In den Vereinigten Staaten hatten Väter während der Corona-Lockdowns mehr Zeit, sich an den täglichen, intimen Aufgaben der Kindererziehung zu beteiligen. Laut einer neuen Studie aus den Philippinen haben diese Vaterschaftsleistungen jedoch aufgrund der Prekarität am Arbeitsplatz und der wirtschaftlichen Ungleichheit die Pandemie nicht überdauert.

Long-term study of COVID lockdown and family life shows unexpected, lasting effects on fatherhood

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.

For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0343636

As an individual data point, I still work from home but my wife has to go to work in person. So I’m doing the vast majority of child care.

She stayed at home before Covid though so the kids have really had a lot of both of us.