Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
Yesterday on the show, we talked about a new report from the Pew Research Center which looked at modern parenthood. The big finding for women was that nearly a third of mothers — with kids younger than 18 — preferred working full time. That's a significant increase from just a few years ago.
But today we turn our attention to the findings about dads. The same study found fathers are increasingly concerned about their kids and they worry they're not doing a good job as a parent.
From the study:
"For their part, fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period. Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home."
In addition, 46 percent of fathers say they are not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23 percent of mothers.
Here with his thoughts on modern fatherhood is Jeremy Adam Smith, an occasional stay-at-home dad and author of the 2009 book, "The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the Twenty-First-Century Family."