Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Modern Fatherhood Is Changing Men’s Brains

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Humans are unusual dads. Across the animal kingdom, dads are often absent from child-rearing altogether. But among humans, fatherhood takes many forms, and in the last half century, it has changed dramatically. College-educated American fathers now spend nearly four times as much time caring for their children as they did in the 1960s. And according to new research, this new type of fatherhood doesn't just change a man's schedule or priorities—it can literally change his brain. Today, Derek talks with USC psychologist Darby Saxbe, author of 'Dad Brain,' about the science of modern fatherhood. They discuss how active parenting affects men's psychology and how changing expectations around fatherhood are reshaping families and men themselves. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Darby SaxbeProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud, ERP for any size business. You can learn a surprising amount about the world by just watching Disney movies. If you've seen Bambi or Dumbo, you know those are two movies about mammals

separated from their mothers. Their mothers, you might think. Where are the dads in this picture? Well, the answer is basically nowhere, that's where. Bambi's father gets a few minutes of screen time, and we never meet Dumbo's father at all. This representation of elephant dads isn't mean, it's accurate.

Active fathers are. are rare among mammals. In fact, the word mammal is itself a mother-centric term. It shares a root with mammary, since a defining feature is the milk of the mother. Across the mammal kingdom, males care for their young in less than 10% of species. But now take another movie, Pixar's Finding Nemo.

This is an entirely different story. That movie is about an anxious, nebishy, single clownfish father who tracks his son across the ocean. And true to the film, clownfish dads are, in fact, vigilant parents. And it pays off for them too.

Some underwater research has found that ladyfish prefer to mate with dadfish who are particularly active parents, which is maybe a little bit like some dad bodd strolling around with a baby stroller in the park, which attracts the attention of the single ladies. Fatherhood is extremely diverse

across the animal kingdom, and it's very diverse within the human race as well. As the USC researcher Darby-Saxby writes in her new book, Dad Brain, mothering is more uniform around the world. Of course, there are good mothers and terrible mothers and average mothers and all sorts in between. She's not claiming otherwise, but rather she says, if you study hunter-gatherer tribes and modern households, and if you look at western cities and in eastern rural areas, you will find that across time and space, moms are mostly just being moms. They're taking care of the majority of child care.

They're singularly guiding their children. It is fatherhood, she points out, that is more diverse. In some hunter-gatherer tribes, dads are mostly absent from their children's lives. In other hunter-gatherer tribes, separated by just a few hours of driving, fathers are constantly with their children. These are differences between societies, but there are also changes within one society. In the last 60 years,

the amount of child care that college-educated American dads spend with their kids has nearly quadrupled. And that's what makes studying fathers so interesting. Fatherhood isn't just diverse as you look around the world, it's being transformed here in the U.S., in front of our faces. fatherhood is shaped and reshaped by changing obligations, economic structures, cultures,

moral codes, status games, reproductive strategies. Some men would sacrifice anything to be with their children while others are absolutely fine, contributing little more than their genetic material. Today, Darby and I talk about the science of fatherhood, the science of what makes dads great, and why some of her research might be telling men something. thing they don't want to hear. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Darby Saxby, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here. I sometimes hear from critics, sometimes conservative critics, that we need to return to quote-unquote traditional fatherhood, right? That when we look at, say, hunter-gatherer tribes to understand the origin point of parenting styles, can we say there? that there exists one traditional style of fathering that we can return to.

Right. I mean, quite to the contrary, I think the history of fatherhood is a history of adaptation and variability. So Dad's role has always changed according to cultural context, according to the local demands of the environment. And, you know, even just the fact that humans are involved in fatherhood is unusual. Most mammals don't have male hands-on or, I guess, pause-on caretakers. So, you know, we're already sort of in this kind of weird territory of having these extra caregivers. And part of the reason that we have these sort of extra caregivers, not just fathers, but also extended family, is because our human babies are extremely hard to raise. They require intensive care. And, you know, in most species, if,

you know, something takes mom out, whether, you know, disease or malnutrition, the baby will be out of luck. In our sort of human worlds, we have all these stopgaps and sort of layers of care that allow us to ensure an infant survival. And so fathers are part of that picture, but the specific role they play depends on what the resource demands are of their context. So in hunter-gatherers, societies where you're foraging, women actually produce a lot of calories for the tribe. And, you know, there's a lot of man the hunter. People get really excited about, you know, big chunks of meat. Protein's great. But actually the majority of calories are brought in by foraging. And so you need the economic labor of women, many of whom are mothers. And so there is a sort of

tradeoff of economic production roles. And in the book, I talk specifically about the ACA, which is a hunter-gatherer society where the mode of resource gathering is cooperative net hunting. And so it's often done in couples, men and women work together. And so as a result, you actually don't want a super specialized dynamic where the baby or young children are only cared for by one gender. It's much more adaptive to have men and women, women both participating in economic activity. And as a result, dads are really hands-on and involved. And, you know, one statistic suggested that men are within arm's reach of their baby 47% of the time.

