Don't Blame Millennial Dads for the Birth Rate Decline

Let's give credit where it's due

The birth rate decline is a very fun topic because people generally like to project their own personal pet peeve onto it, from girlbosses working for Pronouns Inc and drinking matcha lattes instead of procreating, to revolutionaries radically revolting against reproduction during a quadruple pandemic and late-stage capitalism. The only problem with that line of thinking is that it’s stupid.

Another pet peeve that sometimes gets invoked and shoehorned into the fertility crisis discussion is lazy, unhelpful fathers. Using anecdotes and snippets from TikTok (I’m reminded of one where a woman left her two school-age children with her husband while she went to Target, and he called her begging her to come home because he “didn’t know what to do with them”) people assert that modern women are choosing not to have children because we know the bulk of the work will fall on us, and it’s evident by how lazy, sexist and obnoxious men have become.

While these men certainly exist (as do the women who enable them, like a woman on Twitter last week who said men changing diapers is “creepy”) I feel like I have to step in and defend modern dads a little bit, at least in comparison to their predecessors. While modern dads are hardly perfect, they are by far the most involved and engaged fathers in history. There might be a nugget of truth to women’s aversion to taking on the bulk of domestic labor (and I’ll get to that) but let’s not throw millennial dads under the bus to make it.