A Perfect Father's Day Gift for the Whole Family

Mugs and ties are great, but dads could give themselves a gift with big ripple effects that would flow throughout their household: Himself, all-in on housework and homework, child care and cognitive labor, too.

A new brief for the Council on Contemporary Families by Daniel L. Carlson, an associate professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, and Richard J. Petts, a professor of sociology at Ball State University, includes data showing that when fathers dive in and split the load on child care and housework, “it’s a gift that truly keeps on giving, benefitting you, your kids, your partner and your relationships for years to come.”

Among other findings, research shows major benefits, including " less conflict , more relationship satisfaction , better communication , and more sexual intimacy . Children with involved dads report stronger relationships with their fathers, are healthier and happier overall and are even less stressed as adults," per the brief.

It’s not just a gift to their family, either, Carlson and Petts report. “Fathers themselves also benefit personally from doing childcare and housework, as enhanced relationship quality from sharing the load leads to greater life satisfaction and better physical and mental health ."

“This is not a trade-off situation where fathers do more and that helps out mom and her life’s improved or dad contributes more to child care and that’s great for his kids,” said Carlson, who is also the incoming executive director of the council, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners. The group is currently based at the University of Texas-Austin.

“Our research and other research shows that just in general dads’ well-being also improves when they do this. Their contributions are an enhancement for the entire family’s well-being.”

Tackling the mental load

There’s also a major but sometimes overlooked place for dad in what the two call “cognitive labor” — the thoughtful part of running a household that includes the planning part. Cooking is physical, but planning the week’s meals is mental. Making the shopping list, paying the bills and organizing the week’s schedule are cognitive jobs and when parents share them, they report less stress and depressive symptoms than when the tasks fall in their entirety on mom.

“Cognitive labor is the thinking and planning, organizing and monitoring of home life. It’s making sure your kids have new clothes for the school year, knowing when sign-ups are for the next sport season, planning weekly meals and knowing that milk is running low and we need to get more. Managing family life,” Carlson said. “That work is very taxing.”

Because it’s largely invisible and can be done anywhere, it’s more invisible and harder to appreciate and to recognize what the other person is doing, he noted.

Petts told Deseret News that research they did a couple of years ago on stress and well-being showed that the more dads shared the family’s cognitive labor load, the better the well-being of both moms and dads. A more recent paper on relationship satisfaction found the same when household labor is shared.

One of the big benefits, he said, is shared communication. And there’s a big difference in connection between being involved in tasks and taking charge of some of them. While it’s hard to measure, he said he thinks it increases connections and that’s probably why relationship satisfaction rises.

Studies do clearly show that mother does more of the planning for the family. Dads could generally do more of that, per Petts.

Of participating fully in child care tasks, Carlson notes a “lot of meaning making and mattering that can come from doing that kind of work, building those bonds and those relationships. It’s very rewarding to be engaged with your kids. I think that’s one of the reasons why, when we look at housework vs. child care, people are more likely to want to be engaged in child care because it has at least what we perceive to be more intrinsically rewarding qualities than housework.”

But don’t short the value of housework, he adds. The rewards come in the form of relationship-building. “When you are doing housework together, sharing that load mutually, that necessitates more communication between partners: cooperation, compromise, things of that nature.”

Managing a household together is very good for a relationship, Carlson told Deseret News. He said there are negative implications that “reverberate back on that person” when one doesn’t share the load.