This Father’s Day, Let’s Finally Give Dads Some Credit

0:00Hello once again from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City on another beautiful June day. Welcome to the 1600, everybody. I'm Carlo Versano. This country was stone cold dead. So this Sunday is Father's Day, as everybody knows. June is also mental health, men's mental health month. I stumbled over that because I didn't even know that was a thing, which is sort of part of the conversation we're going to have today. It's also men's mental health week. So to mark all of these sort of disparate but related occasions, I have with me today a friend of the show who I am calling, Lisa, I'm going to call you 1600's chief manhood correspondent.

0:41I love it. We might need to workshop that title now that I say it out loud. But it sounded good in writing. But Lisa Britton is, if you don't know, we've had her on before. She's great. She's a writer for Evie magazine and a passionate advocate for boys, for men, for fathers. And not just an advocate. Her work in Washington has earned plaudits from members of Congress, presidential candidates, a first lady, an actual president. So she does the work. And I'm very happy to have you here, Lisa. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me back on. I loved being here last time. And we have such a great conversation.

1:21and now leading up to Father's Day, it's just we're all going out, you know, hard this week. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you pinged me to remind me that Father's Day was coming up. And you're like, we should do something about it based on sort of these, you know, a lot of the themes we've talked about here about the men's crisis, the crisis among boys, a lot of stuff that doesn't really get picked up in the mainstream media. But I know you work a lot on. And to that point, you have a piece in Evie. by the way, Evie Magazine, we have, if you're watching us on YouTube, we have a copy of it here. This thing is, first of all, it's like a doorstop.

1:54It's like the September issue of Vogue. The Cock to Table magazine. It's beautifully done. You brought with us, you brought with, for me, the sex issue of Evie. I'm not going to show the actual pages of this magazine on camera because we're a family show, but it's something. It's something. I'll put it that way. It's beautifully done. The magazine really does look great. It's beautiful and it's, I think, appropriate. Yes. Because people have called— It's not porn. It's not a porno magazine. And it's not anything derogatory or anything like that. Because Evie's kind of known as the conservative Cosmo.

2:31Right. That's what people have kind of labeled the magazine as. So it's the sex issue basically for people in committed relationships and marriages. Okay, yes. And I think that's very important to me. Very good point, yes. for to keep mothers and fathers happy and in a loving marriage. It's very important. It is a bit more risque. It's a little risque. Nothing wrong with that. When I picked up the final copy, I went to a coffee shop in New York, and I sat down and opened it, and I closed it. I was like, maybe I shouldn't be reading this. What is this crazy lady reading in the middle of the – yeah, right.

3:05But I would highly recommend picking up a copy, and you can get it online. Awesome. And there's actual journalism in this magazine. And to that point, you have a piece titled The Lazy Dad Cliché is Dead and the Data Prove It. I want to talk to you about this piece and the data that you mentioned here. So the article opens with this viral cartoon. I think we can show it here on the screen. This sort of went viral on Twitter. And it frames dads as these – so it's this person saying, what's wrong with this picture if you can't see what we're looking at? And it's this picture of a, you know, sort of just like a 1950s household, you might think, right?

3:46It's a woman cooking on the stove. She's got an apron. She's pregnant. She's holding a baby. She's got two little kids sort of like, you know, nagging at her pants. And the dad's in the background, and he's got his feet up on the couch and the remote control in his hand, and he's just kind of like, you know, lazing about. So the data in your piece, which comes primarily from the American Institute for Boys and Men, shows that the opposite of this is true. So these are some statistics from that study that you mentioned in your piece. Since 2019, fathers have sharply increased unpaid labor while reducing paid labor, their paid hours.

4:22Among couples with children under six, the gender gap in unpaid work has shrank by almost four hours per week, and nearly all of that came from fathers stepping up, adding almost 3.6 hours of childcare and household tasks, while mothers did a little bit less. Some other statistics here. Married dads' engagement on the home front has tripled. Married dads of young children in 1965 did, on average, less than 10 hours a week of any kind of childcare or help around the house. Dads in 2024, from when this study was completed, contributed nearly 30 hours a week. So it's been a 300 % jump in fathers doing housework, child work, and being engaged at home.

