, and the economics rewarded the change instead of punishing it. That combination almost never happens. Usually the incentives point the other way.
What this means, depending on who you are.
If you're a dad reading this, the hours you're putting in are part of a measurable generational shift, not an individual sacrifice nobody's tracking. Statistically speaking, advertising your fatherhood yields an extra $400K over the course of your career, though it doesn’t offset the $591K penalty mothers are experiencing over the same time period.
If you run a company, paid paternity leave isn't a soft benefit anymore. It's a retention lever. Half of first-time dads are already taking it where it exists. The other half are telling you, with their attrition, that they wanted to.
If you're the partner of one of these dads, the Pew data tells the story. Active fathers in 2026 are a multiplier for your family and your household income.
Hit reply and tell me: is the dad in your life, or the dad you are, different from the one who raised you? I read every single response.
Jenny
P.S. If you know a new dad, or a dad about to become one, forward this to him. The numbers say he's about to do more than he thinks, and get more credit for it than his father did.
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