Why Do Dads Lie?

This article was originally published by Slate on Thursday, June 17, 2010.

Why do dads lie on surveys about fatherhood? And why their lying is socially significant.

By Katherine Reynolds Lewis

A new Boston College study makes the modern American dad look positively Swedish in his dedication to his children and his zeal to participate equally in raising them. The yearlong qualitative study of 33 first-time fathers, released yesterday, found that they viewed themselves as sharing family responsibilities 50-50 with their wives and claimed to devote an average of 3.3 hours each workday to child care. The new dads openly gushed about the way parenthood had changed their priorities and career aspirations. "I love being a father so much more than I thought I would," said one study participant about his new baby girl. "The highlight of my day is in the morning when I hear her start to wake up and I can just go in there and pick her up."

Could that be true? Has the American father adapted so quickly to modern feminist demands? The researchers themselves were somewhat suspicious. After all, the most recent large-scale, benchmark studies on time use found that fathers spend significantly less time on child care than mothers. The Families and Work Institute, for instance, puts fathers at three hours and mothers at 3.8 hours with kids under 13, while Census Bureau time-use surveys found that married men spend about 1.2 hours per weekday caring for children under age 6, while married women spend 2.6 hours on the same activity. (For both benchmark surveys, the most recent year available is 2008.)

The answer, it turns out, is that the men in the Boston College study were probably lying about how they spend their time. But that's no reason to be disappointed. The Boston study relied upon in-depth interviews with men after the fact. Time-use studies involve questions about the previous day's behavior. With in-depth interviews, researchers expect subjects to have imperfect recall or exaggerate behaviors they perceive as being socially desirable—weight loss and breastfeeding are classic examples. But the direction in which they lie is socially significant. Thirty years ago, dads claimed to spend less time with their children than they actually did, since child-rearing was considered women's work. Now they are lying in the opposite direction, which suggests that they perceive doing half of the parenting to be a manly affair.