So that's one society. But there are also societies where resource gathering is riskier, where it requires physical strength, upper body musculature. It makes a lot more sense for males to do the sort of calorie gathering. and for women to be more involved in home production and caretaking. And agricultural societies, which are sort of the mode from which our contemporary cultures have evolved, are stable. You gather wealth. You need to hoard wealth. Therefore, wars. Therefore, banks. And so you end up with more specialized roles. At the same time, subsistence farms involve women participating in dairy work, you know, livestock, maintenance. There's a lot of economic activity that happens on a family farm. And so for 95% of human history, we operated as hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers,

or perhaps small business owners. And men and women both had roles to play in kind of maintaining our livelihoods. So it's only really after the industrial revolution that we get this really sharp divide between the household sphere and the workplace sphere. And all of a sudden, it's like men are off to the office and women are home with babies. And we think of that as this like natural way of being. But it's actually kind of this blip in our, you know, lengthy human history.

And, you know, sociologists have written about sort of the 1950s was this post-war, you know, just exception to the rule of, you know, how there was a, enough wealth that women could stay home and take care of kids almost exclusively. So that's not natural at all. And I think if you really look at how fathers have participated in care throughout history, they've occupied a huge variety of roles. There's so much in that answer.

And I want to make sure that listeners heard what I heard there, which is that it might be unfair to say that all mothers are the same. In fact, it would definitely be unfair to say that all mothers are the same. but it might be accurate to say that mothering is more similar as we look around the world and as we look back through history, because there's certain aspects of mothering that are simply biologically necessary for these helpless babies that are born. But fathering is more contingent on local customs, on local economies, on local availability of calories. Essentially, the context creates fathers, whereas it is biology. that creates mothers.

And so you brought us up to the 1950s where a very particular context, the post-industrial world, created a world where fathers were more likely to work, and therefore mothers were more likely to be at home caring for children. And this is the world that sometimes conservative critics will point to

when they say, let's get back to traditional family values. Your point is if traditional family values describes like a 120-year blip in history between like the late 1970s, sorry, excuse me, the late 1700s and the mid-1900s, well, that's not traditional. That's just, again, a blip of post-industrial history. And the broader history is one of extraordinary variety in fathering styles. This theme that fathering changes when local context changes is also one that pertains the last 60

years of fathering in the U.S. Can you describe a little bit about how being a dad, how fatherhood has changed in the U.S. in the last six decades? Yeah, so we've been sort of part of this revolution in father's roles. So as we know, women entered the workplace on mass, kind of at mid-century. Of course, you know, there were women, even in the blip we just talked about who were working. You know, so it was always a privileged position. to be fully at home. But, you know, once women started earning income, all of a sudden, you know, and even in the 80s, Arlie Hochschild was writing about the second shift and the idea that, you know, even when you have dual learner or family, mom is going home and is still charged

with the household and the child care. And we haven't fully sort of evened out those roles. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But all of a sudden, the onus is on men, you know, to broaden their roles beyond solely breadwinner. And so, you know, the fastest growing household configuration in the U.S. is equal incomes, right? Both men and women are earning similar amounts of money. And so fathers have to step up. And so we've seen this tripling of time with kids among millennial dads compared to their fathers and grandfathers. And I think not just more kind of hands-on time, time with kids, but also men themselves are saying

that the fatherhood role is particularly meaningful to them. So fatherhood is a source of sort of purpose and identity for men in a way that it's maybe always been for women. But I think it's sort of increasingly among men who become fathers sort of occupying a larger role. I feel like this statistic that you just put your finger on might be more counterintuitive than it first seems. It's not just that millennial men are spending three times more minutes per day caring for their children than boomer or silent generation men. It's also that this increase is happening the fastest among educated men. That's counterintuitive, I think, because these dads who are educated have higher earning potential. which means that if you knew nothing else about the world,

you might think, well, if they have higher earning potential, they might be spending even more time doing so-called market work rather than housework. So why do you think not just today's millennial fathers, but today's educated upper middle class millennial fathers, has such a different approach to being a dad than their grandparents and great-grandparents? Yeah, I mean, we're kind of saying a K-shaped trajectory

of fatherhood, right? And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the case-shaped economy. So it's like the most privileged sort of top half of men who become fathers are spending more and more time and devoting more and more resources to parenting, whereas non-college men are actually spending slightly less time with kids, right? So it really is like a tale of two cities. And, I mean, I think the broader picture is that there has been a rise of intensive parenting from both fathers and from mothers. So everybody, you know, particularly educated people in this winter take-all economy, is investing more and raising their own kids when they have the bandwidth and the leisure to do so.

So, you know, you'd think that as fathers are taking on more and more child care time, moms would suddenly get a break and they would, you know, be spending less time with kids. In fact, moms are also increasing their time spent with kids. So, you know, the economists published the statistic that millennial dads are spending as much time with their kids as boomer moms did. in the 80s, but it's also the case that millennial moms are spending more time with kids than their mothers and grandmothers did. So, you know, you could think of it as a form of resource hoarding or a form of optimizing. What I think is interesting is that if you look at countries where there are actually generous maternity and paternity leaves, you don't see such a sharp class divide.

