Hurray for Dad!..Where’s Dad?

Father’s Day tomorrow. And a gazillion new surveys to tell us how the dads are doing…

I found this one by the Pew Research Center most intriguing: “A Tale of Two Dads. More Are Active, but More Are Absent.”

The fathers who live with their children, it seems, are becoming more actively involved in their children’s lives. But fewer fathers are living with their children.

Whether dads live with their kids is strongly related to socio-economic status. So, to put it bluntly, the study would suggest that poor dads are less involved with their kids than well-off dads.

Which flies in the face of a different study I read last year, that says that working class dads are making far greater progress on the kids n’ chores frontier than professional dads:

Between 1965 and 2003, college-educated husbands, on average, increased the time they spent doing housework by 33 percent. Husbands who graduated from high school but not college increased theirs by 52 percent. And husbands who were not high school graduates doubled the amount of housework they did. Despite starting from a lower level in the 1960s, these men are now taking on at least as much responsibility for housework as husbands with a college education and more than those who graduated from high school.

The Pew study also found that most fathers say being a dad is harder than it was a generation ago. Which is a great segue into Monday’s post, so stay tuned.

What about the dads in your life? How involved are they with their kids?