There is a real case of baby fever going around — and it’s coming from America’s young men. Fifty-seven percent of men 34 and under want to be parents now. Compare that to just 45 percent of women the same age who want to have a kid now, and it’s a stat that turns antiquated notions of parenthood on its head.
In a time where report after report tells us that men are in crisis, why do so many men want to turn to fatherhood? Phillip Maciak thinks the answer could be found on our television screens. He’s a TV critic at the New Republic and teaches a course on fathers and in pop culture at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s also the author of an upcoming book, titled Dad: A Pop History. Maciak says that young people have a different perception of what it means to be a father. “Largely Gen Z students have grown up in a time when dad is an adjective as much as a person,” he says. “I think it’s a more malleable thing for them.
The adaptability of fatherhood may sound like a new phenomenon, but according to Maciak, even our “traditional” picture of what it means to be a dad is fairly new. “One of the things that is really at the center of my research on this is that this is a relatively modern idea,” Maciak told Vox. “I think that the idea of the dad is constantly evolving. We see it changing rapidly and transforming every day.”
How has our image of fatherhood changed over the decades? And what mirror does television hold up to us about the ways we parent? Maciak answers these questions on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Maciak, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Where did the pop culture idea of the dad first originate?
The dominance of this idea is a post-World War II thing. It was tied in with men’s experience of returning from World War II to the suburbs. The central media that helped to synthesize all of that stuff was television, and specifically the family sitcom. These television shows were both reflecting something about American culture and providing a model within American culture that tracks pretty closely to a kind of timeline of the evolution of this figure.
What are the greatest hits of TV dads?
There’s a lot of places to start, but it starts for me with Ward Cleaver of Leave It to Beaver as the archetypal 1950s dad of suburbia. He works all day and comes home at night, but when he comes home, it’s very clear that his role as a father is of central importance to him. It tells us a lot about the idea of fatherhood in the 1950s as being an identity category for American men. You feel alienated at work. You feel alienated in all these other realms of your life. But as a father, that’s who you can be.
I think Archie Bunker on All in the Family is a really good example of a generational clash. He’s a conservative blowhard who’s got a feminist daughter and a son-in-law who is a campus activist. They’re negotiating this difference in an understanding of not just what society is, but what manhood is.
I think then the next sort of big ones are Cliff Huxtable, The Cosby Show in the 1980s, and also Steven Keaton on Family Ties. These are dads who are the product of feminist reimaginings of what fatherhood is in contemporary life. They support their wives’ careers. They take an active role in co-parenting their children.
All of the things that have happened to our understanding of Bill Cosby in the years since then are startling because Cliff Huxtable is such a good dad.
The biggest TV dads of the 21st century are the anti-heroes of the prestige dramas: Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper. They’re all dads, and the center of their drama in lots of ways is “What does fatherhood mean?”
Who is the dad of 2025? If you had to pick a symbol from our pop culture moment right now, who is that dad?
I think this feels like a particularly fraught year for the dad. For a long time, the dad as an archetype has been this kind of liberalizing figure, even when it applies to a politically conservative dad. It’s about moving away from an idea of fatherhood as disciplinary and more about support and presence.
But I also think that that model is under threat more than it has been in a while. [You also have] this retro, patriarchal vision of fatherhood that you get out of the manosphere, where fatherhood is about giving orders and fatherhood is about leadership and fatherhood is about sternness rather than flexibility, adaptability. It’s a weird time for pop culture dads.