So to me, this is actually a reflection of our sort of lack of parenting infrastructure in the U.S. that we treat children as a luxury good, and therefore, you know, there's a class dimension to our participation in care. I don't know that this next question is entirely inside the parameters of your book, but it's one that just occurred to me that I definitely want to ask you about. This phenomenon you're describing, intensive parenting, how much of it is it about love and how much of it is about fear? Because on the one hand, you could say this is about love, right? This is about dads recognizing, realizing, realizing, discovering. But it's beautiful to be around our children, that our children are fun, and they're funny, and they fill our lives

with meaning, right? That's a very beautiful, you know, Halcyon story. There's another story you could tell that's not very beautiful at all. It's that intensive parenting is anxious parenting. I believe there was a study in the 90s or early 2000s called the Rugrat Race by two economists, which the surname Ramey. I believe they're married economist, Valerie Ramey and her husband. And it basically said, look, parents are spending more time with their teenage children because they're terrified that their kids aren't going to get into a good college, and then their children's lives will be ruined, and the parents will be shamed. This is a stylized reconceptualization of the study. I don't know if Valerie would put it

exactly that way, but that was basically my read of it. So that's a story about fear, that we're so status anxious, we're so afraid that people, people are going to judge us, that our children won't succeed, that they'll become part of the permanent underclass, that we have to spend more and more and more time driving them to the violin lesson and then to the piano lesson and then to the soccer lesson. So that's fear. I went on a little bit of a rant, but I'll return to the first question. How much of intensive parenting is about love and how much of it is about fear? Yeah, so I think it's both. And it actually might be, the answer might be a little different for moms and for dads, but the fear piece is huge.

and, you know, our sort of, and this goes back to this idea, you know, we treat having children as a luxury good because rather than think of, you know, there's this sort of public common shared benefit of producing the next generation, we think about children are this individual choice that we make, and therefore it's up to us to invest everything we have. You know, we're not trusting the community center, you know, local rec league. We're putting our kid in the expensive club baseball team that's privatized. right? We're not trusting the public school we're doing tutoring and, you know, college counselors, right? There's this, like, layering on that sort of goes beyond the publicly available resources for raising kids. So, and there's also, you know, I could talk about this all day, right? There's also safetyism. There is the fear of judgment. There's social media that amplifies these sort of terrifying narratives. I wrote an article about a girl who was left alone in a roller rink for two hours and the mom went on a TikTok. meltdown, you know, that was shared hundreds of thousands of times, right? So there's this like panopticon of judgment that I think moms especially are on the receiving end of. And there's also a

lack of third spaces. We have built car-centric neighborhoods. We don't make it easy for kids to roam free. So, I mean, I'm from small town, Ohio in the 80s. I used to walk around my neighborhood knocking on doors until I found a friend. We don't build our world's, that way anymore. And that's a loss. But I also think for dads, the story might also be about love, right? So I think that the sort of pervasive intensive parenting culture, which I see as, you know, mostly a counterproductive trend when it comes to mental health and both parental well-being and child outcomes, dads are also realizing that parenting is rewarding in a new way. So that's like maybe the little silver lining of the trends that we've seen. And I think you see that if you look at the

pandemic, right? Like all of a sudden everybody was locked at home with their children. And men who might have only said hi to kids in the morning and, you know, after getting home from work, were suddenly like Zoom school, Zoom meetings, everybody was at home. I mean, I've locked up. They were like the Akha. It was quantity time as opposed to quality time, just doing all of your work around your children and never leaving their sight. Yeah. Well, we were both like that, but also it was like the dark side of that because we were lonely, right? We didn't get the community to come hang out with us. We were actually like trapped at home. So I mean, I've actually blocked out most of that year because it was it was so challenging having grade school kids at home. But a lot of men sort of realized

like my kids are cool. I want to spend more time with them. And so negotiated for more remote work, more flexibility, things that moms have been asking for for, you know, decades. And so you do see this restructuring of the workplace. And you do see, you know, I have a workplace chapter in the book where I interviewed some Silicon Valley dads just talking about generational change to the work culture of, you know, at least kind of in the startup world, where men are voting with their feet and they're wanting to spend more time at home with kids. So I think there's a good story and there's maybe not so good story, kind of buried in those statistics. Yeah, the last ingredient that I would throw in that pot, and this comes from your book,

is the decline of, I believe, what researchers call allot parenting. That is parenting by not the nuclear family parents, but by extended family, by community. You reported on one hunter-gatherer tribe, where, if I recall the statistic, the father did 10% of the parenting, the mother did only 25% of the parenting, and the other. 65% of the child care time was other members of the community, right? So that's a very thick network of Allo parents. Today, for a variety of reasons that take us in a direction, antisocial century, that we don't have to go today, you have less community, you have more thin community, you have people living further away from their parents. And as a result, if there's

going to be intensive parenting, the burden of that intensive parenting is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of the mother and the father rather than be shared by a local community. So that's not making a point you didn't make. That's bringing in a point from the book that I encourage folks to read. I want to start to move a little bit toward describing the difference

between moms and dads today. Dads are spending three times more time with their kids than they did in the 1960s. But what are they doing with that time? Like how do fathers spend time with their children in a way that's different than the way that mothers spend time with their children. Right. It's interesting. Actually, there's some data suggesting that dads enjoy parenting more than moms do. They find it more rewarding. And some of that does have to do with what they're actually doing. So dads do more playtime. They're more likely to be the play parent. That's not universal. The anthropologist who studies the ACA, who I interviewed, told me that in that context, dads do a lot of basic hands-on care.

But certainly in contemporary societies, dads are more the playtime parent. And, you know, moms are doing more of the basic care. That said, that is changing too. So millennial dads are actually doing more feeding, more bathing, more helping with homework, more dressing kids. And Gen Z dads are even doing more than millennial dads. So the configuration of time being spent is shifting a little bit. But dads are still, I mean, I think.

the sort of cranky way to say it is that they're doing the fun stuff. I think the more positive way to say it is they're doing stuff that's really good for kids' development and emotion regulation and limit testing, right? The sort of active physical play that dads often gravitate towards. So it's interesting. One could argue that today, as jobs become more interchangeable and less gender-specific, it might make sense for parents' roles to be the same, more interchangeable, less gender-specific. But A, that's not true. I mean, there are jobs like, you know, changing diapers, or maybe even like, we're going to talk about mental load in a second, that are disproportionately done by women, and there's other categories like play that might be disproportionately done by fathers.

