‘Say what you want about millennials, but this is a generation of hands-on dads.” If you’re a parent on Instagram, you have probably seen a video using this template by now. Against a background of saccharine music, users show their male partners lovingly interacting with their children. It’s cheesy and self-congratulatory, and if I did it to my husband I think he would be utterly mortified. But there’s also something cheering about it. This is a generation that has been bashed by its predecessors for supposed entitlement, so such videos represent a gentle, if sentimental, rebuke – an assertion that we are doing things differently when it comes to childcare.
And we are doing things differently, there’s no doubt about it. Millennial dads show up for their kids. They spend three times more time with their children than previous generations, and whereas in 1982 almost half of dads (43%) admitted to never having changed a nappy, that figure had fallen to 3% by 2000. Indeed, you could go so far as to say that refusing to change a nappy – or complete other childcare tasks – would be met these days with the utmost scorn, not just from women, but from other men. It would have been highly unusual for a woman of our mothers’ generation to expect such support and input from a male partner. Some did exist: they were called “involved fathers” because the norm was to leave the children to the woman and, though the term still exists, it is highly likely to provoke an eye-roll, as is the suggestion that dads are merely “babysitting” their own kids.
