In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, much has been said about how the lockdowns created conditions for dual-parent families to spend more time at home with their children. In an ideal vision of family life, this would have led to parents sharing in quality time and caregiving responsibilities, and bonding with their children in a way they hadn't been able to do before.
In the United States, ample attention was given to the novelty of how dads, in particular, were getting much more time to participate in the daily, often mundane and yet intimate tasks of child-rearing. Many people hoped that the change would persist, allowing dads more time and flexibility in the long term — ultimately reshaping how we view fatherhood in general.
However, according to new research from anthropologist and fatherhood expert Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame, those fathering benefits have not outlasted the pandemic itself.
"COVID didn't really lead to a large-scale uptick in this new vision for fathering on the part of dads across the board," said Gettler , the Rev. John A. O'Brien College Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology , as well as an affiliated faculty at the Eck Institute for Global Health and the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families .
"I think what's been missing from many of those initial reports was a wider perspective on what the realities are for families and fathers in the United States and around the world following the pandemic," he said, "especially as we think about common jobs for men, precarity in the workplace and economic inequality."
To address those gaps in understanding, Gettler and his team, which included co-author and postdoctoral research associate Sarah Hoegler Dennis , relied on 15 years of longitudinal data to compare fathers' pre-COVID to post-COVID behaviors. The researchers looked at this data from a non-Euro-American perspective in a major metropolitan area in the Philippines.
What they found was that fathering behaviors, for the most part, did not change much before COVID began versus shortly after the pandemic ended.
"There was this idea out there that a meaningful percentage of dads were spending more time with their kids during the lockdown periods, even if they were still working, and that the dynamics of COVID would lead to this long-term effect on what and how much dads were doing within their families," Gettler said. "And we just didn't see that prevailing change."
The research team drew on a large sample of men who were around 25 years old at the start of the study and followed them for the next 15 years as part of a larger set of research in Cebu, Philippines. Gettler and his team have been studying fathering and the " biology of fatherhood " as part of this project for close to 20 years, and have found that fathers in Cebu have become much more involved in the past few decades , mirroring father involvement in the United States.
During the pandemic, the Philippines also had one of the longest lockdown periods in the world, according to Gettler, with some of the most strict, government-mandated quarantine guidelines in place, making this an appropriate site to test for the effects of the stay-at-home orders on fathering.
"There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children. COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior."
The researchers used waves of socio-demographic and fathers' caregiving data collected prior to the pandemic (2009 and 2014) and after the pandemic (2022-23). The main analyses focused on caregiving changes over time for fathers who had young children at home both pre- and post-pandemic, looking at how involved they were with routine, hands-on care for babies and young children, recreational play and activities, and educational caregiving tasks.
"What we found is that COVID — and the time dads spent at home with their children during that period — did not change fathering in any lasting way," Gettler said. "As soon as life gets back to normal, we see that dads are continuing to do the same thing they were doing before COVID."
With one exception, Gettler noted.
For the group of fathers who found themselves going from employed to either unemployed or underemployed because of the pandemic, their involvement with their children's educational care shot up noticeably, and the change persisted.
"We see this link with employment status and fathers' ability to spend more time helping kids with school work and homework," Gettler said. "But that's the only hint that the conditions surrounding COVID may have contributed to some sort of change in what dads are doing at home."
At the end of the day, dad's employment status is the primary predictor for how much care he is providing, Gettler said. He believes that policy changes within the workplace — such as paid paternity leave and widespread flexibility on working from home or setting working hours — might lead to a more lasting change in fatherhood behavior. These structural changes could support permanent shifts in expectations and norms for men as caregivers, and open up more opportunities for dads to get — and stay — involved.
Gettler argued that society needs to recognize how it can better support dads and give them the chance to be more available at home, without the caveat of having to become unemployed or underemployed in order to enjoy such chances to be with their families.
"There are questions remaining about how we can continue to encourage dads in dual-parent families to pull their weight, be a supportive partner or to balance the responsibilities of what it takes to run a household and take care of young children," Gettler said. "COVID exposed or habituated more dads to what that can look like, but now we need to enable them to continue that behavior."
Gettler, who is also director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Lab , works with collaborators at multiple global sites and is an expert on fatherhood and healthy families , including the psychobiology of motherhood and fatherhood and parents' physical and mental health, as well as child growth, development and physiology. Presently, Gettler works on research projects related to these interests in the United States, the Philippines and the Republic of the Congo.
