Good Dads Deserve Praise. So Do Moms.

Happy Father’s Day, all. As with Mother’s Day, I have complicated feelings about this holiday. Not because there aren’t wonderful dads to celebrate — there absolutely are, and I personally know a bunch — but because the praise we offer dads is rarely matched by the praise we offer moms.

Much has been written about how unfair it feels that dads who are seen doing any parenting are often loudly praised for it. Shop at the grocery store with your toddler and you’re “such a good dad.” Take your kid to the playground and you’re “a wonderful father.”

This disproportionate praise is a pretty glaring illustration of how low the bar still is for dads today.

But my take isn’t that we shouldn’t appreciate what fathers do. I think it’s wonderful to acknowledge how much labor it can take to bring a toddler to a grocery store. It’s important to recognize and call out the very difficult work that all parents do. But if we’re going to praise dads, then we need to be doing the same for moms. And we need to stop scrutinizing mothers much more harshly than fathers. This is especially important since, in heterosexual couples, mothers still do substantially more parenting labor, on average — especially the invisible planning, anticipating, and remembering that keeps family life running.

We need more research on this parenting double standard and how pervasive it is, but one study illustrates it well. It’s from 1998, but the findings still (sadly) seem quite relevant. In this study, Mount Holyoke researchers interviewed 88 couples with three distinct patterns in terms of father involvement: low involvement, in which both the mom and dad agreed that the dad did 25 to 30 percent of the parenting; medium involvement, where the dad did 35 to 40 percent, and equal involvement, where the mom and dad each did 50 percent. (I am doubtful that these numbers accurately reflect parents’ mental-labor contributions, as research finds that it’s extremely rare, even today, for fathers to match mothers on that front.)

Then, the researchers interviewed each parent separately, asking them questions like “Do you ever get criticism from any source about the way you are doing things?,” “What about praise?,” and, “From whom are you likely to receive those messages?”

The results were staggering. Among the supposedly equally-sharing parents, over half of fathers reported being commended for their parenting involvement, but only four percent of their wives reported similar accolades. Women were also much more likely to report being criticized for working outside the home, and fathers were more likely to report being criticized for spending too much time at home. (Wtf.)

Other research has suggested that mothers are more harshly criticized than dads when they make parenting mistakes. People also judge working moms as worse parents than working dads. Mothers are expected to be perfect and endlessly available, and then they are judged when they inevitably can’t be. Fathers, meanwhile, are often praised simply for showing up.

Here are two rather telling graphs from that 1998 study:

Again, my belief is not that it’s bad to praise dads for their parenting. What’s bad is the unfair and sexist parenting double standard. If we’re going to shower men with accolades when they appear in public with their kids, we need to do the same for women. And we need to recognize that so much of the work women do (compared to men) is invisible — rarely noticed, and rarely praised.

So yes, let’s celebrate good fathers today, as we should. But let’s also stop treating ordinary fatherhood as heroic and ordinary motherhood as unremarkable.