“I instantly felt like the world’s biggest asshole and just about started crying,” one father said. Many columns ended with the man’s regrets.
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An early series on the site, called “Why I Yelled,” interviewed a different father for each installment about a time he’d lost his temper. The lack of clear-cut standards for successful masculinity, Harbin said, “causes a lot of dissatisfaction that gets expressed as anger.” Men who defined themselves as modern fathers, more nurturing than their own dads had been, could be flummoxed by that rage.
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How to Build a Life: The things that make fathers happiestįatherly tried to help with this conundrum. But all of that caring served as fuel for newfound insecurity: Most of the moms surveyed-51 percent-said they did “a very good job” of raising their children among the dads, just 39 percent said the same. “ What it is to be a man now is in flux, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of men.” Indeed, modern dads were left to flounder in a half-developed masculinity: Their roles were changing, but their roles hadn’t fully changed.Ī Pew Research Center survey, carried out the autumn after dad-bod fever, found that men cared just as much about their parental identity as moms did about theirs (57 percent described it as being “extremely important,” versus 58 percent of women). Harbin would explain to Fatherly a few years later. But what were dads supposed to do today? “In former times, the definition of a man was you went to work every day, you worked with your muscles, you brought home a paycheck, and that was about it,” the clinical psychologist Thomas J. Everybody knew that dads used to earn a living that they used to love their children from afar and that when the need arose, they used to be the ones who doled out punishment. In its partial lack of definition, the dad bod could stand in for dads’ self-image on the whole.
Was the dad bod hard or soft? Was it imposing or forgiving? Was it just a state of mind, or was it-as Men’s Health suggested-a dangerous reality? (“ Face it: The dad bod is just a precursor to dead bod,” the magazine’s editor proclaimed.) But as the phrase’s popularity increased, so did debates about its meaning. Soon dad bod was the subject of hundreds of newspaper stories, including five in The Washington Post alone. In the spring, just before the launch of Fatherly, a Clemson University student’s viral essay introduced the world to the phrase and image of the dad bod: “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” as she put it. View Moreīut 2015’s most telling fatherhood trend was the one that captured dads’ confusion. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.