Who is the modern American dad?

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1:14Midi Health is built by women. That's why our experts actually listen and treat your symptoms. Book a virtual appointment at JoinMidi.com. Midlife needs Midi. Results may vary. Medications prescribed only if clinically appropriate based on a consultation with a clinician. The idea of the dad and the idea of fatherhood is constantly evolved. We're in this sort of time period where I think what it means to be a man culturally is shifting really rapidly. I always wanted to be a dad, so becoming a father was scary, but it was the natural thing I wanted to do to find more purpose in my life.

1:51Jonquilyn Hill:I'm John Gwlin Hill, and this is Explain It to Me from Vox. There's a real case of baby fever going around, and it's coming from young men. 57 % of young adult men want to be parents now. Compare that to just 45 % of women the same age who want to have a kid one day. This stat kind of turns our traditional ideas about parenthood on its head, which got us thinking about what fatherhood means right now. So I'm going to be really honest with you. Why did I become a dad? If you'd asked me at the time, I really didn't have a strong answer for you. The big change in my life is actually about three years ago I went sober and because of my son it was one of the easiest things ever.

2:35So the most rewarding, greatest thing that ever happened in my life has also led to losing a lot of friendships that maybe were just surface level or just a different season of my life.

2:44Jonquilyn Hill:So today we're going to ask and answer some questions about dads that reflect wider changes in American culture. Like, where did our notion of the dad in American life first come from? What explains a growing trend of single fathers by choice? And what challenges do men face once they actually become dads? I think we think of the dad specifically as just this sort of universal idea. This is Phil Macyak. He's an expert on dads, and I mean that literally. He teaches a seminar at Washington University in St. Louis called Dad Culture Studies. He's also a TV critic at the New Republic, and he's writing a book called Dad, a Pop History.

3:26This is a relatively modern idea. It's something that sort of emerged in the late 19th, early 20th century. And so I think that the idea of the dad and the idea of fatherhood is constantly evolving. And I think we see it changing rapidly and sort of discourse around it transforming every day.

3:47Jonquilyn Hill:Phil traces the beginning of the idea of the modern American dad to a specific period in our history. The dominance of this idea is a post-World War II thing, how much it was tied in with men's experience of returning from World War II, of the suburbs, all these sorts of things. And the central kind of media text that helped to synthesize all of that stuff was television, and specifically the domestic sitcom or the family sitcom. And so I started looking at, you know, all of these famous TV dads, and it really struck me that these television shows were both reflecting something about American culture and also sort of providing a model within American culture that tracks pretty closely to a kind of timeline of the evolution of this figure.

4:36Jonquilyn Hill:Can you run us through the greatest hits of TV dads? Sure. So I think for me, it's, I mean, there's a lot of places to start, but it starts for me with Ward Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver as the sort of archetypal 50s dad of suburbia. Come on, get your mitt and we'll get a little catch before supper. He works all day, comes home at night, but when he comes home, it's very clear that his role as a father, his role as a dad is of central importance to him. And it tells us a lot about the idea of fatherhood in the 50s as being an identity category for American men, right? You feel alienated at work, you feel alienated in all these other sort of realms of your life, but as a father, that's who you can be.

5:18I think Archie Bunker on All in the Family is a really good example of kind of generational clash. I am perfectly capable of getting a job. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Hey, you got a kid to raise. Don't talk crazy. He's a sort of old guard conservative, you know, blowhard who's got a feminist daughter and a son-in-law who's a campus activist. and he's sort of negotiating or they're negotiating in their relationship to him this difference in an understanding of not just what society is, but what manhood is or what masculinity is supposed to be. I think then the next sort of big ones are Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show in the 1980s.

6:04A dual career couple who works from home sometimes, who's really involved in his kids' lives. How do you expect to get into college with grades like this? Stephen Keaton on Family Ties. I'm a married man. I have three children. I know. You're a very sensitive, caring father and husband. I think in lots of ways, these are dads who are kind of the product of feminist reimaginings of what fatherhood or what partnership is in the contemporary life. They support their wives' careers. They take an active role in co-parenting their children, all of the things that have happened to our understanding of Bill Cosby in the years since then.