And at the same time, there's especially conservatives who will argue that people would be happier, men and women would be happier, if there were really clearly defined roles for men and women in the family. And I wonder, because you understand this research in a way that I definitely do not, is there anything to that? Is there anything to the idea that maybe if we've surveyed moms and dads, they're made happier. and more confident in their roles if there are like really, really clear domains for mom and dad. Yeah, I think there's anecdotal evidence that sort of people find life easier when they're clearly defined roles

because it can prevent conflict. But it's also really restrictive to a lot of people. And so if you ask most couples what they aspire to, they are likely to say egalitarian roles. And there are some class and education divides around this. But it's interesting, because there's often friction in that couples can be very poor forecasters of how their roles will actually play out. So my lab did a study where we brought expected parents into the lab. They were

having their first child. And we asked them to talk about how they plan to divide infant care. We gave them a checklist of a bunch of different tasks. And they had to sort of fill out, how much would this be mom, how much would this be dad? And then we brought them back when the babies were about six months old. And what we found was that everybody was pretty bad at predicting what they were going to do. And they were all bad in the same direction, which was that people thought dad would be doing more than he was. So I think they were sort of optimistically predicting a fairly even split. And then after birth, often because of the vagaries of breastfeeding and time off from work and comfort levels with the baby, moms tended to be doing more. And

Dads were especially optimistic. They thought they were going to be doing more, both before and after birth. But I think you can get conflict where expectations don't match reality. And in fact, we found that the couples who had very specific expectations and the couples who had very vague expectations were the least happy after birth. So there's something to be said. Who is happiest? If the specific and vague were unhappy.

Flexible. So in the middle, right? There's a middle. there's a happy medium of, you know, wanting to have somewhat egalitarian roles and thinking through what that would look like, but being willing to accept that things might change after birth. And, you know, again, you also see cross-cultural differences if you look at countries where there's sort of protected earmarked paternity leave for men, you tend to see more involvement in hands-on care in the early months. But certainly, you know, there is sort of

home court advantage that moms have shortly after birth. And part of that, as I write about in the book, is just that she's had nine months to build a bond. You know, the baby comes out and all of a sudden dad is sort of figuring everything out while he's also trying to take care of his partner. One of the themes of your research and one of the parts of the book I thought was most interesting is that mothers consistently take on a larger share of what's called invisible labor or mental load. So that is, men might take out the trash, but women are disproportionately likely to remember to buy the trash bags in the first place.

Or men might put the lunchbox in the backpack, but prepping school lunch means, okay, you have to, you know, find where the lunchbox is, you have to make the sandwich, you have to buy the things that go into the sandwich. You have to remember that you're running low on the cucumbers, and so therefore you have to place the order or go to the grocery store to get the cucumbers. That's invisible labor.

That's mental load. and it's dramatically disproportionately done by women. I will say, without revealing too much of my own incompetence, I read this section of your book with the embarrassed shock of recognition, and so to my wife. Why is this so common? Why do you think mental load is a gendered component of household labor? Right.

So I don't think it's a skill issue. Ben can be very competent executives. You can be a project manager. and yet be totally hapless when it's time to pack the diaper bag. So, you know, I think it's not about some little, you know, no to the brain. Yeah, I've studied the brain for a long time. There's no region that makes women better executive household managers than men. It's really about socialization, and I think it's also about value.

So, you know, a lot of the time when there's conflict around sort of household division of labor, a response you might get from a man who maybe feels defensive about the fact that he's not doing as much as his partner would like is, well, this stuff just isn't that important. Who cares? Right? Like who, you know, all these little details, you're overthinking it. And there's a grain of truth in that. But there's also, like, if you forget to sign your kid's permission slip or, you know, remember that they're going to need a present for the birthday party they're going to, your kid won't get to do this stuff that, you know, their peers are getting to do. And that's unfortunate, right? So there is a lot of mental load stuff that you sort of just have to track in order to be

a competent parent and sort of executive of the home. So I think a lot of it just has to do with, because it runs in the background, it frequently goes unheralded or sort of unacknowledged by others. And no one is really that incentivized to do it. And a lot of ways, women just sort of take it on because it's like this, you know, it's kind of floating, you know, unclaimed between the couple. And I think the way to figure that out is by increasing ownership of household tasks, right? So my friend, Eve Rodsky, has done a lot of work on this with her fair play stuff and we've collaborated on some studies together. The infamous fair play, right, which is often a lightning rod for conflict. And I feel like I'm always defending.

it when haters on substack start criticizing it. But, you know, her- Be sure. So the people are let into our mutual laughing. Can you slow down and describe not only the theory of fair play, but also the card game of fair play? Because in many cases, when there are showdowns between husband and wife and plates thrown against the wall, it's following the card game, not just reading the research that created the card game.

So can we just talk a little bit about what it is we're talking about here? Yes, yeah. So fair play is an attempt to sort of gamify household division of labor conversations by putting common household tasks on physical cards. Like you can get a deck of cards. And on each card is a description of sort of what the steps are that go into the task, not just the actual execution, but the conception and planning. So go into the grocery store is a good example. There's a lot of executing around grocery shopping, like just go into the store to grab milk or tomatoes. But there's also the planning of knowing, like you said, when you're packing school lunches, what you're about to run out of. Your kid likes tomatoes this week. Maybe he doesn't like them next week.

