Study: Today’s dads are engaging more with their kids
news.byu.edu
news.byu.edu
I wouldn't wish involuntary unemployment on anyone. My family was lucky that my dad found steady salaried work again before the savings account was completely drained. The stress could have broken a weaker marriage. But I also got something from my dad's extra availability that I wouldn't even have known to miss until adulthood otherwise. Kids will remember and cherish extra engagement with them, whether the time you put in is planned or not.
[1] I partially credit my own career to his early help with programming. My friends growing up used 8 bit home computers too. But they didn't have dads working through the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide with them. They learned just enough to load/run software and I learned to write my own. I know that some kids can just pick up a teach-yourself book and learn simple programming on their own. 9-year-old me couldn't. I needed help from my dad. (Thanks, Dad. I miss you.)
My father was overworking most of the time due to his career as a pipefitter for Imperial Oil. He spent two terms unemployed— once when we moved to our small SW Ontario town (long story why), and another during an illness that lasted about a year. Because my mother had left her career in insurance to look after us, our college savings were depleted (the last thing they touched to make payments). I don't remember the times he was unemployed very much. Much of my family was ill at the same time he was and I spent a lot of time looking after them (with my thoroughly tough mother)— otherwise he was driving an 2-3 hours round-trip to the union hall every day to try and find contract work. So I didn't see much of the guy when I was young, and when I did he was exhausted and often cranky. There were some great moments in there, and he still taught me as much as he could while I was there, but I'm just remarking on the work and unemployment and family time thing.
Funnily, I got into programming because my mother had an [name I don't remember] 80286 from her work as an insurance analyst and I dug right into that machine. Then the internet finally came to town...
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Really, thanks for sharing that.
Most definitely. I get a bit of existential vertigo when I think about how much of my often-happy life has depended on luck. It intensifies when I consider how many of those lucky circumstances were determined before my birth.
I have a similar story, but more from necessity; for the first few months while our dad saved up money to buy a tape drive (something he didn't know was sort of necessary when he made the initial purchase), the machine just sat there at the interpreter prompt. Luckily the reference guide and various magazines of the time had examples we could type in. That became the routine - you want to play a game, first you have to type it up. In retrospect, it's actually quite amazing how good a teacher necessity can be.
I expected that as I withdrew from long office hours, replacing it with remote work, my income stagnate (or go down). The opposite happened - my income has actually gone up steadily.
Towards the point of this topic - I have been able to spend a lot of time with my kids. We walk (or bike) to and from school, I coach sports, and I'm able to see all of the recitals, performances, and various events. My kids are age 12, 7, and 5 for those wondering.
I do work quite a bit, but the work is performed at odd hours, and not during prime family hours. It helps to find companies that is geared towards projects and your performance over the long or medium term, rather than people who want to see butts-in-chairs when they are at the office.
I encourage everyone to try to replace their commutes with more time with loved ones. Move your working hours around, if at all possible.
I pick up my kids at 2-3 pm and then get a babysitter for the afternoons while I am still working until 5ish. This ends up being, basically, just a late lunch.
If things go south with my babysitter the kids can play or watch tv while I finish up the day and it's not a big deal to occasionally do.
I would try to get a stable/full-time job at a family friendly company, but that's just me all the time. Health care is expensive.
I did have some time to work on pet projects and freelance-style (usually free) projects prior to the kids starting sports.
Without a flexible job where I can shift my hours this wouldn’t be as doable. As a consequence, if one views it that way, is I give up some evening time from mediocre TV to wrap up an hour or so of work - in order to not feel like I allocate time poorly from formal work (which I don’t).
My dad passed away when I was 5, and I have very few memories (sadly more negative ones than positive due to a battle with cancer). So for me the ability to do as much with my family as the work/life balance allows before the inevitable is highly valuable hoping to tip that scale in the positive direction for my family.
My wife works 5am-1:30pm so I do the morning routine for our three kids (1, 7, & 9). I work 9am-4pm and am home by 5pm. It's family time -- dinner, sports practice, homework, chores, fun -- until the kids get to bed around 8pm. After that, I'll finish tidying up for the night, make lunches for the next day, and settle in for another 1-2hr of work a few nights/wk. This schedule affords us the ability to be with our children nearly the entire time they're not in school, and is definitely worth the tradeoffs we made to facilitate it, considering the obvious alternative would be for one of us to quit their job (which not only has an opportunity cost but would also likely reduce the time the other partner had with the kids).
I spent A LOT of time with my mum, she taught me programming, and after a while I was teaching her newer stuff. My mum was the real MVP, my passion for everything comes from my mother.
