The rise of the ‘Denis dad’

Pity the ad man of 2022. Jokes about men and women and the differences between them are so very tempting, but can easily get a brand into trouble. Until not so long ago, the safest way to poke fun at family dynamics was through the figure of the incompetent dad. A 2012 American ad for Huggies nappies challenged five dads to ‘the toughest test imaginable’: looking after their babies solo.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, given that the useless dad appears in almost every sitcom of the past half century. But Huggies was forced to pull the campaign after complaints from insulted fathers and, ten years on, my guess is that no other brand would attempt anything similar. Not because the public are more easily offended, but instead because a slow and steady change in the aspirational model of fatherhood.

Men are now spending more hours on childcare than at any time since records began. Perhaps that's why a recent Office for National Statistics survey shows that the number of ‘fairly or extremely unhappy’ relationships has halved over the past decade, as fewer women are stuck resenting the drudgery of motherhood. Dads who don't know how to change a nappy have become both passé and déclassé.

But I suspect that the changing nature of work is also part of the story. In the period before deindustrialisation – and, even more so, before the invention of the internal combustion engine – male physical strength was of profound economic importance. But the post-war shift towards a service and knowledge economy means that the strength of a worker hardly matters any more, and feminine traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness are newly valuable.

This means that young women are now out-earning men right up until the moment they have their first child. As of 2020, 21 per cent of married women earn more than their husbands, and middle-class women who delay childbearing until their late thirties now have time to cultivate high-earning, high-status careers. When a baby arrives, it makes sense for the lower-earning partner to take a step back from work, and that partner will not necessarily be the woman. In previous generations, the minority of husbands who found themselves earning less than their wives would probably have doggedly refused to take on any more ‘women’s work’, even if outsourcing that work to paid childcarers hurt the overall household income.

When women in this country were granted access en masse to professional careers in the 1960s, it wasn’t difficult to persuade them to seize the opportunity. Extra income, extra status? Yes please. What proved much more difficult was persuading men to forego income and status by stepping away from the workplace and spending more time mucking in at home. The result was what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called ‘the second shift’. Women spent their days doing paid work, only to return home in the evening and do more than their fair share of unpaid work as well. No one really wanted to do the girly work. The new model of fatherhood has changed that.

The stay-at-home dad is no longer as rare as he once was: between 2000 and 2010, the number of fathers choosing to look after their children full-time increased tenfold. Given the peculiar ways in which class is now affecting parenting, I predict that the stay-at-home dad could yet become a high-status figure. ‘We can live well on my wife’s income alone’ has become another way of saying ‘we’re minted’. And letting other people know that you’re rich (subtly, of course) is what the status game is all about.

Modern men are starting to respond to this new status hierarchy in which nappy changing is a mark of distinction. In our boujie London suburb, the man with a baby in a sling is a common sight and my young father friends all make an eager show of being ‘hands on’. Even in families in which the mother stays at home, breadwinning fathers also take their turn to cook, clean and assume sole charge of their children for long stretches at the weekend.

‘My husband’s colleagues told him that his job was to do everything around the house,’ one friend reported during her maternity leave, ‘so he’s been working his way through Nigella’s Forever Summer.’

My own husband works four days a week, which means that on Wednesdays our toddler gets a vigorous morning session at the playground followed by a lunchtime nap with his dad in the big bed. A day a week with our son doesn’t dent my husband’s masculinity, nor indeed the masculinity of any man with sufficient confidence. But the same could not have been said of our grandfathers’ generation or even our fathers’. I heard an elderly man call up a radio station recently to ask in the horrified tones of Lady Bracknell why any young father would ever consider ‘becoming a house husband?’.

It seems that the modern man can successfully accommodate the childcare role within his self-image. Some men, too, can live contentedly in the shadow of a high-achieving wife. I was charmed to read Hamish Badenoch in The Spectator last month reporting on the existence of an informal club for the husbands of female MPs called ‘the Denis club’.

It was a happy excuse for me to revisit a video (below) of Denis Thatcher mastering a vast lawnmower with the skill of a chariot driver. ‘Denis Thatcher was a chad,’ commented my husband, watching over my shoulder. Can ‘chads’ (that is, macho men) play second fiddle to their wives? Apparently they can.

As membership of the Denis club becomes ever more associated with the elites, we can expect stereotypes and jokes about fatherhood to subtly change. The incompetent dad is out and the 'Denis dad' is in. Never fear, though – the new dads will still be mocked somehow.