Special Edition: How Fatherhood Is Changing

**Kevin Maguire** (0:00)
There is a yearning to be the dad that you want your kids to remember.

**Erica Mandy** (0:08)
Today is Saturday, June 20th, and tomorrow is Father's Day. So we're talking about fatherhood and how much it's changed in a lot of families. More and more dads today are trying to do things a bit differently and be more involved in the day-to-day work of raising kids. Of course, that can also come with some new pressures. And a lot of dads are still figuring out what that actually looks like and how to navigate it. Today, I'm joined by Kevin Maguire, the dad-in-chief, as he calls it, at The New Fatherhood. He has a book and popular newsletter by the same name, and his writing has been featured in GQ, Bloomberg, and more. He also works as an executive coach for leaders at Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube, helping them navigate the intersection of career and family. In this episode, we talk about how dads' roles are shifting, the support more fathers need but don't always get, what paternal postpartum depression is about, and more. In this father's day, it turns out even the smallest moments can matter more than we realize.
Welcome to The NewsWorthy Special Edition Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in less than 15 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's Special Edition Saturday.
Kevin Maguire, thanks so much for joining us here on The NewsWorthy.

**Kevin Maguire** (1:28)
Thanks for having me.

**Erica Mandy** (1:29)
So first, what do you think has changed most about fatherhood in the last generation? Just big picture.

**Kevin Maguire** (1:35)
Oh, I mean, it used to be just so simple. It used to be set in stone. A dad's job was three things. They had to protect, provide and preside. So protecting was really kind of like based on the historical facts that men are generally larger and stronger than the women in their lives. And it was necessary in those times to be able to kind of keep your family safe and protect them from the saber-toothed tigers that might have been trying to get into the cave at night. And as time went on from other tribes that were battling, so we needed to protect.
We needed to provide, you know, historically, this wasn't exclusive that men were the hunter-gatherers in society. There has been research recently that showed that women went out and hunted as well, but primarily the man's job was to provide. And that carried straight through until, you know, men were the primary breadwinners, men went away to work while women stayed at home and raised the children.
And the third was preside. We all know kind of that very standard thing of like, wait till your dad gets home and the father is the disciplinarian and the person in charge. And then a real shift happened over the past generation or two. We've been dealing with changes in what it means to be a man, this idea of modern masculinity, this idea of fatherhood as a moment where we won't just pass on everything that was passed on to us by the dads who came before us. But there's really a reckoning of like, how do we do the work to make sure that our children grow up without having to do this work themselves?

**Erica Mandy** (3:07)
And there still seems to be a tension in society about that shift. Some people are fully embracing it and other people do want to keep traditional gender roles. What's your take on why that's happening and the impact on dads when we have kind of different roles happening in different families?

**Kevin Maguire** (3:27)
It tends to, Erica, as so many things do in both the US and the UK at the moment, fall along party lines.
Things have changed over the last generation. A third of marriages in the US, men and women now earn the same. And in a sixth of marriages, women earn more than the men. But what this opens up is, it opens up an opportunity for richer, deeper relationships between fathers and their children. When we can turn up and when we can be there for our children in ways that our fathers were never able to be there for us, the entire dynamic changes. It's intergenerational change.

**Erica Mandy** (4:06)
You call it the New Fatherhood. So what does that really mean to you? And what are many dads trying to do differently now?