My father however.. well he would talk about loving to play games like pacman and galaga as a kid, but wouldn't play games with me.. Later after smartphones and facebook, he now just disappears completely.
Now I'm a father, the difference is huge, I play with my daughter, I teach her stuff.. Recently I decided to build her first computer (shes 2, same age as I was when I first got to use a computer) .. so we together restored a Macintosh Classic, and upgraded it with modern components https://cherubini.casa/macintosh-classic-948301f14cbd
Largely, I think it's a sign of the times. My generation's fathers came from an era where "hard work" was still considered a necessity for happiness. My own father as well as most of those of people I know work and worked very hard. Technology, the economy, and society changed significantly from the time that our fathers grew up to when we grew up, and we sons saw our fathers work countless hours, leaving us to wonder how life is even worth living if it's made up of overtime hours and a series of useless meetings. Despite my father being the type to overachieve in the workplace, I would not wish that kind of lifestyle on him. I know a lot of men my age who saw their fathers work slavishly and realized that it's not worth it for them to spend their early life working to promote someone else's excessive success. I'm sure there are women out there who feel the same about their labor in contrast to that of their fathers, although women are also working more than ever(outside of the home) so it's not as much their issue as that of men and their rapidly changing role in society.
I don't have kids but I've often thought if I could get 6-12 months off for having a kid it would change the equation from impossible burden to work around to actually a pleasurable experience to learn/grow/bond/etc.
In many civilized parts of the world, a female employee getting pregnant will mean disruption during the pregnancy to accommodate doctor's visits and health issues, and then months of paid leave PLUS having to pay to backfill their position with a temp, plus the costs of recruiting and ramping up said temp.
That's a huge hit for an early stage startup to take.
There are regular doctor's visits during pregnancy, yes, but that's a few hours a month. Surely even the smallest startups can absorb that kind of "disruption".
And typically, since parents know well in advance when and how much leave they'll need to take, the team can plan around the leave and how to take over that work in someone's absence. In most cases, you'll have 5-6 months to prepare.
I work for a small startup - fewer than 20 employees - and two of our team members are married. They had a baby and were both out for month (the mom took more time after that), and everything continued to function just fine because we'd planned for it. And if we needed them, they were just an email or text away.
Finally, parents can be some of the most efficient workers on a team, and are great candidates for startups. They are experienced in time management and balancing multiple tasks and stakeholders.
My advice is this: companies need to suck it up. We live in a society with rules and laws for a reason. If your business can't exist under those rules and laws, then it doesn't belong in society. Ventures that are detrimental to society simply shouldn't be allowed.
s/pregnant/cancer/ and then ask yourself if you would feel comfortable inquiring about medical history during the hiring process.
You should try visiting one of them.
That's all I have to say on this matter. I will not be posting further.
It's just too bad that there's no way to offer an equivalent benefit for women without partners to provide them the same sort of support.
Not that there's any simple solution to that. Maybe in a society that believed in social safety nets some sort of home aide could be available during the first few weeks.
It's not partner leave, it's paternity leave.
> some sort of home aide could be available during the first few weeks
Men don't take paternity leave solely to be 'home aide' - they're taking the time to bond with their new children.
@rconti suggested that equal paternity leave might be unfair because of the additional physical costs that women pay to give birth; I was disagreeing with that, saying that if anything paternity adds value for those women.
Paternity leave even adds value for women who will never have children, because it undercuts any argument that prefers hiring men over women because of parental leave.
The only women it doesn't add much value for are those without partners. "Unfair" is probably the wrong term. They're simply put at a disadvantage relative to other mothers as a result.
How on earth are they put at a disadvantage that someone who does not exist, and so does not need the benefit, does not get that benefit?
And more broadly is it nice to talk about someone else getting a benefit that they need as being putting people who do not get it at a 'disadvantage'?
Are you disadvantaged that people who can't walk get wheelchairs?
Women without partners or whose partners don't get leave have to face that time alone.
It's not a disadvantage in a competition. It's an additional obstacle to overcome that not everyone has to. I think it's a shame we can't give every mother the chance to have that physical assistance and moral support after giving birth.
(Of course, before we address that, maybe we should focus on making paid maternity leave universal. Imagine giving birth (pushing a watermelon out of your private parts or having it cut out of your abdomen) and then having to return to a physically demanding minimum wage job immediately after so you can still pay the rent and buy food? While being the sole caregiver for a baby who wakes you every 3 hours for feeding. I don't know how they do it. My friends who gave birth naturally were advised by their doctors not to even try to walk more than around the house for the first 6 weeks after, to allow for proper healing.)