6:44Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, the dad. And then it's all this baggage of like, oh no, this is not what I thought it was. It's startling because Cliff Huxtable is such a good dad. And then I think when you get into the 21st century outside of these sort of domestic sitcoms, obviously there are people like Phil Dunphy on Modern Family. But I think to me, the biggest sort of TV dads of that 21st century are the antiheroes of the sort of prestige dramas like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper. All of these protagonists, they're all dads. And the sort of center of their drama in lots of ways is how do you be a dad?

7:24What does fatherhood mean? What does it mean as a part of your identity, right? Tony Soprano is always dealing with this with his kids and Don Draper is absent, but it's fraught. Walter White is trying to provide for his family, which is this classic you know, trope of fatherhood. And I think those dramas do a lot to take the sort of, you know, model citizens of the 20th century and sort of push on those archetypes and those icons.

7:50Jonquilyn Hill:Who is the dad of 2025? If you had to pick a symbol from our pop culture moment right now, who's that dad? It's a hard question. And it's a hard question, I think, because this feels like a particularly kind of fraught year for the dad. I think that for a long time, the dad as an archetype is this kind of liberalizing figure, even when it applies to a conservative dad or politically conservative dad. It's about softening and it's about like a less hard edge. It's about moving away from a sort of idea of fatherhood as disciplinary or moral education and more about support and presence. But I also think that that model is under threat more than it has been in a while of this sort of like retro, you know, patriarchal vision of fatherhood, right, that you get out of the Manosphere or Andrew Tate or places like that, right, where fatherhood is about giving orders and fatherhood is about leadership and fatherhood is about sternness, right, rather than flexibility, adaptability.

8:54So it's a weird time for pop culture dads, I think.

8:58Jonquilyn Hill:So you teach this course called Dad Culture Studies. Are there any ways your students are thinking about fatherhood that have surprised you. There's all this research saying that nowadays, young men are kind of more so looking to be parents than young women. I'm curious what conversations you're hearing on campus. One thing that is very true is that they have all, and these are largely Gen Z students, have all grown up in a time when dad is an adjective as much as a person, right? So dad friend, dad bod, those sorts of things. They're also, I think, much less influenced by sitcoms. They're less inundated with those sort of models of fatherhood that came out from the sort of the big like sitcom production factories.

9:47So I think it's a more malleable thing for them, but they're also just really invested in it as a concept, right? They want to think about it in their own lives. They want to think about fatherhood as something that They want to think about their own dads. They want to write about their own dads.

10:01Jonquilyn Hill:Oh! I think that it's very much a category that's in crisis. And whether that's like an emergency crisis or just a sort of, you know, we're all thinking about this. Or we're all thinking about what this means in a contemporary context. They're going through it. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

10:27Jonquilyn Hill:Up next, the story of a growing group of men also going through it. And you probably haven't seen them in a sitcom. Single men choosing to become parents on their own.

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12:33Jonquilyn Hill:Faith Hill reports on singlehood and romance at The Atlantic, and she says she usually spends a lot of time thinking about single motherhood, women who decide to try parenthood on their own. But recently, she heard about another group, single fathers by choice. And then I started looking into it, and I found that this population, you know, it's small, but it seems to be growing. And that was really interesting to me. You hear so much today about men struggling and the kind of crisis of masculinity and men moving rightward. And so I just wanted to know how this sort of fit into that larger context.

13:11Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah. Do we have any idea how many of these single fathers by choice there are? You know, it's really hard to find exact numbers. That said, when you talk to people in the fertility industry, in the adoption industry, people who study, you know, the sociology of families and how families are changing, people will tell you that we've sort of observed what really seems like a shift and a growing number of single dads by choice. It seems like since the pandemic, a lot of people are kind of reprioritizing, like thinking about what they want in life. And they're, you know, they came out of that time just really like wanting to make families before it was too late in a way that they hadn't had quite that urgency before.

13:59Jonquilyn Hill:Who are the men choosing to do this? Is there like a typical profile? A lot of these dads are men who, you know, never really set out to do this on their own. They just got to a certain point. Often I heard from doctors and from men themselves that that tends to be like in their 40s where they realize they're still single and they start thinking like, oh, gosh, I really I want to have children. I've always wanted this. And what are my options going to be? And a lot of the men that I talk to happen to have, you know, a friend who was a single parent or someone who told them about this option. And that kind of made it feel real.

