I find it interesting that you feel the need to say that. At probably no point in US history are fathers spending more time with their kids than today. And yet our parenting culture is so toxic that we still feel the need to tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job.
I don’t think I said that at all, and it’s a little offensive to make that assumption. It’s like saying global poverty is at its lowest in history and saying it could be better is blaming poor people for not working hard enough. The parents aren’t to blame, and in the context of this overall thread, it’s the society that puts a premium on collocation over cohabitation, when it’s been demonstrated unnecessary to collocate to work effectively together in many fields. How you got to blaming parents for not doing a good enough job I have literally no idea.
I will bet you, furthermore, that pre industrial America parents, fathers included, spent way more time with their children than post industrial and more likely post war America. The data linked only extends to the start of post war American history though, and I’ll wager there’s no quantitative source to back me up. But the commuter culture started with the highway and interstate system, and before that factories brought parents away from the home en masse for the first time. Frankly I see the breaking down of the commute and office culture as a reversion to a more historically natural state where families are generally together most of the time.
I'm not sure where you got anything to do with work from the parent comment. All they said was, "there’s plenty room to improve - especially for fathers." Which is simply saying that fathers aren't doing enough.
Less than that - I don’t blame fathers for the society they live in. Some of that might be attitudes about fatherhood being away from home all the time and mothers are the person at home. But I suspect it’s more society expects fathers to be at work, where work is away from the home, and by in large fathers have little choice. Regardless I don’t blame the fathers for doing enough or not - it appears from the graphs fathers are increasingly spending more time at home which means they’re doing as much as they can - presumably the upper ward pressure is coming at the will of the father. Presumably given the continuous upper pressure there’s some upper limit fathers prefer that’s not been reached. Further it’s likely above where Denmark is, which is much rather than the US. It’s hard to blame someone who seems to be working their way towards a desired state, slowly but surely, for not yet being able to attain their desired level. That’s what I meant - I hope society continues to loosen its grip on parents and let them live the life they prefer. For some it’ll still be working all the time. Others it’ll be working what they need to, where the need to, to give their family the most time. I don’t qualitatively think one is superior to the other, there are ever present parents that are horrible and distant parents that are wonderful. But as long as that slope points upward and is accelerating, we haven’t finished the apparently desired progress to be made.