If one stretches such an analogy, one could reason that paid sick leave is discriminating against healthy people. Not many people would agree with that one.
As you've stated, a sensible medical policy for everyone would be good. I would imagine that Google has a one.
So that part is more like medical leave than parental leave (even though you're also parenting at the time).
Is offered or is forced to take?
Which is why California provides both equal paid bonding leave for parents (biological or adoptive) and paid pregnancy disability leave based on actual disability (with standard rules for uncomplicated cases) for those carrying a child.
Conversely I work from home and see my kids all the time, albeit they're still younger than my own memories. Only last week I had to two days work in London, about 3 hours commute each way, but I came home rather than stay in a hotel. It's rare we don't all sleep under the same roof.
I don't see my dad as having negative masculine attributes though, or myself as being any better. He was often used as a threat by my mother when we were misbehaving, but more often than not we were just pleased to see each other when he came home. I'm proud of him and the decisions he made, he did the best for his family often to his own detriment and the choices I was able to make just weren't available to him. At 6'5 there reverse is also true, or I'd have been doing all I could to follow the same path.
At the time at least (this is also UK) you had to be under 6'1 for fast jets and although in theory you could be up to 6'4 for the big slow stuff or rotary wing initially they wouldn't know what aircraft type you'd be streamed for, so everyone had to be meet the lower height limit. I wasn't particularly interested in anything other than the fast jets either.
That said, I was also told the measurement that really mattered was the thigh length (jokes about losing kneecaps against the canopy if you ejected). So you could potentially still be accepted if you were a little over 6'1 but carried more of your height in your torso and a doctor measured your thigh length as being below a limit. I figured I was way over though and my legs don't look particularly short for my height.
I mean, 40 year olds dress like teenagers (sneakers, t-shirt, jeans, sometimes a cap), they often have the same hobbies as teenagers (e.g. video gaming), and responsibility is low because there is a high level of social security.
I don't think behaving more like kids is something confined to dads, or even men as a whole either. It seems modern adults are maturing far more slowly or even showing some signs of regression now.
I don't have anything to compare it with, but grown men burning their evenings in front of a games console, playing games aimed at children, and grown women slathering pictures of themselves all over social media in an attempt to garner attention and social acceptance, with both groups seeming to want to be their kids' "buddies" more than ever, doesn't seem to be a positive direction for things to go in.
Who knows. I may be bah humbugging here. I'm young enough that I can't reasonably say "in my day adults were adults!", just that the direction things appear to be going in (socially, and as role models for children) does not appear to be promising.
You are. Two things:
1. How is spending (not burning) an evening in front of the console any worse than spending it in front of the TV?
2. You're painting with a really, really broad brush there. Some grown men play a lot of video games, and some women post a lot on social media, but not all of them do, and in any case, I'm not entirely sure what the problem with socializing online is.
2: The damage being done by social media and the rise in narcissism, toward society at large, towards children and towards mental health, is pretty well documented at this point.
Not in America.
But tell that to the soon-to-be-homeless dev who posted this morning, tell that to people who aren't in our industry, tell it to minimum-wage earners, tell that to people in Bumbleshit, Nebraska.
> I mean, 40 year olds dress like teenagers (sneakers, t-shirt, jeans, sometimes a cap), they often have the same hobbies as teenagers (e.g. video gaming)...
I'm with you to this point. The 'adult' father figures of the past - for example, as exaggerated in the character of George Banks from Mary Poppins - were much more austere and had higher societal requirements regarding acceptable activities and behaviors. If that means that they are involved in the lives of their children rather than simply trusting that the nanny has them scrubbed, tubbed, and adequately fed, so much the better!
As Mr. Banks lamented,
You've got to grind, grind, grind
At that grindstone
Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve
And all too soon they've up and grown
And then they've flown
And it's too late for you to give
Just that spoonful of sugar
To help the medicine go down
> and responsibility is low because there is a high level of social security.
Uh, I took a different track than you did. You seem to be of the opinion that fathers being more involved is due to the fact that they are kids. I believe that they choose instead to decline the negative aspects of traditional masculinity and, in so doing, are better than if they had maintained those aspects. This may mean that they wear comfortable clothes rather than suffering in a suit and tie, or that they are more active (their children may see their fathers doing undignified activities like running when they could be walking), or that they change their kids' diapers or feed them rather than leaving those tasks to the womenfolk. All positive changes, in my opinion!
People shouldn't need a fear of death by starvation to motivate them. If a removal of this fear allows them to be better people, that's a good thing. If some people abuse the safety net, things would not be better if it were absent and they simply crashed.
