The Dad Tax
Fathers pay for parenthood with less sleep and less leisure
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The Verdict
Happy Father’s Day! I hope you also had a great day with a dad in your life. I decided to do a light investigation into how dads spend their time relative to (male) non-dads. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) randomly selects a person age 15 or older from households that have completed the Current Population Survey. They are then asked to walk through the previous 24 hours in their own words, and each activity is then logged.
There are, of course, myriad ways this could go wrong: People could misremember how much time they spend driving, and they could inflate things like time spent with family and minimize things like time spent scrolling TikTok. But it’s the best source of information we have on how Americans are spending their days.
Using this data, I, using Claude, decided to figure out what dads are up to.
The survey doesn’t actually ask whether respondents are fathers, but you can find out whether people are living with a child in the home. I chose an expansive definition, which includes men living with a child who is not their own. As a result, I may have inadvertently included older brothers, uncles, or other male roommates living with minors, but that was a scant concern compared with leaving out foster dads, granddads, and unofficial stepdads, of which there are many.
This approach, of course, leaves out dads who are not living with their children, either because their children have already left the nest or they are the noncustodial parent or they are a deadbeat or any other reason.
The top three differences between dads and male non-dads are:
Dads spend roughly one hour a day on childcare, whereas non-dads spend no time on childcare.
Dads lose one hour of leisure time a day, which is, to a large extent, just less screen time. (While dads play fewer video games, spend less time on the internet for fun, and spend less time reading for pleasure, there is one leisure category where they edge out non-dads: socializing.)
Dads lose roughly 25 minutes of sleep compared with non-dads.
The toughest call I had to make was to restrict this to employed men, because if I include nonemployed men (and dads are likelier to be employed than non-dads) then almost all of the effects would be driven by the fact that some people are spending most of their day at their job.
I had Claude pull nonemployed men between 25 and 54 and compare the ones living with a child in the home with the ones living without. This is a very tiny sample (47 fathers, 101 childless), so I’m not reading too much into this, but topline findings showed that nonemployed dads do more childcare than employed dads (roughly 1.84 hours per day versus 1.02 for employed dads). This is probably reflecting the growing share of stay-at-home fathers. Unsurprisingly, nonemployed childless men are the champions of leisure — roughly 7.6 hours per day of socializing/relaxing/leisure time.
To the employed and nonemployed dads alike, I hope you’re able to make back some of that leisure time today.
Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel
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The big news of the week is that the Split Ticket 2026 Midterms Model has gone live on The Argument’s website. In this piece, Lakshya covers the headline findings and explains why they differ from those of other major polls. To give you the TL;DR: Our numbers put the Senate essentially at a toss-up but strongly favor Democrats winning the House.
As per usual, Jeremiah contributed a cultural take that got the people going: Sometimes you have to hurt people. The piece is inspired in part by Phoebe Bridgers’ controversial concert phone ban and in part by an insane football lawsuit (and also… abundance). He points out that maybe the best response to zoomers who say they can’t live without their phones for two hours is to defend the good old-fashioned principle of the greatest good for the greatest number — even if someone, somewhere gets hurt.
Kobe wrote a piece that tries to make sense of the place software engineers hold in the American public imagination, from the #learntocode craze of the 2010s to the now-peculiarly widespread concern for tech workers in the 2020s. Our May poll revealed that people are more willing to support a protectionist ban against using AI in software engineering than in any other industry. But do the software engineers really have it so bad?
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
Congress is set to pass the much-beleaguered 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Jerusalem wrote about one of the most controversial parts of this bill earlier in the year. A lot of hard work from YIMBYs made this possible!
The U.S. Energy Information Administration published its June outlook, and utility-scale solar generation is forecast to rise 19% this summer compared with last, reflecting a 20% increase in average solar capacity.
Scientists in Denmark identified hydrogen radicals as a mechanism for breaking down PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” that may be cause for concern when they build up in water, soil, and the human body.
Worth watching...
This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt bravely entered the world of gender slop. My favorite line comes from Jerusalem, who argued that dating advice based on gender stereotyping makes people less curious about the individual in front of them, ultimately hurting their romantic chances. So libbed out.
What’s News with The Argument
The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel
It’s World Cup season, and because Denmark, my small and clearly not-so-mighty home country, did not qualify this year, I asked the office which team to root for instead.
Kate Crawford told me her son has gone “all in on Cabo Verde.” And while the team’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, stole Jerusalem Demsas’ heart, she is obviously holding out for “AMERICA.” (Separately, she recommended Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth as a good summer read.)
Lakshya Jain has also been watching the World Cup, and he has been amused by the reaction of foreign fans to “American abundance.” Apparently, there are anecdotes circling on Twitter of “Japanese people startled at bottomless chips” and “the British being like “WTF?” at Waffle House.”
I don’t know how many World Cup matches Kobe Yank-Jacobs has watched, but I do know that he watched the four-part docuseries The Dark Wizard, which he very emphatically declared “the best climbing doc for anyone who is not into climbing at all.” Now, Kobe is in fact into climbing, which slightly undermines his authority on that point, but he did call the whole thing “really beautiful,” both visually and spiritually.
Justin attended the DC/DOX film festival, where he saw Soul Patrol, a documentary about an all-Black special operations unit in the Vietnam War. “The film cuts between the final reunion for the last living vets of the unit and Super 8 footage shot entirely by young soldiers in the war.”
Finally, Milan Singh went to Sunset Cinema at The Wharf, a free weekly outdoor movie series at Transit Pier in D.C. They will be screening Hamilton on July 8. Just a heads up.
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I would have liked to see the distribution of one of those datasets. I suspect it would tend to be more bi-modal with a long tail - some dads spending almost no time (those who will admit it) and a significant though non-majority fraction spending much higher than the average. At least anecdotally that’s what the dads I know did…
I "liked" this because I saw someone else post these same stats earlier as though they were really striking. I rolled my eyes hard at that.
In all seriousness though-- happy Father's Day! I called my dad. He learned that seniors in St. Louis can take community college classes for free, so he's taking a class on electric motors for fun. He's a physicist. He told me that he really appreciated the other students in the class. Since they are in the trades, they are apparently very attentive to the material. He was having a lot of fun.