5:04And I want to get to, I mean, you can see this in a lot of places. The data shows it to be true. But it's not just the AIBM study. This is from the IPOM's Time Use Survey. Millennial dads do four times more child care than boomer dads. From the American Time Use Survey, fathers spent 38 minutes more on child care today than fathers did 50 years ago. And the most interesting data point here to me that I took note of here, for every two and a half hours men are putting in, women are only gaining one hour back. So one way to look at that is, you know, there's overall more work for the couple, the married couple of children.

5:42In aggregate, it's going to the kids, right? It's not going to, like, leisure time or anything. And that's, I mean, I think you could argue that's a good thing. It's certainly a good thing for the children to have more attention spent on them. But what I wanted to ask you is you write in the piece that you didn't actually need the data to believe any of this because of this experience you had walking into a bakery in Connecticut. So tell me a little bit about what you saw there. So I walked into a bakery in Connecticut one morning and I was flabbergasted by how many millennial dads, I would say they were around my age, were there solo with their children.

6:20Yeah. Children too. I'm not saying 15 year olds, I'm saying like three year olds. And I even saw two men who must have had like a coffee meetup or something. And they had, one had their three year old son, one had their three year old daughter. and they were like putting them together for a photo and they're like, let's take a picture for your mommies. I was just saying like, this is adorable. But it's just not what happened in that bakery. Walking around Brooklyn, in LA, I see men stepping up, pressing strollers through the streets, having the things, carrying them around. I don't think you would have seen this a couple decades ago.

7:00And the problem is, is there's been so much movement in that direction, but still the narrative and the messaging has been almost like a shaming and blaming men to do more. So it's about time we kind of put that shaming and blaming, saying you need to do more housework aside and celebrate how much work they're doing. No, look, I completely agree. I see it in my, I mean, I am one of those dads, right? Like I'm extremely involved in my daughter's life. I mean, you know, you're talking about this bakery. I take my daughter to something called Tutu School, which is basically this like overpriced but cute ballet thing on Sunday mornings.

7:44I've been doing it for a couple of years now. It's all dads. All dads. I mean, every once in a while a mom will come in. But it is me and like 10 other sometimes hungover but always present fathers bringing their little girls to this ballet school. And I always think that that's really interesting. And also you just see it. You see it walking around Brooklyn all the time in the parks. Again, Brooklyn, you should never extrapolate too much of what you see in Brooklyn. We live on another world here. I posted that on X once and somebody said, come on, it's in Brooklyn. Like, of course you're going to see that.

8:17But I see it everywhere. I see it in other places too. And I have, I mean, just the guys that I know who have kids who live all over the country, from everything I've seen, they are a million times more engaged than our fathers were. And that's not to say that our fathers weren't, that boomer fathers weren't - Loving. Loving or engaged to a degree. Part of it was they, there's so much here to unpack. Part of it was, I think, our boomer fathers, first of all, there weren't dual income households the way there were now. So if you have a single income household, as I did growing up, your dad, If he's working, he's going to work a lot, right?

8:55Because he has to keep that job because everything depends on it. So it's like it's not like my dad wasn't there. He was there a lot, but he wasn't there to the extent that perhaps I am. But that's not because he was laying around on the couch. He was grinding. He was working. He was working. Grinding. And he wasn't doing that because he was cold and heartless and didn't care about his family. That love for his family was what drove him to provide for the family. Right. So you talk about how the narrative hasn't really caught up to the data. Why do you think this sort of like lazy dad framing persists, even though it's pretty empirically false at this point?

9:36I think a lot of people are kind of blinded by the narratives that are fed every day. And in media, they still have that, you know, bumbling idiot dad or a bad man. You know, those are the two options for men today. But there's also a sense of, I call it female victimhood, that we still perpetuate to women. Like, motherhood is a burden. You're expected to do this. Men have everything. They have privilege. and people just see everything through that lens, that's what bothered me so much about that tweet that went viral because I looked at it and I said, who's liking this? They're acting as if we're still in 1955.