Dads in the past were remarkably shitty and it isn't really even clear why.
Why can't I be warm, understanding and available to my children and still be a "tough guy" (with "toxic masculinity") towards strangers, or colleagues, or my team mates in the soccer club?
After all, there is a very different level of trust within the family.
He still has an instinct to ask my mother whenever my son needs something, and I remind him "No, Dad, I can cook/bandage/clean/change that. We don't need to ask Grandma to take care of it. Why don't you cook up a few of your famous hamburgers and I'll get the boy ready for dinner?" - and he's still a bit hesitant to watch his grandson when grandma's not home.
But through his hindsight, he agrees that (1) the novelty doesn't wear off, it changes way too fast, (2) do it as much as you can, because time is limited, and (3) it definitely is the best. Though you may get a reprise as a grandparent someday, which is possibly even better because you can send them home with new noisy toys after they've been spoiled and are on a sugar high.
It can be extremely challenging at times trying to work, but I am able to be in their life a lot more than your average dad.
I flew out to Cali to record a course last year and it was my first time away from my family for a few days. Before leaving, I thought it was going to be awesome to take a break from them. I realized just how damn attached I was to them during that time. I never experienced home sickness like that before. I was like a little baby.
More is more. More is not better.
You are a by-product of your parents. What you've learned from them - about life, as well as a model of parenting - often carries forward. The problem is this: you wanting to share what you've learned doesn't mean what you learned is worth sharing.
In short, for some percentage of these kids, this increase could be bad news.
The question is: How many? And in what way?
Provide some facts to back up this claim.
> May be fathers who love children are staying in marriage
It sounds like you are saying that fathers that leave marriages don't love their children? Is that what you are saying?
There is this excellent tool called google that can help you get all the numbers. You should consider using it Sir.
Check this resource: http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-extent-of...
Let us just consider African Americans. around 70% of Black children born last year did not have a father. Are you saying these people loved the children and yet for some unknown reason would not be present to take care of the child or provide child support ?
As of today 1 in 3 children in USA are growing up in a household without a father. Are these fathers spending time with their kids ? You tell me.
A single mother doesn't imply that the children don't know or spend time with their father.
Perhaps even children with single mothers see more of their fathers, because when they stay with their fathers they get more attention from him? I don't know, but I guess you don't really know either.
Don't know if anyone coined the term toxic femininity, but it should obviously be a field of study, just as toxic masculinity is.
Female gender role is strongly associated with motherhood and personal appearance so toxic femininity could for example be exaggeration of those aspects. Two examples would be possessiveness of children and the abuse of plastic surgery.
The question is why people are using such gendered terms that so easily get perceived as derogatory if all we want is to a term to help discussions around exaggerated gender role behavior that causes negative effects. Personally I avoid using both and see those that do as pushing an agenda rather than addressing the core issue that we have gender roles and those have a negative impact on society.
I mean there are a lot of things someone displaying this type of behaviour, can do to hurt the relationship between the father and the child, even if she is the mother of the child.
If so, I don't understand why somebody would do this. Studies like this bring us wonderful news, there is no need to add negative connotation. Sure the tone of andrewclunn comment is debatable, but given he is a father, I think he is entitled to be upset about this because I am also. What do you think HN.
You may restrain a child for their safety but the use of force for “parental correction” is treated as assault and can be prosecuted. The police are encouraged to apply discretion.
It is still common in many places for a “whooping” to be used to keep kids in line.
Furthermore, huge swaths of the population have grown up with the occasional spanking and somehow managed to avoid PTSD or other emotional/mental problems.
Labeling it a "toxic masculine" practice is idiocy.
Can you cite that? If that's how today's psychology is defining things, then that's a sign that field is totally screwed.
>The study also showed a correlation between fathers who exhibit negative aspects of traditional masculinity and fathers who are less involved with their children.
>“It’s important to understand what masculinity is and is not,” Shafer said. “In some circles, when people hear terms like hegemonic or toxic masculinity, they think those are attacking all men. Not so. There are some very beneficial aspects of masculinity — being goal-oriented or being loyal, for example. However, we are talking about more problematic aspects of masculinity — like aggression, detached relationships, not showing emotion and failing to ask for help. These are negative aspects of traditional masculinity, and our research suggests it hurts families.”
Some of that I take issue with as well. Being able to seriously turn down your emotions or at least not show them is a really useful skill in situations where emotions run high. I would certainly have no problem if my own children (regardless of gender) were less emotional, I think it's probably better than being the same distance from "average" in the other direction.
Ask one of your friends who works in a female dominated workplace what it's like. They might prefer a bit more stoicism, less emotional displays, and more working together without complaint.