Maybe you need extra milk because you're planning some big breakfast gathering, etc. And so the goal is that when you're holding a card, you hold the entire card. You hold the mental part of the card and you also hold the physical part of the card. No one is ever just randomly telling somebody to go to the store because the person in charge of groceries is in charge of all of groceries, which means keeping the list. When you play the game, you sort of like deal the cards and you each are supposed to hold a certain number of cards. And I think that's where the plate growing. You create a stack. There's a card that says whatever, I'm the breadwinner and one person takes that card. And there's a card that says, remember the birthdays of the child's friends and

another person takes that card. And at the end of the day, what tends to happen in most cases, again, revealing nothing about my life, is that the woman, the wife, these are obviously in heterosexual couples I'm describing here, has the much higher stack, and the man has the lower stack. And the implication from the mere comparison of stack sizes is that the mother is doing relatively everything and the father is doing relatively nothing, which, of course, creates the debate about whether each card, which has the same width, represents the same size of contribution. So if the father, let's say, is the red winner and the mother is much better remembering the

friend's birthdays, well, are those cards of equal value for the production of the household? Then there's a fight about that. Then there's a meta fight about whether or not understanding is being held between the two people. And then, of course, you have these people talking about last night's fight on substack and everyone screams about it. So that is, at least in my experience of reading. lots of commentary about fair play, generally how this space goes. But it's very interesting, like lifting up from like the funny like back and forth about

fair play, the larger point that's being made here is that there is a category of necessary work that is invisible, that is mental. And for some reason that I'm interested, again, in the why behind this reason, it is overwhelmingly the mother who is doing this invisible labor rather than the father. My idea that I raised last night with my wife, so you tell me how wrong this is, was that men are playing, fathers are playing catch up for the most part in the West, right, between the 1800s and the early 2000s. It was mothers who were doing the vast majority of household labor, taking care of the kids, taking care of the house while the men disproportionately worked. And men are catching up, and we haven't caught up yet. And as we catch up, we are grabbing the low hanging fruit.

well, what hangs low? What hangs low is stuff that feels kind of manly, that appeals to our strength or appeals to our interest. So taking out the trash, well, the trash bag is heavy and it's smelly, and I'm a guy and I'm going to do it. Fixing up the house, that looks like a physical, mechanical engineering problem. I'm a man and I'm going to do it. Remembering to buy the cucumbers for a week from now

because our daughter's going to that Shabbat thing and she needs to bring a healthy snack does not feel as manly as taking out the heavy trash. And so it's higher hanging fruit that is the less likely to be picked as men are playing this game of ketchup. And I'm mixing the metaphor here as of picking the fruit tree and playing ketchup.

But that was my theory, essentially, that men are picking and choosing exactly how to catch up in the game of child care and household work. And I wonder how you feel about that general story. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's worth saying that when asked, you know, who's doing more around the house, men typically compare themselves to their fathers or grandfathers by which metric they're stepping up enormously. Women typically compare their partners to themselves by which metric, you know, the men look like they're slacking off, right? So, you know, in some ways, I feel a lot of sympathy for fathers who feel like I'm not getting any credit. I'm doing so much more than the models that I saw in my own childhood. But, you know, and I think a really legit criticism of fair play, by the way, is it does tend to thin slice a lot of more female-type tasks. And some of the big sort of, you know, yard maintenance tasks only get a single card. And so when you were talking about the big stacks of cards and how that precipitates a fight, you know, I would say it's not a game you win. It's a conversation tool. Of course, all games have winners.

This is the problem. I mean, I don't want to say this is a male typical way to think about the card game, but you know, you don't declare victory. You're just supposed to be talking about the tasks. And, you know, it's designed to help you have a better conversation. But I think there's also difference in like the chronicity and urgency of sort of sex stereotyped household tasks. So like dinner has to go on the table every night. The kitchen has to be clean. You know, you're frequently, straightening up multiple times a day if you have, you know, messy kids as I do. A yard work might happen, you know, once a season or, you know, depending on what you have to do, home maintenance might happen once every few months, right? So, and you can do it on your own schedule. And it can be outsourced in a way that it can be tricky to outsource some of the sort of more frequently recurring household tasks. So, and I think the mental load piece really reflects that idea that it's sort of the tasks that always have to be done that someone needs to keep track of. Do we have the supplies for this? Do we have the ingredients for this?

And that is taxing. And it requires that somebody pay a lot of attention. And if you're paying a lot of attention, you don't get to use your brain for other things that could bring you renumerative reward or, you know, the celebration of other people. And, you know, because we don't really value housework culturally, it doesn't make anybody a lot of money, it tends to become the sort of default domain of women because men understandably don't really want to do it. There's another factor here that could excuse men who don't pick up more of this invisible labor and these household tasks. And that would be the claim that many mothers, especially many highly educated upper middle class moms, are gating certain

activities with perfectionism. A father might try to do a certain activity, like, I don't know, do his daughter's hair or something. And the mother says, well, you did that. that terribly. Her hair looks like shit. And then the dad's not going to do it again. So that's a task that maybe the dad could do, and it would be B minus, but the mom wants it to be A plus. And so that task is gated and remains in the domain of for mom only. There's an idea, in fact, in the literature that's called maternal gatekeeping. Can you describe what maternal gatekeeping is and what it refers to. Yes, definitely. I talk about this in the book. So this is sort of like mom's feeling like home and child care of the domain and kind of scolding or shaming or directing men who are trying

