What Fathers Are Getting Right

On Father's Day, some personal reflection and some genuinely good news about the direction American dads are heading.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone. Welcome to Good News Sunday.

I want to start today with something personal, then talk about some genuinely positive trends in American fatherhood.

I grew up lucky, and I know it. My dad was present. He was loving. He showed up. Not in the vague, aspirational way that phrase sometimes gets used. He actually, consistently showed up. He worked hard. He coached. He listened. He modeled something I did not have a name for at the time, but have spent a lot of years since trying to articulate: the idea that real strength is not loud, that it serves rather than demands, that it is measured not by what you take but by what you give.

He also ran nonprofits to help feed people who were hungry. Not because it built his brand or advanced a career. Because he believed it was the right thing to do, and he wanted his kids to grow up understanding that the people in your community are your neighbors, not your competition. I think about that a lot. I think about it especially now, in a political moment that tells men something very different about what strength is supposed to look like.

Then, having a son of my own changed something in me that I did not fully anticipate. When you hold your child and you look at the world they are going to inherit, the question of what kind of country we are building stops being a policy debate and becomes something more urgent and much more personal. After serving on the January 6th Committee, I left Congress. I lost my party. But I kept going anyway. A big part of why is that little boy, and the world I want him to grow up in.

That is also why, when most politicians being floated as presidential contenders are writing memoirs about themselves, I wrote a children’s book instead. I kept thinking about the kids growing up right now, in a confusing and often frightening moment, trying to figure out what heroism looks like and whether it is available to them. The answer I wanted to give them is simple: a hero is anyone who helps someone else. That’s it. You don’t need a cape. You don’t need a title. You just need to decide that the person next to you matters.

That message came from my dad. It is the one I am trying to pass on.

Now here is the good news, and it is genuinely good.

American fathers are spending more time with their children than at any point in recorded history. In 1965, the average American dad spent about two and a half hours a week actively engaged with his kids. By 2024, that number had grown to 7.6 hours — a tripling of engaged fatherhood in roughly two generations. That is a transformation in how American men understand what being a father means.

And it is showing up in the data on children. After decades of troubling increases, the percentage of American children growing up in father-absent homes has been falling steadily since around 2010. More fathers are staying. More are showing up. More are doing the unglamorous, repetitive, essential work of being present: bath times and homework and middle-of-the-night wake-ups and the ten thousand small moments that do not look like anything from the outside but are slowly building a human being from the inside.

I do not think this is an accident. I think it reflects something real shifting in how a generation of men understands what it means to be strong. The version of masculinity that defined the mid-20th century, the provider who worked, came home, sat in the chair, and was not to be disturbed, produced a lot of material stability and a lot of emotional distance. The men who grew up under that model often loved their fathers and were loved in return, but through a kind of glass. The feeling was there. The language for it was not always.

Something has changed. I see it in my peers and in the men raising children around me. There is less embarrassment about tenderness. Less anxiety about the softness that children require and that children give back. More willingness to say out loud that being a father is the most important thing in a man’s life. Not as a platitude but as a concrete priority that shows up in the schedule, in the choices, in the way time actually gets spent.

That is what positive masculinity looks like to me. Not the performance of toughness. Not dominance or detachment or the studied indifference that some corners of the internet have decided is the authentic expression of manhood.

Real strength, the kind that lasts and the kind that builds things, looks like my dad running a food bank for our less fortunate neighbors. It looks like fathers tripling the hours they spend with their kids because they have decided that nothing else in life matters more. It looks like showing your son or your daughter, through ten thousand small choices, what it means to care about the people around you.

I am encouraged by the direction things are heading. The trends are real, they are meaningful, and they are worth celebrating today.

To every father reading this: thank you for showing up. To everyone who had a father who showed up: you know what a gift that is, and I hope you tell him today. And to everyone who did not. Who grew up without that presence, or with a presence that hurt more than it helped, I hope you find in your own life the chance to become the thing you needed. That is what my dad taught me. That is what I am trying to teach my son.

Happy Father’s Day. Now go enjoy it.

— Adam