10:17We're not anymore. But their mindset seems to be viewing the world today through that lens. So it's so important for these reports to come out. Institute for Family Studies also came up with a report yesterday. on this level of engagement and housework and homework that men are doing today. And we should celebrate that, not continue telling them to do more. What's also interesting to me is when you look at these studies, all of this is happening despite all of these labor-saving inventions that we've had. So it's like the microwave, the dishwasher, the Roomba, DoorDash. There's all of these things that we have invented as this, you know, culture of efficiency to make life, to make chores easier, to make housework easier.

11:11But you have the modern family that has young kids now is doing more unpaid home labor chores than the family in the 1950s when the wife was literally washing their clothes by hand and then going to make dinner from scratch, right, and then going to, like, welcome her husband back from work. So it's like you've got all of this extra time, but the time doesn't actually get banked as extra time. It just flows back into the children mostly, right? And by the way, that doesn't just happen in families. It happens everywhere. It happens at work, right? John Maynard Keynes famously predicted like 100 years ago that his grandkids were only going to work 15 hours a week, right?

11:49Obviously, that didn't happen, right? Even though we've created all these new efficiencies at work from the computer to email, what happens? You're not logging off sooner. You just get more emails. You just get more work to do. Right. Work just expands to fill the time. Right. That's that's sort of always what happens. But it's just kind of it was interesting to me. It's sort of just more of a point on the human condition or maybe the American condition in particular. Right. We're workaholics. Maybe that's all it is. I know in Italy they don't take their time a little bit. Yes, exactly. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer.

12:25Did you know writers who switch and save with Progressive save nearly$200 per year? That's a whole new pair of writing gloves and more. Quote today. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of$197 by new customers surveyed who save with Progressive between October 2024 and September 2025. Potential savings will vary. and Lisa the other thing is reading your piece it reminds this this trope of the working dad and the sort of the housewife mom it's not set in stone like it wasn't always like that it was really a product of the industrial revolution um and you know I think what's happened now is back to our conversation about the dual income trap which is what Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about But you get this situation where it's like a keeping up with the Joneses effect.

13:19Do you know what I mean? So it's like you're making more money, but are you necessarily saving that money? I don't know. You're just probably spending more, right? Everyone sort of gets wealthier, but I don't know what point I'm really trying to make. I get it, too. A lot of people and a lot of people my age just say, oh, well, it's so expensive to have kids. I can't have kids. They're making more money even when you factor in the inflation and everything like that. They're making more money than anybody in human history. That's the point that I'm trying to make. That's how we're here today. Exactly.

13:53No, that's the point that I'm trying to make. And, you know, this is I wanted to sort of save this point. But it's a good thing to talk about now because it ties into this and this question of the fertility crisis. Right. Why are we having fewer children? Not just here, but really everywhere in the West. There's a lot of, I think, chatter online about this. I think if you take sort of a leftist perspective, they would say that. They would say there's too much economic insecurity. But to your point, it's like, I mean, talk to your parents. Ask them if they had two nickels to rub together when they had you, right?

14:21Most would say no, right? And they managed to do it, right? To say nothing of the families, you know, 100, 200 years ago. We're pretty spoiled today with the luxuries we have. Right. And then there's sort of the other version of sort of the left position on this, which is that, you know, the climate crisis. I don't ever buy that. I think that that's people saying, like, I'm not going to have kids because of climate change. It's like, I don't know. Our parents were worried about nuclear annihilation. There's always a deep stay scenario. There's always something. In people's minds, yeah. Right. And then if you take sort of the trad, right-wing position, it's that the women's rights movement is to blame, right?

15:00This is the sort of girl boss culture. Women should be in the home and having lots of babies while the dad works. which again I think is very reductive right Jessica Gross writing in the New York Times recently suggested that the answer to this question is men actually want fewer children because they want to spend more time with the ones that they do have amid these sort of changing gender roles I don't know how much I buy that it's an interesting argument different surveys and stuff show that men are more likely young men today to desire to have children than women are Right. And it shows that they desire to have more children than women do.

