Married fathers are spending more time with their children than ever

Fathers spend more time with their children now than ever before, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by Institute for Family Studies Director of Research Wendy Wang, found that fathers are spending one more hour per week taking care of their children than they have in the past two decades.

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With the mother’s child care remaining constant during this time and fathers spending about 7.8 hours per week on average doing the same, children are able to spend more time with both parents.

“Fathers play an irreplaceable role in their children’s lives,” Wang said. “The increased father involvement, especially among fathers living with their children, will have positive impacts on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development.”

However, the study maintains the phenomenon is happening primarily with married, college-educated, and white or Asian fathers.

“Fatherhood is undergoing a transformation in America. Fathers overall are taking on more and more caregiving responsibilities for their children,” the study states. “However, fatherhood in America has been increasingly divided along educational, marital, and racial and ethnic lines.”

For example, college-educated fathers of children below the age of 18 spend an average of over 10 hours per week on child care, up by more than two hours from 2003, and married fathers spend an average of eight hours per week, up from 6.8 hours in 2003.

White and Asian fathers increased their share of childcare by 1.8 hours and 2 hours per week, respectively, in the same time period.

However, fathers who do not match those criteria have seen their share of child care become “stagnant or even in decline for other fathers in the past two decades.”

Fathers without a college degree decreased in time spent with their children from 2003, 6.2 hours to 5.9 hours per week, nearly half the amount of their degree-holding counterparts. In 2003, the time difference between the two was only separated by about two hours.

Hispanic fathers have decreased time with their children by about 1.2 hours per week, while black fathers have increased slightly by about 20 minutes.

One aspect trending in the other direction is the decrease in children living in fatherless or parentless homes, which moved from 20.6 million in 2012 to 18.4 million in 2022. While the share of children living without parents stayed about the same, those living with both increased from 68% to 70% in that time frame.

According to the report, 61% of fathers who never married and 53% of divorced fathers live apart from their children, which is in contrast to 36% of cohabiting fathers and 11% of married fathers living separately.

Nonresident fathers spend a significantly lower amount of time with their children, averaging about 36 minutes per week, or about 0.6 hours.

Likewise, fathers without college degrees are three times (27%) more likely to live apart than their college-educated peers (10%).

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Taking racial demographics into account, black and Hispanic fathers are significantly more likely to live away from their children than white fathers, 43%, 29%, and 14%, respectively. However, black fathers who are not living with their children were more likely (59%) than their white (39%) and Hispanic (35%) peers to have seen their children “regularly,” meaning at least once a week in the past month.

“The growing gap in a father’s time based on his education and marital status as well as race/ethnicity indicate a more unequal childhood for American children in the foreseeable future,” Wang wrote.