Father’s Day
The Average Woman Standard — And the Fathers Who Quietly Exceed It
The bar for fatherhood has been embarrassingly low for a long time. This post is about the men who looked at it and decided it wasn't good enough.
There is a joke that gets passed around in feminist circles — and it is funny, and it is also not really a joke. It goes: a good man is simply an average woman. Meaning: the things we celebrate in men — showing up, being present, remembering birthdays, asking how someone is feeling and actually waiting for the answer — are things we simply expect from women as a baseline. No applause. No special occasion. Just Tuesday.
I've repeated that line more than once. I stand by the point it makes. The bar for male participation in family life has been so historically low that mediocrity has been dressed up as virtue for generations, and women have been quietly exhausted by it for just as long.
But here's where I want to go today — somewhere a little less comfortable for all of us, including me. Because I think there are men in the world who have genuinely cleared that bar. Who looked at the version of fatherhood that was modelled for them — provider, disciplinarian, occasional weekend presence, emotionally unavailable but technically there — and decided, consciously, to do something different. Who are raising children in a way that requires something of them that their own fathers were never asked to give.
And I think those men deserve to be named. Not because the standard they're meeting is extraordinary — it isn't, and we should be clear about that — but because the choice to actively reject a low standard and build something better is worth acknowledging. Especially on a day that has spent a long time celebrating men for far less.
Let's be honest about where the bar actually is. Because we cannot talk about exceeding it without first naming it clearly.
For most of recorded history, fatherhood has been defined almost entirely by economic provision. A father's job was to bring resources into the household. Everything else — the feeding, the comforting, the homework, the emotional labour of raising a human being who is capable of feeling things and understanding other people's feelings — was not his department. It was hers. It was always hers.
That model has shifted, on paper, significantly. Surveys consistently show that contemporary fathers report wanting to be more involved than their own fathers were. They describe emotional connection with their children as important. They use the language of modern parenthood — being present, being engaged, sharing the load.
And then the data on what actually happens comes in. And the gap between what fathers say they want and what mothers actually experience is still wide enough to be uncomfortable.
Research on the division of domestic and caregiving labour consistently finds that even in dual-income households — even in households where both partners describe their arrangement as equal — mothers carry a disproportionate share of both the physical tasks and the mental load that makes a household function. The planning, the scheduling, the anticipating, the remembering. The noticing that the school shoes don't fit anymore. The knowing which child is going through something and what they need.
Studies on paternal involvement show that fathers tend to spend more time in what researchers call "interactive" childcare — playing, outings, the enjoyable parts — while mothers carry more of the routine, invisible, repetitive work. Fathers are more likely to "help" with tasks that belong, in the household's implicit understanding, to the mother. Which is its own problem: help implies that the responsibility was never equally shared in the first place.
And when it comes to emotional availability — the capacity to be present not just physically but psychologically, to track a child's inner world, to sit with discomfort instead of solving it — research on child development consistently shows that this remains the domain where fathers, on average, are least present and least practised. Not because men are incapable of it. But because they were not raised to see it as their job, and the culture around them has been slow to insist that it is.
This is the bar. Technically present. Economically contributing. Occasionally engaged. Emotionally at arm's length. That is still, in too many households, what passes for a good father. And it is — let's say it plainly — not enough.
The things we celebrate in men — showing up, being present, asking how someone is feeling and actually waiting for the answer — are things we simply expect from women. No applause. No special occasion. Just Tuesday.
And yet. There are men who looked at that version of fatherhood and chose differently. I know some of them. You probably do too.
They are not remarkable in any grand, headline-making sense. They are not pioneers or activists or public figures giving TED talks about involved parenting. They are men who noticed, at some point, that there was more required of them than what they had been shown — and who decided to give it anyway, even when the culture around them didn't particularly ask them to.
What does that actually look like? It looks like a father who knows his child's emotional landscape well enough to notice when something is off before the child has said a word. Who does not default to fixing or deflecting when his child is upset, but instead sits in the discomfort alongside them and waits. Who has had the conversations about feelings, about bodies, about the world, that are easy to leave to the other parent and hard to have when you're not practised at them.
It looks like a father who tracks the mental load without being asked to. Who initiates, rather than responds. Who does not need to be thanked for participating in the household he lives in. Who has genuinely renegotiated what the division of labour looks like in his home — not in theory, but in practice, in the actual Tuesday evenings when everything needs to happen at once.
It looks like a father who is raising sons who will not need to unlearn everything, and daughters who already know that their needs are as legitimate as anyone else's in the room. That particular kind of fathering is one of the most powerful things a man can do — not for himself, but for the generation that comes after him. For the women those children will one day become or become involved with. For the world those children will eventually move through.
That is not a low bar cleared. That is a man who went looking for a higher one and built it himself.
There are men who looked at the version of fatherhood that was modelled for them and decided, consciously, to do something different. That choice deserves to be named — not because the standard is extraordinary, but because the decision to reject a low one always is.
I want to be precise about something, because this is the part where this kind of post can go wrong.
Celebrating these men is not the same as lowering the bar back down. It is not the same as giving out gold stars for basic decency or congratulating someone for doing what should have always been expected. The point is not that emotionally present, labour-sharing, genuinely involved fathers are exceptional. The point is that they made a choice in a culture that gave them a very easy opt-out — and they didn't take it.
That choice has consequences far beyond their own households. Research on children raised by emotionally available fathers shows measurable differences in outcomes — in emotional regulation, in empathy, in how those children understand and navigate relationships as adults. A father who models that men are capable of emotional presence is not just being a good parent. He is actively contradicting a cultural script that has done enormous damage for a very long time. He is proving, in the most ordinary and daily possible way, that the script was always a choice and not a biological inevitability.
That matters. It matters for his children. It matters for his partner, whose mental and physical load is directly affected by whether she is carrying this alone or not. It matters for the men around him who are watching and recalibrating their own understanding of what fatherhood can look like. And it matters for the culture, slowly and cumulatively, as the exception becomes slightly less exceptional with every generation that grows up inside it.
So this Father's Day — genuinely, warmly, without irony — this is for the fathers who are doing it differently.
The ones whose children will grow up knowing that a man can be soft and strong at the same time. The ones whose partners are not running on empty because the weight was always shared. The ones who show up not just for the moments worth photographing but for the invisible, repetitive, unglamorous work of actually raising a person. The ones who noticed the low bar and built their own.
You are not doing something extraordinary. You are doing something necessary. And the fact that it has taken the world this long to recognise those two things as the same is not your fault — but your decision to close that gap, in your own home, with your own children, every ordinary day, is yours. And it is worth something.
The world is slowly, imperfectly, getting better at this. And it is getting better because of the choices that individual men make inside their individual households, one generation at a time. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, exactly how change works.
To the fathers building a higher bar — your children already know. ❤