15:41So I'm not quite sure. I didn't see Jessica's story on that. But and there's I mean, and there's also there's been studies just this week of tying the smartphone to this. I wrote an article. Yeah. I think there's absolutely something to that. Oh, 100 percent. Right. And I mean, you look at the you know, if you actually if you plot the lines like the fertility decline really starts around the rise of the iPhone and social media and, you know. And they followed when it was introduced to specific regions, and they saw the same thing happen each time. And then when you factor in us being around the technology that much, which I mentioned in the Evie article, that used to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists, you know, weirdos saying, oh, it's affecting men and keeping it in your purse.

16:25No, studies keep coming out that staring at the blue light, like women staring at the blue light, messes with their hormones. And men holding their phone in their pocket does it. I mean, it's energy, you know, so. Well, it's not just that. It's not to interrupt you, but it's, I mean, there's that part of it. But it's also, to me, the bigger issue is narcissism. Oh, well, of course. That's the main point of the article. Right, exactly. It just goes into and the physical. So it's like two ways. And we're a society of narcissists, right? We are a culture that idolizes leisure time, ostentatious displays of luxury, wealth, materialism.

17:06We have this sort of underlying rugged individualism thing that's great. I mean, it's very American. I always say self-status and stuff. Yes, exactly. That's what we're all striving for today. And once you have a kid, that goes out the door, goes out the window. As every parent listening will know, right? Kids are a huge pain in the ass. They're a huge time suck. I mean, that's what makes them great, and it's worth it a million times over. But if you don't know that and if you grow up in a culture that doesn't idolize that the way that it idolizes, glorifies it, the way that we glorify, you know, displays material wealth.

17:40I mean, look, you can't do the stuff that you can do when you have kids, right? You can't travel the world. I mean, you can do a degree depending on how much money you have, but you can't really be out there taking, you know, five vacations a year. Exactly. Traveling. Traveling. Drinking. Drinking. With your friends. Yeah. There was a meme that went viral a couple, maybe like a year or two ago. I'll try to find it and send it to you. Where it said, a little cartoon. It looked cute with my mom at 30. Right. And she had like three babies. Yeah. And there was like me at 30. And there was a girl with a glass of champagne with a suitcase looking all hip.

18:16Exactly. And like, I'm traveling the world. And when young women are seeing that, they're like, yeah, I want to be that. Right. I want to be that one. Not that one. Right. Oh, and the smartphone is why they see it, right? Because you transmit that to everybody else. So everyone's like, right, that's the life I want. I don't want to have children. I want to be out there sipping a Mai Tai by the pool or traveling or doing whatever. So all of that is to say I think that there's a lot of reasons for the fertility crisis. It is a big problem. I've gone back and forth with people because I've written about this extensively in my newsletter, and people have been like, oh, you know, we don't need more children.

18:54It's like, well, actually we do, big time, right? I mean, for a million reasons. Demographic collapse, Social Security is going to run out. I heard the perfect example a couple weeks ago that makes you realize this isn't some far-off thing, is that there's so many fewer babies being born today than even five years ago that there's going to be fewer children entering public school. So all of a sudden, the amount of children entering public school is going to drop in half within the next few years. So all of a sudden, our education system is going to be under all the strain, which it already is.

19:33Exactly. So you've got to think, this is soon that we're going to see the repercussions of the Fong birth rate. It's funny. I think a lot of boomers are – like there was that book in the 70s. I forget the guy who wrote it. He died recently. It was called The Population Bomb, and it was this big scaremongering book about how we're at risk of overpopulation. Again, he was totally wrong. It's like the opposite happened. But I think a lot of people – I remember my parents telling me that book was a huge deal when it came out, and I think a lot of people still have that in their head. Yeah, and then they're teaching the next generation.

20:04Yeah, exactly. But anyway, back to the dudes, the guys, since it is our weekend here, our week, our month. Is it? I don't know. I believe it is. It started with, well, of course, Father's Day. Then it's actually Men's Health Month. Yes. So it expanded to full health. Okay. I said mental health. Mental health. Yes. So physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Yes. But it started as the week leading up to Father's Day, and now it's expanded to the full month. But we really highlight that week. Yeah. So it is Men's Health Week. Right. But again, we don't highlight it enough because I didn't even know that as a man.

