U.S. Dads Are Doing More at Home
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American Dads Rock: Fathers Are Doing More at Home Than Ever
Lyman Stone
June 15, 2026
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Married dads of young children in 1965 averaged less than 10 hours a week on any kind of child care or help around the house. Dads in 2024 contributed nearly 30 hours a week.<br>Post This
Total hours spent on all paid and unpaid work, chores, education, and child care has increased markedly for moms and dads alike in recent years.<br>Post This
For decades, researchers have argued that a key source of falling fertility was that men didn’t help out enough at home. It’s an appealing theory: women wouldn’t want to have kids with a man who won’t contribute at home. This Father’s Day, it’s worth noting that this theory is almost certainly wrong: today’s dads do more than ever before.
The figure below shows weekly hours spent on all unpaid chores, domestic work, child care, and care of other household members, by married moms and dads with kids under age 5 at home, from 1930 to 2024. Two different time use datasets are used with slightly different variable definitions.
Married dads of young children in 1965 did, on average, less than 10 hours a week of any kind of child care or help around the house. Dads in 2024 contributed nearly 30 hours a week. We have data for moms back to 1930, and we can see married moms of small children back then averaged about 55 hours a week of domestic work and child care. Today, they average just over 40. Thus, while women’s domestic work obligations have declined (especially due to home appliances like dishwashers and washing machines), men’s have risen. The result is that while in 1965 the average married couple with small kids may have had a combined sum of around 50 parent-hours of domestic work and focused child care per week, today they average over 70.
Some of this is due to changes in reporting. We have shown in prior work that child care time has not risen as much as the raw data suggests, but rather parents have changed in their likelihood of reporting time spent with their children as focused child care.
But it’s not all a change in reporting. Dads, in particular, are actually spending more time with their kids, as the figure below shows:
Maternal time spent with children may actually have declined a bit in recent years, even as dads now spend almost 45 hours a week with their children (this would include time spent sleeping if children co-sleep or, in some cases, sleep in the same room—survey respondents may vary in how they judge whether or not they were “with” their children).
Dads are helping out more at home, especially on child care, where they are spending more time in total with their kids than any prior generation of dads.
Nor are dads slouches in other areas. Total hours spent on all paid and unpaid work, chores, education, and child care has increased markedly for moms and dads alike in recent years.
Adding up all their work obligations of any kind, married moms and dads of young children both average around 63 hours of such work per week, up from 60 in 2005 and 58 in 1965; the low values for 1975 likely reflect an issue in data collection, not an actual huge decline in time spent working.
The truth is that married parents are, overwhelmingly, doing their fair share, regardless of sex. There is essentially no statistically meaningful gap in the amount of time these parents spend doing the hard work of raising a family together (or paying for the cost of that family). While a whole cottage industry exists to try to press dads into “doing more,” the truth is that most dads are already pulling their weight, and indeed are pulling more weight than any prior generation of dads before them ever did.
This tells us at least two things. First, getting men to help out more at home probably isn’t the secret sauce for boosting birth rates. More plausibly, the fact that the total number of hours of work married couples do has risen appreciably over the last several decades, despite a steady stream of new innovations replacing housework (dishwashers, Roombas, DoorDash, etc.) should give us pause. Maybe the problem is not the division of labor between parents, but the amount of labor. The amount of labor may have risen for parents for many reasons.
The above figure shows time use from the child’s perspective, for the 15 to17-year olds who filled out their own survey forms in the survey. Teenagers have seen their time with parents rise modestly over time (though there’s been a recent decline), but their time unattended hanging out with friends...