to help. And yeah, so it could be, you know, you forgot the cream and the wipes that you were supposed to pack in the bag. You did the hair wrong. You know, you got the bedtime routine all scrambled up. It can come from a lack of trust. It can come from moms feeling socialized to be responsible for sort of excelling at parenthood. I think we put a lot of heavy cultural expectations and judgments on moms. And, you know, if you're terrible at doing hair and your daughter goes to school with a rat's nest, mom is probably the one who's going to get scorn from the other parents. It can also come from male malingering. So, you know, the guy who's perfectly competent who all of a sudden just like can't figure out, you know, what he's supposed to do to get ready to go to the park

and needs to be told, right? And that can be frustrating too. So I think there are a lot of different ways that this dynamic can manifest. But it's certainly something that can make dads feel sort of less than empowered when it comes to fully participating in household and child care. There's also a way in which this can create a bit of a vicious spiral where one driver is maternal gatekeeping and another driver is this malingering or weaponized helplessness. So this is quoting from your book, quote, mothers were more likely to close gates if they were perfectionistic about parenting, reported more anxiety and depression before birth, or felt their relationship was unstable. mothers also closed more gates when their partners rated themselves less effective as parents. It might be gatekeeping comes from multiple sources. It might be rooted in mom's own fear and perfectionism, but it can also come from

legitimate doubts about the father's parenting, end quote. And this is where I think it's important to bring in this concept of weaponized helplessness, the idea that, you know, whereas in the 1950s, the sitcom representation of dads whose father knows best. Like, I'm the dad. It's a patriarchal society. My word is the law. It's more common these days that the sitcom representation of dads is Homer Simpson or that guy from modern family where like the dad's just like a bumbling idiot, like someone to be laughed at. And in a world where fathers pick up the baton and say, oh, I'm a bumbling idiot. I'm there to be laughed at. Well, who relies in a bumbling idiot to do his daughter's hair? Who relies in a bumbling idiot to shop for food? Who relies

a bubbling idiot to make plans for, you know, seeing the in-laws, no one relies on them. So no one relies on dad. And dad can happily remain, you know, watching television and playing games with his children, but not really picking up the rest of the labor. So maybe you can bring in how there's like these two, there's like this twin engine system of maternal gatekeeping, but also learned helplessness that can lead to this sort of bifurcation between mothers and fathers' roles. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

because, you know, one of the biggest themes in my book is great parents are made not born, right? The way that you become a great dad is the same way you get to Carnegie Hall, lots and lots of practice, lots of time, lots of patience. And if dad sort of feel short-circuited from full participation in care, they don't develop the skills, the confidence, they don't inspire their partners' trust, and they're going to be relegated to a more secondary role. And, you know, I also talk about the sort of portrayal, like you said, of sitcom dads that they're more often than not depicted as humorously foolish in contemporary TV shows and commercials where, you know, it's like this funny thing to sort of laugh at the dad who's really clueless. And I think that's a bit of a toxic message. Like,

men are capable and motivated parents. You know, we have to recognize that they play an important role. And I think couples need to work together to figure out how to best support that. You know, it's not mom's job to teach the dad how to do basic care, right? Like dads can take initiative. But certainly, whatever dynamics are going to encourage men to step up and embrace the parenting role, I think we want to get behind those. This spring, Denham gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.

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And rather than culture represent men as incredibly capable people in the 1950s that just took their competence and extended it across the world of housework, instead, the cultural representation is the opposite. It's one of incompetence rather than competence. Why do you think, like it's clearly a cultural trope, like anybody who's why? television last 20 years, like has to understand, like, what I'm talking about. But why is what I'm talking about true, do you think? Like, how has the increased role of fathers in their children's lives coincided with the rising representation of fathers as bumbling fools? Yeah, I mean, I think

it's part of a larger sort of dethroning of authority figures. So, like, it's not just about parenthood. It's also about culture. Like in the post-watergate world, we don't trust our politicians. We don't trust our leaders. We're maybe more cynical and we see people as objects of mockery instead of as, you know, leaders. So I think it's part of that cultural change. But I also think it goes to our conceptions of masculinity. So when the dad is the sort of distant breadwinner, we think of earning money as a really masculine pursuit that we recognize culturally as worthy. And men are in this kind of tricky place where, you know, they don't get recognized as solely being breadwinners. They're expected to help at home. But helping at home isn't seen

as particularly masculine or sort of valorous. And so they don't actually want to put a lot of time into getting good at it, because it's going to then sort of subtract from the things they can do that will actually earn them status. I mean, I think the sort of cultural solution is to tip the balance of how we think about care and recognize it as a valuable enterprise for both men and women. But in the meantime, I think dads are a little bit caught in terms of how to sort of like win in a world that still cares about their paycheck. But, with partners who maybe want them to be much more helpful at home. I think it's a really interesting answer.

It's funny because the trope on television is often of this bumbling fool. But that trope lives alongside this cliche of the dad bod with his stroller in the park getting ogled by single ladies thinking, oh, there's someone who's really got it all together. It's just that that character exists in the park more than he exists maybe in television and film. But it's funny that those two tropes coexist, I think, in our culture. Like, we're familiar with both cliches.

I think that's funny. And I do think that it very much connects to this idea that we're still trying to figure out a non-toxic masculinity for the 21st century. Exactly. We feel comfortable representing dads as racist patriarchs from the 1950s. Like, that exists. Like, we've done that.

