Haven’t read this yet. And I’m sure there’s plenty of men who are unwilling to be parents or who are crap partners.
But let’s be real; this is the Atlantic. So instead of covering the real systemic issue: the world is on fire and every bit of labor and value is being squeezed to its last drop to fill the dead coffers of the rentier elite, it’s gonna be: why we don’t got more kids? Men.
It’s not about women being free to pursue jobs, or men being toxic. If society is not producing offspring, en masse, it’s because society sucks. My hot take.
It’s interesting. I took a read and generally didn’t dislike the article, but it read to me like its intended for women, by women. They touch briefly on topics I would definitely have preferred them to go into more depth on.
Nearly three decades ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson cited male joblessness as the reason behind the decline in marriage in some predominantly Black communities, and the pool of available men has shrunk since the late 1970s and 1980s because of Black men’s disproportionately high rates of incarceration and mortality. More recently, economists have documented falling marriage rates in pockets of the U.S. where men have lost manufacturing jobs, notably in sectors facing competition from cheap Chinese imports. Unlike the egg freezers, women in these communities typically do not defer childbearing until their late 30s, but instead have children at earlier ages and raise them on their own.
This section in particular is interesting. Anecdotally, I wouldn’t be surprised if jobless men in places without any hope of improvement of their situation sunk into being terrible partners. Given the pressure for men to be primary income providers, especially the forces at work in blue-collar environments and the stronger gender norms enforced there, handling a loss of your future and not seeing a chance to improve things isn’t likely to make you someone who wants to look into the future and plan for a family.
Beyond that, the article gives very few in depth answers, and just skims over things, like what classifies men as ‘eligible’? Income seems to be related, given the wording they use, but is that just any income, or are these women unable to find men who are interested in being high income/sole breadwinner type earners? My frustration with the article’s lack of solid information is summed up in the paragraph below;
Or is it that finding love and connection has always been hard, and is even harder today for straight women because something is amiss with a not-insignificant share of American men? Between the quantitative gap in college attendance and the qualitative gap in dating experiences between men and women lies dicey causal terrain. Mapping that terrain with any degree of precision may be beyond Inhorn’s (or anyone’s) capacity.
The article doesn’t give answers, because it’s a book review. So, it’s giving you a synopsis of the book’s arguments and evidence, then a critique of it. The article isn’t trying to give answers but is a genre of writing intended to review a book and not more than that.
Hey somehow the USA thought the term president was for life. Every ex one is still addressed as such.
They obviously didn’t foresee a curmudgeon like trump becoming president and smearing the office with the never dying crud and stench of corruption and ball sweat, but it’s still how is supposed to be done…
Lessons from 15 years as a stay-at-home father By Shannon Carpenter Illustration of a man holding hands with two kids to >quizzical looks from others Illustration by Pat Thomas for The Atlantic November 24, 2023
When I first became a stay-at-home dad, 15 years ago, people didn’t know how to categorize me: I was called a babysitter, “that guy at story time,” and even a woman a couple of times by shirttail relatives and friends. Their words were patronizing and unnecessarily feminizing, but they didn’t diminish my love of being a father. Over time, I raised three kids while my wife advanced in the advertising world. She negotiated contracts; I negotiated naptime. She worked hard to bring in new clients; I worked hard to raise our children. The division of labor has benefited our individual strengths: We both agree that I’m more patient while she is more business-savvy.
Yet, after all this time, many people still can’t compute that I’m my kids’ primary caregiver. Several years ago, as I was fetching my youngest child from preschool, a kid asked the teacher why my son was always picked up by his father; the teacher explained that I was a “daddy-mommy.” As I wrote this article, I learned that I’d missed the sign-up for the same child’s parent-teacher conference because I never got the email. My wife did, even though she barely interacts with the school.
I wish I could be surprised that this kind of confusion hasn’t gone away. I live just outside Kansas City, Missouri, in a rather progressive part of the Midwest where people tend to accept those who buck traditionally gendered roles. In 2021, the proportion of American fathers who were stay-at-home parents was 7 percent, up from 5 percent in 2020; dads account for 18 percent of all stay-at-home parents. Still, I’ve come to believe that a gradual increase in the number of stay-at-home dads alone won’t alter people’s perceptions. Two problems also need solving: policies that discourage men from being involved parents, and a cultural misunderstanding about men doing care work.
Let’s start with paternity leave. Denmark offers a year of paid leave that is split between a child’s parents. Swedish parents get 480 days of paid leave between them. These systems come with their own complications. But the American counterpart is paltry: The Family and Medical Leave Act provides only 12 weeks of unpaid time off, for mothers or fathers—and applies only to certain employees at certain companies. When new mothers aren’t even guaranteed paid time off from work after birth, it’s hard to imagine fathers taking time too—in some cases, they might need to provide the family’s only income while a mother recuperates and cares for a newborn. The result is that fathers, from the very start of a child’s life, tend to be seen as the secondary parent. This too often sends the message to new dads—and to other men—that child-rearing is not the father’s main job.
