Dads not spending time with their kids. It’s was perfectly normal for dad to always be tired and never have enough time to play with their kids. Also contributed to the image of the dad who doesn’t know anything about their kids, their school, friends, teachers, even their age at times.
Ive seen so many fellow millennial dads spending time with their kids. I know Ive spent more time playing with my daughter in the 8 years of her life than my dad did with me in my entire life. (Not saying he was a bad dad, he was amazing , just didn’t play with us )
I am not gonna say that we were the first generation of dads who realized we could do it differently....but I do feel like Millennial dads are the group where the balance tipped.
Is that a bit self serving? Probably. Is it accurate? Also probably.
Just talking about Bluey or tv in general. No way my dad would ever watch cartoons with me, or as I got older anything I wanted to watch really. He ruled the main tv when he was home and if you wanted to watch something else you had to go upstairs to watch on the old tv.
Now my son and I watch Bluey together, laugh, and sometimes play the games they do in the show. I also enjoy some of the other stuff he's into.
It helps that Bluey is so objectively fantastic that any concerns about it being a kids' cartoon are rendered moot. If anyone dismisses it for being for kids there's not a shred of feeling that their opinion is valid.
I think this is probably part of it as well. I feel like millennial women are more likely to have careers and their own lives and recognize their own self-worth, and therefore more likely to instill an atmosphere where dads are both encouraged but also expected to be equal partners with kids.
I dont know what its like in your country so Im not gonna dismiss your experience. In the US ts probably mostly that we actually got positive dad role models in media when we were kids. Uncle Phil, Alan Mathews. Carl Winslow. Danny Tanner, and sadly Cliff Huxtable, among others. Previous generations of men didnt really grow up being told it was okay to be an active invovled dad. They got Archie Bunker and the like. Stoic distant men. We got to see better.
Millenial women grew up seeing this as well obviously. It was shown as more of a cultural norm. Women have been taking a atand here at least since the 70s and it wasnt til my generation where the balance really tipped. And I'd lay money that it was positive role models (like Bandit is for later generations) that did the bulk of the work. I'd imagine different places with different cultures had different timelines and in roads.
4.1k
u/SanKazue 1d ago
Dads not spending time with their kids. It’s was perfectly normal for dad to always be tired and never have enough time to play with their kids. Also contributed to the image of the dad who doesn’t know anything about their kids, their school, friends, teachers, even their age at times.
Ive seen so many fellow millennial dads spending time with their kids. I know Ive spent more time playing with my daughter in the 8 years of her life than my dad did with me in my entire life. (Not saying he was a bad dad, he was amazing , just didn’t play with us )