Dads on Dads, a study published in 2002 on the changing patterns of family life in modern Britain by the Equal Opportunities Commission identified four types of dads based on men’s time involvement with their children, the activities they engaged in with them, and the role they adopted in these interactions.

What type of dad are you? or What type of parents are you? 

• Enforcer Dad
• Entertainer Dad
• Useful Dad
• Fully Involved Dad

Enforcer dads: The enforcer dad has very much a ‘hands off’ role in looking after the children, and is happy to leave the more mundane, day-to-day childcare tasks (and household tasks) to his partner or, invariably, wife. He sees himself as having an overview role – for example, looking at the children’s education as a whole (their performance, choice of school and subjects and so on) – and is also responsible for discipline. He could be conceptualized as the ‘macro-manager’ of the family, setting the broad context, while his partner is the ‘micro-manager’ and has responsibility for the day-today running of the home and family (clothes, transport, food, health, etc).

Entertainer dads: These dads tend to define their involvement with their children mostly in terms of play and leisure activities. Their role may include providing a distraction while the mother gets on with the work of cooking, cleaning, and other day-to-day household tasks, but they tend not to be heavily involved in such tasks themselves. An ‘entertainer dad’ might typically leave for work before the children are up in the morning, come home in the evening after they have eaten, and perhaps play with them for an hour or so before bedtime.

Useful dads: Useful dads take more responsibility for household and childcare tasks, but tended to take their lead in this from the mother and defined their role as a ‘helper’ on the domestic front. These fathers’ roles were ‘supportive’ rather than sharing, and involved less responsibility than mothers for day-to-day management of the home and family. These fathers, tended to spend most of their time with their children on the weekends.

Fully involved dads: Fully involved dads tend to see being a father as a full-time commitment, and not one which they can switch off when at work and switch back on when they get home. They emphasize taking full responsibility for the children, and really being part of their children’s lives. Fully involved dads are equally involved with running the home and family, at least some of the time. The mother and father roles are virtually interchangeable in this family. Dads in this category are more likely to need the kind of flexibility at work that is more closely associated with working mothers.

Not surprisingly most dads in the study fell in within the two middle categories. I went back to this study because I’ve had a number of interactions this past week on what being an involved dad means today verses previous generations and whether the practice of fathering has caught up with the changing ideal of what it means to be a “good dad.”

In her book, Intimate Fatherhood: A Sociological Analysis, Esther Dermott writes about dads valuing time spent “caring about” more highly than time spent “caring for” children. These men tended to dismiss the importance of routine physical child-maintenance activities in favor of talking/listening, reading/playing which, they believed, were the activities most likely to develop and facilitate a strong father-child bond.

In an excellent review of the book, Adrienne Burgess of The Fatherhood Institute (UK), points out that many of the public awareness campaigns urging dads to spend more time with their children tend to highlight these kind of joint activities more than routine care.

Fathers are encouraged to read with their children; pursue “family meals”; take them out. The routine, physical, obligation-based care of babies and young children is not presented to men as an opportunity, let alone a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to develop intimacy. Thus fathers are never made to regard failure to engage in substantial amounts of routine physical care as a serious loss for themselves. Where they are encouraged to engage in it, they are mainly encouraged to do so as supportive partners."

Burgess states that, In fact, there is no evidence that these more-highly-valued activities are more likely to “develop and facilitate a strong parent-child relationship” than routine care. Nor need such a clear division be made between the two: clearly, innumerable opportunities for developing and facilitating a strong parent-child relationship (conversation among them) are provided in routine care; indeed, the very fact that it is routine may make it particularly salient. What is interesting here is that the fathers believe routine childcare to be relatively inconsequential for the development of close father-child relationships.

Hmmm, are we inadvertently promoting an entertainer mindset? I’m not suggesting we do away with the current “the smallest moments can have the biggest impact on a child’s life” National Responsible Fatherhood Clearing House PSA theme. It resonates, is fun and is powerfully true. I just hope we aren’t building a generation of “Entertainer Dads,” in the process.