We're comfortable representing them as Homer Simpson. That exists, you know, longest-running television show in American history. But this idea of he's a guy, he's flawed, but he's basically a nice guy. and he finds a ton of meaning from being with his kids. Like there's not anything particularly like interesting about that. Like there's no, there's not a tension that makes that kind of representation of masculinity interesting in a cultural setting. And I feel like it's like it's a challenge maybe to screenwriters and, and cultural producers everywhere,

to make that figure interesting rather than to make him seem like some kind of kind, somewhat denuded male representation of masculinity that just is like a little bit milk toast and not that interesting. Like he changes diapers and makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and goes on one vacation and like that's actually quite boring. Like that's actually, that actually sounds very basic rather than sounding like a hero in a story that that has some kind of core tension. So I don't know, just some brief thought on the challenge of representing new masculinity

in an interesting way before. I want to get to, your book's called Dad Brain, and I have a question about Dad Brains in a second. But if you wanted to wrap up that comment or that section of masculinity, feel free to jump in there. Yeah, I was going to say that guy sounds like a winner to me. He sounds terrific. You know, I think part of it is, it's like if you want to poke fun at a parent,

there's a lot of discomfort about making fun of moms or depicting them as incompetent. And like, that's almost too dangerous. And so if you're going to pick on somebody, it's easier to pick on dad. And so I think that's one reason that dads are more often a figure of them. I'm sorry to interrupt. We pick on mothers for the neuroses.

We pick on fathers for their lack of conscientiousness. Like that's the way that we can do it, so to speak, today. But it's interesting that we feel comfortable representing male low conscientiousness and comfortable representing high female neuroticism. Right. But outside of that category, it's not easy to clearly represent a kind of like male, modern nail archetype. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.

Yes, I think that's right. And I think this was a tweet that you posted that has lived rent-free in my brain for the last year, which is that in our politics, we don't have a good dad's lane. And so I think it's both the politics and it's the culture. We haven't really figured out how to elevate the good dad. You know, we have a lot of bad dads in our discourse.

And I think anyone who could sort of figure out how to capture that sort of good dad lane because there are a lot of good dads out there. They're just not well represented in our leaders or in our cultural narratives. Well, this sounds cheap to say, but they're just not interesting, right? Culture is not about what's real.

Culture is about what's interesting. Movies are compelling because they have compelling characters that have compelling internal tensions. And so, like, one of the issues here is, like, what is the internal tension of someone who's, like, generally, like, a pretty good dad? Well, you got the Mandalorian, right?

You have the guy with the armor and the baby Yoda. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, the Odyssey is coming out this year, Christopher Nolan, like the OG father just trying to get home story, which, you know, half of every movie or half of every sort of epic film has a father trying to get home message. But it's a challenge for example. It's a great Odyssey story, which is basically about a guy trying to get home through space and time. Okay, enough on culture. The book is Dad Brain. And the most interesting point that you make about Dad Brains is that fatherhood seems bad for dad brains in the short term. But there also seems to be. to be something neurologically protective about being a father in the long run. Dads have younger brains when you look at them when they're 50, 60, 70. Why does that make sense? Why is being a dad bad in the short term but good in the long term for your brain?

Yeah. So we're still figuring this out. There's a lot of emerging research. But it seems like the parenting brain is a brain that shrinks and then rebounds. So we lose gray matter volume in early parenthood. There is more longitudinal data now coming out of studies of moms, finding over time, you tend to actually recover some of that brain volume. What I found in my lab is that when dads lose more brain volume, which is sort of a more like

mother signature pattern, they tend to endorse stronger bonds with their babies. They're spending more time with their kids, but they're also suffering from more sleep problems, more stress and more depression. So, I mean, I think of it as like parenthood is a double-edged sword. It's like being a good parent requires a lot of your time attention and it makes you sleep deprived. And women have always, we've always known that women are at risk for mental health problems in early motherhood because they're sort of bearing that load. Now that dads are getting more involved, they're also shouldering some of those costs. But as you said, the long-term story is one of neuroprotection.

So we know from this really exciting new research literature coming with representing thousands and thousands of scans, like the big UK Biobank studies, that when both men and women have had more children, their brains have markers of younger-looking brain age. And that's true both for brain structure. It's also true for brain functions. So the brains of parents look more flexible, more interconnected, more dynamic.

And I mean, I think to me, my best guess is, right? The fact that we see it in dads and not just moms tells me it's not just about pregnancy hormones. It's not about breastfeeding. It's not about birth. It is really about parenting experience. And I think it may be that being a parent is a proxy for greater social integration. Yes. We know that, you know, and I know this is your wheelhouse too.