20:40You didn't know. Yeah. But, you know, you make this point about the guilt trip, right? We spent these decades sort of shaming men into doing more stuff at home, doing more work around the house. It worked. Obviously, it worked spectacularly, right? The data show it. The propaganda worked. Right. And the public narrative hasn't updated. You know, you got everyone from social media scolds to the mainstream media sort of like hammering the same tired message that, you know, dads are these just sort of like layabouts, right, who are home on the couch when they're actually cooking and cleaning and diapering and everything, coaching, going to ballet, all this stuff.

21:21You invoke this friend of yours who worked a 16-hour, like 16-hour days during his early years. Tell me about this guy. Yeah. So he had a business. He was very successful. He traveled a lot, got to the point where maybe like a couple of days a month he would be home to see the kids. and we view people like that, like, oh, they're out living their life, their kids are an afterthought. And he tells me that it kills him inside. All he wanted was to be home with them. He worked hard and knew he had to continue doing what he was doing. But now that they're older and then he works less, he's trying to be with them as much as possible and spend time, but he always knows he'll never get that time back.

22:03And it kills him inside. He feels guilty for not spending enough time with them. And then at the time, like going to bed at night being like, well, my kids forget me. Like they're really young. Like will they be like, who are you again? When you get home from work. Those are things that working dads face today. But they've always faced throughout history. By the way, men do not speak about. Men don't talk to each other about this kind of stuff. How are they going to talk about that? You know? I have a lot of people share things with me especially. because they feel like she'll get it and she won't judge and stuff.

22:36So I know a bit more insight, I guess, into the average man. No, I mean, it's true. And I think that's one thing that us men actually, I think, do need to do better is talk amongst ourselves about this sort of stuff, right? And not just, you know, hey, how's the family? Oh, it's good. It's good. How's work? Good. It's like, no, you can let that stuff out, right? And sometimes you need to among people who aren't your spouse. OK, but here's what I wanted to ask you. The counterargument to what we're talking about here, which I think both my wife and mother would make and make persuasively, is women still do the majority.

23:17Women and mothers in particular do the majority of the invisible labor. Right. The mental load, the scheduling, the appointments. And again, I would say even though I do a fair amount of child care myself, there's no question that my wife just has a, I don't know if it's a gene or what. She's better at keeping the sort of like running list in her head of what we need, where my daughter needs to be at a given hour. So even though we've had this sort of like time use gap narrow, there is probably a fair point that women still just by definition carry more of this like invisible labor load, right?

23:51Yeah, and then you've got to ask how much is it just in their blood basically to do that. I remember recently, not really with child care but with home care, I read something that somebody was complaining that even with single men and women, single men do half as much housework as single women living alone. Right. And I read it and I was like, but that's the woman's choice. If they're single women. Well, first of all, men are slobs. Have you ever been to a single guy's house? A bachelor? apartment. They don't care as much. How are you going to shame and blame them for not doing enough when they live alone?

24:29They chose that. Women should choose to do more work. So I would look at that data and not say it's unfair to women. I'd say women choose to do more. On average, again, I always say this is general, but women put more effort into making a home. Yeah. And so I would want to look at how much of the invisible labor that women do are actually just part of who we are. And do you know what? It's an interesting question. It's not a bad thing. Right. I think society looking at like it's a bad thing. What if we looked at it like it's a good thing? Right. No, it's an interesting question. And it goes to the point that I think you were making on the last time we talked, which is that, yeah, men and women, they're different.

25:15Men and women are different. Like, that's just how it is. And women are good at some stuff and men are good at other stuff. And, you know, yes, keeping a home is not something that we are generally good at. Right. Like I had before I met my wife, I had a my coffee table was made out of pizza boxes. Right. Like I lived like that. Wasn't not even that long ago. I had no problem with it. even though I was like a single guy trying to find a wife. Look at my peekabag purse. So, okay, I want to bring this back to the economy and this idea of the male identity crisis at work, which, again, is something I think we've talked about in the past.