For a rich country like the U.S., these parental-leave policies are a travesty. However, paid time off at a child’s birth is the bare minimum required for fathers to be active in their kids’ lives. We also need to address society’s perception of what kind of labor can lead to a fulfilling life for men.
A vehicle for this could be some of the many caregiving fields that have a labor shortage. Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the author of Of Boys and Men, and the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has advocated for a “massive national effort to get men to move into jobs in the growing fields of health, education, administration, and literacy.” He argues that having more men in occupations like therapy, nursing, and teaching would not just fill jobs but provide a broader social good, by modeling that men can be caregivers. Reeves points out that federal funding has increased the number of women in STEM professions by providing grants, scholarships, and direct aid to women. The same funding could be provided to place men in fields such as nursing and teaching. The number of male nurses has increased by 59 percent over the past decade. But currently, only 12 percent of nurses are men, and 11 percent of elementary-school teachers are men.
To Reeves, there are real benefits to men when they are cared for or taught by other men. They may be more receptive to a male therapist, and thus more likely to get help, for instance. But doing care work rewards the giver, not just the receiver. Studies show that people who actively choose to provide care may experience a decrease in stress and a greater sense of social connectedness. Dads experience caregiving benefits in specific ways: One study found that when a group of fathers cradled their premature newborns against their bare chests for the first time, they experienced a decrease in both blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. In general, when men become fathers, their testosterone tends to decrease, a change that increases empathy while lessening aggression, writes Linda Nielsen, the author of Myths and Lies About Dads: How They Hurt Us All and a professor of adolescent and educational psychology at Wake Forest University. In short, it can be both psychologically and physiologically healthy for men to care for others.
My hope is that policy and societal changes will benefit all fathers in the long run, no matter the particular caregiving structure in their family. But for stay-at-home dads who might feel marooned or misunderstood in their experience now, the best recommendation I can offer is joining a dads’ group. These are locally organized small associations of fathers—and not just at-home ones—who might meet regularly for playdates with kids or hangouts without them. The groups are an ideal way for men to bond over their parenting experiences and mentor one another: My group and I discuss everything from automobile engines to potty training. I have been a member for my entire time as a father; the community has both cared for me and taught me how to care for others. When I was in the hospital with my wife for the birth of my youngest son, one of the fathers in my group took care of my older kids, while other dads brought food over for the next month. Just recently, we discussed strategies for teaching my 16-year-old son to drive, ahead of his upcoming test.
For all the chaos it created, the pandemic gave many fathers more unexpected family time, even if they weren’t full-time caregivers like me. It opened many fathers’ eyes to a new approach to parenting. But too many people still see men caring for others—be they one’s own kids or a wider community—as an implausible vocation. I’d like friends, extended family, and our kids’ teachers to recognize how fulfilling being a stay-at-home dad can be. And I’d like fathers to see that caregiving can be a joy for them, too.
This sounds like the experience I was having in 1978. We ultimately had to switch back to more traditional roles because she just couldn’t earn enough money to support us, while it was trivial for me to do so, despite neither of us having postsecondary education.
I know social change is slow, but this is pathetic.
I generally disagree with the analysis of the article. Particularly, I think that Gen Z men and women showing roughly the same divide in voting as older generations still constitutes a major shift. If it gets to the point that Gen Z has a greater divide than older generations, I would consider that an extreme result of this trend. Curious what y’all think?
This article poses a Yes or No question in its headline, then takes 1500 words to answer it with “Maybe, sort of by some metrics, but not in any way that matters. I don’t know only time will tell.”
It includes Millennials in its statistics about Gen Z by referencing “under 30’s” (the youngest Millennials are currently 28) and includes a comparison of Gen Z to both “middle aged” people and Millennials, which overlap, the oldest Millennials are 43. So it’s comparing young millennials to middling millennials and saying they’re actually more like old millennials.
I wish I hadn’t read it. My bad though, I should have known. Articles that generalize people into categories as broad as generations are always poorly written.
I really enjoy how whenever I find a paywalled article, I can usually head to the comments and find someone like you helping out. This also means that when I find that no-one has added an unblocked link yet, there is an organic sense of it being “my turn” to help out, like I’m taking out the bins in a shared house. I like having a space where I don’t mind doing chores, and the key to that is feeling like the load is shared
I also like taking out the bins as you put it. What I like even more is finding someone that spots that the bins should be out but they aren’t and showing them not only that it’s possible to fix, but how to do it. I hope that next time [email protected] will spot the problem and endeavor to fix it. 😄
It’d be an amazing way to multiply community help.
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