Yeah. You know, we know that men who are isolated suffer long-term health consequences. consequences, higher risk for all cause mortality among men who live alone in late life. And so men who have had more children just may be more connected and have stronger social networks. It's also probably because you get a lot of sort of cognitive practice when you take care of kids and raise them to adulthood. You have to hone your sense of empathy, your communication skills, you know, we've been talking about project management and mental load, your brain just gets more of a workout. And so I think that's what's happening, but it's telling us

that there's this real upside to parenthood that maybe only emerges later in life, but is genuinely beneficial to the aging brain. We've had episodes in the show about how one of the more neurologically protective things that exist is social connection. And if you look at superagers, people in their 80s and 90s who have brains that look more like someone in their 50s or 60s, the thing that tends to correlate most highly with these superagers tends to be that they have a very high level of social connection. And the just-so story that I tell about this is, like, what are brains for? Like before we had a very abstract economy, where we were building artificial intelligence

and spending all of our time on Excel and looking at numbers and reading books about complex, abstract ideas. Like, what were brains for before all of that? Brains are for people, and they were for, like, remembering who was in your tribe, who was helpful, who was outside of your tribe, who was a danger, and who you owed a favor to,

and who you needed to avoid, who you were jealous of. Like, social connection and neurological connection were almost the same thing. And so there's a way in which it makes absolute sense that activities that promote social connection would in the long run promote neurological connection and neurological health. And, you know, I have two kids, two and three months old. I'll tell you one thing, it involves a ton of, especially a two-year-old, like, of interpersonal problem solving. Put on your PJs.

I don't want to. Okay, what if I do this for you? I don't want that either. Okay, what if I do this tomorrow for you? Okay, maybe I'll do that. You're constantly thinking through the mind of someone else, thinking through the mind of a two-year-old to think, how do I get this damn PJ set on this two-year-old? And so enough of that, as they turn four, 10, 16, who God only knows what kind of interpersonal challenges I'll have as these kids grow up. I feel like it's not surprising maybe that that's fantastic practice for keeping your neurons firing for everything else you have to do, the AIs and Excel charts of the world.

Last question for you, and this has been so fun, I've learned so much from this conversation and from the book, which is wonderful. What makes dads happy when we ask them what they want? And then when we try our best to look at the happy dads and think about how they spend their time fathering, what about fatherhood seems to make men most happy? Yeah, I mean, the answer to that question, I think, really builds on what we were just saying about social connection and our big social brains, right, which are designed to track, you know, all the complex social information in our worlds. So, you know, I think if you ask dads how they feel after the birth of their child when they're seeing their baby for the first time, they express a sense of transformation, a sense of connection. and a sort of heightened sense of meaning and purpose. And, you know, I think we're all sort of suffering from like a meaning deficit in contemporary society. We've all become kind of nihilistic.

And having kids can give us that sense of purpose. There's sort of like if you think about the different flavors of well-being, right? You have hedonic well-being, which is like having fun on vacation. You have eudaimonic well-being, which is the well-being. which is the well-being that comes from contentment with a life well-lived. And I think that fatherhood can be one of the best delivery devices for eudaimonic well-being. Generally, once kids are adults. So, I mean, I have teenagers now, so they're 14 and 16.

I have to tell you that cognitive work and stress doesn't go away. You're just making your brain younger for the future. So I think of it that way. Yeah, exactly. Cognitive reframe. It's just brain practice. But I think when your kid is kind to you, when they appreciate something, when they do something cool that you're proud of, I just took my daughter to a motorsports expo this weekend where she showed

off a car model that she had designed. And I was bursting with pride. And I think those moments are just so rewarding and gratifying. And they're gratifying in a way that takes you beyond yourself, right? Like they represent like an expansion of your social world beyond just, you know, your own optimization. And they give you a sense of legacy, right? Like thinking about what your kids will do, even when you've passed away, it's like there's a sense of sort of forward motion into the future. So I don't know if it's totally answering your question, which might be more about,

what her dad's doing from moment to moment. But I think that there's this big picture of meaning that just comes from parenthood that is unique and hard to find in other domains these days. Yeah, two responses to that. One, I usually think a lot in my 20s about what the meaning of life was. And I will say, one question that does not occur to you when you are changing a diaper at 2 a.m. in the morning when your child can't sleep and you just want her to fall asleep is what is the meaning of life. What's the meaning of life? Your baby needs to stay alive. Like, you need to change this diaper. You have to get her to sleep. You have to keep her living. Like, the question of, like, oh, my God, like, what is life's meaning actually completely evaporates on contact with children,

in part because the purpose that you serve is so electrically obvious. My purpose is to get through the next hour, to keep my baby alive so that we get to the next day. And so there's a way in which I think fatherhood has very easily melts away questions of meaning because the purpose of the parent in that moment is so is so clear. The second is that we just, when we had our second kid, some of my friends, either who had no children or who had only had one kid asked, you know, what is it like having two children? And, you know, there's a cliche about having two kids that one plus one doesn't equal two, that it gets exponentially harder to care for children as they, as they multiply. And I said, you know, I hope this metaphor connects.

Having children is a little bit like hiking Everest. The higher you go, the less oxygen there is. And if all you cared about was oxygen level, then hiking Everest is fucking terrible. It's one of the worst things you could ever do. But no one hikes Everest for the oxygen. You hike Everest for the view, for the accomplishment, for something that exists outside of the,

original thing you were measuring, which was oxygen. And so it is simultaneously true that just as hiking Everest is terrible and amazing. You know, having children is physically much harder than not having children, but also, my God, the view. Like, that's what you're doing it for. And so I do think that from a meaning standpoint, it is interesting how fatherhood, in particular, reorients one's priorities and the way that you measure a life. Is my, like, social getting drinks with friends calendar as thick as it was before I had two children?

Holy shit. No way. It is much thinner. But, you know, you don't hike Everest for the oxygen. You hike for the view. And the view is better with, too. So, Darby, thank you for all of your writing on this subject. You're really someone that I learned a lot from.

The book is Dad Brain. And I really encourage people. to go out and get it. It's a really, really wonderful book. So thanks for talking to me and thanks for writing it. Thanks for having me here. I really enjoyed it.