14:41I think otherwise, you know, a lot of men don't even consider this to really be a possibility.

14:46Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, you've spoken with some of these dads. I wonder what they told you about why they decided to start families on their own. Yeah. You know, I talked to a lot of men about what was appealing to them about fatherhood in general. And it did seem to be the sort of source of meaning or purpose or like human connection for a lot of men. And we're in this sort of time period where I think like what it means to be a man culturally is shifting really rapidly. You know, there's more women than men going to college now and a lot of jobs more and more requiring degrees. So men are facing increasing rates of joblessness and the sort of assumed dominance and traditional behaviors of men are kind of getting questioned and pushed on.

15:40So I think for a lot of men, there's kind of this looming question of like, what is the right way to be a man today? And it did seem like, you know, for a lot of single men, this fatherhood would kind of give them this sense of purpose that they had really been craving.

16:01Jonquilyn Hill:For the men that moved on to do this, did it provide the answer? Like, did they get what they want out of it? I think they really did. I mean, of course there are challenges. Like, just being a single parent is hard for anyone. But there's sort of this unique challenge, I think, for some of the men who take this on, where they have to grow into this role that no one really expected of them. You know, so much of the time men are not necessarily raised to be tender or to be prioritizing care or, like, listening to people or kind of having that emotionally caring side of parenthood that we typically think of.

16:45And it certainly wasn't beyond them, but they had to sort of, like, get used to thinking of themselves that way. So, you know, I think often it's kind of this process not only of, like, taking on a ton of work and learning how to be a parent, but sort of internal reflection of, like, what does it mean for me to be a parent? And, you know, how can I sort of embrace these parts of myself that are so, you know, typically feminized in the culture?

17:15Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, I think it's interesting that you say that. One of my colleagues, Rachel Cohen Booth, wrote this piece about the dearth of men working in child care settings. And some of the men who do this work in these settings say that people can be suspicious of them. They're worried like, hey, are you creepy? Why are you doing women's work? And the same can go for dads. When I was taking my paternity leave with my now toddler, my father-in-law frequently referred to me as Mr. Mom. And what he was really doing, I think, was making a judgment about what he views as being effeminate if you're involved in taking care of every aspect of your kids' lives.

17:55Jonquilyn Hill:And, you know, the fact that so many people think of child rearing as women's work, that could be its own conversation. Right, absolutely. I think that's still very true. And I think we're in a kind of interesting transitional point in that sense. Like, just the fact that single fathers by choice are a growing population is testament to the fact that there is, you know, real interest, increasing interest in fatherhood. And you see that men are taking on more child care labor. They're spending more time on average with their children. And even, you know, there was a Pew survey, I believe, in 2023 that found that there was larger portion of young men who said that they wanted to become parents.

18:3957 % of men said they hoped to have kids one day, and only 45 % of women said the same. So I think there is this shift where, like, women are realizing that they don't have to be fully defined by caretaking, while men are sort of maybe having the opposite realization of, like, they can make caretaking central to their identity. but at the same time we still have a long way to go in this sense and I think that was underscored by just like hearing about how hard it is to become a single father by choice in the first place and often that's because people just kind of don't assume that men are natural parents.

19:19A lot of adoption agencies are kind of skeptical about the idea of single men adopting. They might not be actively recruiting men. And then in terms of just like, you know, the process of egg donation and surrogacy is so inaccessible for so many men still. And I talked to people at this organization called Men Having Babies, where they really advocate for single men who want to be fathers. And they do some financial support of men who are looking into this. And so they've been trying to push for that. And they really told me that it's just been an uphill battle trying to sort of raise awareness about, you know, single men who want to be dads.

19:59And they believe that partly it's because we assume that all women want to have kids and that if they don't, they're deprived, which is obviously not always true. But then sort of the opposite case is true, where we often assume that men who can't have children are not really deprived of anything, that if they have kids, it's sort of an extra treat.

20:21Jonquilyn Hill:all right faith hill thank you so much for explaining this to us thank you so much

20:30Jonquilyn Hill:so a lot of men are seeking to become dads now but what happens to the other parts of their lives once the kids get here that's next

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