by John Hoffman
Every once in awhile I see something on Twitter that is actually interesting. The other week it was a Tweet crowing about how Finland is the “only country where fathers spend more time with kids than mothers.” The implication was that Finland was some kind of haven of gender equity in parenting.
I’ve been writing about how fathers and mothers share parenting work for a long time. I’d never seen a stat that showed dads spending more time with kids than moms. “OK. I’ll bite,” I thought. The tweet’s link was to this story in The Guardian, from last December. According to data published in an OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) report, Finn dads spend eight minutes more per day with their kids than Finnish moms.
Now, I always like to go straight to original source of data that gets reported by news media. You’d be amazed at the key information that is often missing from news stories of this nature. The classic example was an article I once read about a study that showed that being a stay-home dad was risky for men’s health. I traced that finding back to its research roots. And I discovered that, while the study did track men’s employment status and health, they collected no data whatsoever about whether or not the guys had kids. In other words the study was about unemployed men, not stay-home fathers. In all likelihood a lot of them were out of the workforce due to health problems. So the health problem was keeping them at home, not the other way round.
Back to our highly involved Finnish dads. Once again, a key fact was ignored. It turns out that, while Finnish dads do spend slightly more time with their kids than moms, they actually spend less time with their kids than dads in other countries.
The graphic actually shows two tables. Time spent with preschoolers is on the left and time spent with school-agers in on the right. Fathers are the squares and moms are the circles. As you can see on the right, Finland (FIN in the table) is the only country where the square is on top of the circle. But, check it out. Finnish fathers spend less time with their kids than fathers in seven of the other countries, including Canada. Finnish moms spend quite a bit less time with their (school-aged) kids than moms in any of the other nine countries included in this comparison.
And, ahem, when you look at the preschool side, Canadian dads are top of the table in terms of time spent with kids. On the school-aged side, Canadian fathers are still near the top. However, Canadian parents also have the biggest gaps between mom and dad time with school-aged kids and one of the bigger ones between mom and dad time with preschool kids. So there are a number of ways you could slice and dice what this all might mean.
Actually, I’m not entirely sure what it adds up to, apart from the fact that I get to chortle at yet another example of poor reporting of parenting statistics by the news media. As for which country has the closest thing to gender equity in parenting, I’m not sure. The fact that Finn parents spend less time with school-aged kids than Canadian parents might simply be a sign that good after-school childcare is more readily available in Finland. I know for a fact that the childcare picture is definitely better for parents in Scandinavian countries than it is here. So some of that extra time Canuck dads spend with kids might simply indicate the kind of juggling Canadian parents have to do because of fewer after-school child care options.
But in the end I’m glad that the news media keep writing about gender equity in parenting (and in general). Because it’s important. Mind you, at times it seems like gender equity is a bit like world peace: worth working towards, but hard to achieve. I have seen some progress in my time as a father, but things are moving slowly. Old patterns take a long time to change.
Still, trying to change those patterns of gender roles and behaviour—including patterns in some mens’ sexual power plays over women—is an important and worthy struggle. Societies are clearly better off—both men and women—when there is greater gender equity. If, along the way towards that goal, we see the odd misleading stat about gender equity in parenting, I can live with it. As long as we keep talking about it and working to bring about change.