The rest of your post is non sequitur. Improving the unhealthy parts of male life does not mean making everyone stereotypically female.
Men do have emotional displays, like constantly. If you work in tech, I doubt you never seen someone lash out over petty difference in coding style, change of requirements, completely loose it on analyst etc. "The lack of social skills" is often euphemism for "can keep control over negative emotions".
The other interesting issue I see is that women are according to stereotypes both a.) more cooperative and easier to work with and b.) horrible to work with - depending precisely on which variant makes women inferior in the context.
Men normally are able to control their negative emotions, but you're right that women can be dichotomous, especially in tech. You can predict it if you know why and how they got into the industry.
Men in tech are somewhat more introverted then the rest. They are not more emotional nor feminine then actors, writers, sales or literally any profession. Speaking of groups, the men with least in control are those who end up in jail and similar troubles.
Please state the culture for context. This is absolutely not the case in the West.
> The other interesting issue I see is that women are according to stereotypes both a.) more cooperative and easier to work with and b.) horrible to work with - depending precisely on which variant makes women inferior in the context.
I challenge the very concept that women are more cooperative; they simply cooperate differently from men. When men are overtly challenging one another, they are usually cooperating in the sense that they are playing by the same hierarchical rules. Women cooperate through covertly challenging each other while overtly playing by rules that limit the amount of displayed aggression and promote hospitable behavior. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the fact that men tend to be more aggressive to each other is not to say that they aren't very cooperative with one another; if that weren't the case, men on average would be far more underhanded and circumvent rules on a regular basis.
A lot of suicide is when men retire, get long term unemployed or divorces (divorces are harder on men statistically these days). In two of those you cease to have "shared struggle", but not because women presence caused it. More like, people you knew disappeared. You are not useful to them anymore.
Workers don't share struggle, because most work is about struggle against colllegues, competition and people change jobs often anyway. Combined with working more then 60 hours a week, female presence is hardly the primary reason for lack of long term friendship that sticks as you get unemployed or sick. (I don't think the job should supply socialization, but it does for people working a lot.)
And men like you just described openly challenge those under them in hierarchy, but rarely those higher then them. So, I have reservations about that openness you talk about. It is less about openness and more about never saying you disagree with higher ups in hierarchy and lashing out when perceived lowers disagree or criticize you - because that is interpreted as challenge.
And that kind of behaviour is neither toxic, nor particularly masculine.
It's the inability to show emotions even when appropriate or helpful that is the toxic bit.
http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12476
And yes, with lines like "... Given that hegemonic masculinity persists as the dominant gender norm in the United States, the results from this study suggest that further increasing father involvement may require changing the current gendered structure of society ..." it could just as well have been a point of action for some feminist organisation as a research article. This in return will cause the article to be dismissed out of hand by those on 'the other side' - often describing themselves as being 'red-pilled' after Cassie Jaye's documentary 'The Red Pill' on the subject of modern feminism versus the men's rights movement [1].
In my own opinion this article does not pass the muster as it tries to fit the concept of fatherhood in an ideological framework which only fits those who are already on board. While the actual term 'toxic masculinity' is not used it is clear that the concept is seen as valid and as a driving factor behind the supposed failure to be 'good fathers'. In short, it tries to portray a causality between the acceptance of 'modern gender ideology' (in contrast to 'traditional gender ideology') and good fathering. This is a political standpoint, not a scientific conclusion and as such this article and the conclusions drawn in it lose their relevance.
You may be right on the whole, but this out of BYU—one of the most conservative and family-oriented universities in the US.
I believe we're at the point where HN may need to reconsider the visibility of the voting system here, again unfortunately.
It seems that something we have done or changed has resulted in an incredibly negative change in developmental outcomes. Yet there simultaneously seems to be no little to no effort to see what we were doing so well before, or what we're doing so poorly now in. Instead studies such this one instead seek to constantly demonize past practice and evangelize for new change for reasons that seem to be almost exclusively driven by ideological bias.
Or shall we simply remain in denial?
In the social sciences this point has been lost since the inability to perform meaningful tests means all we're left with are ideas. Yet we can see quantifiable changes in society in the longrun over time and many of the views evangelized within the paper have certainly become more common place - with the authors going so far as to label them "the new ideals". Yet the results we can measure have been absolutely atrocious. But there seems to be little to no interest in consider why this may be. Instead it's onward to ever more new ideas supported by little more than intuition and studies that increasingly often cannot even be replicated built upon other studies that can't be replicated. And even this study builds upon that house of cards stating that previous studies trying to link what they linked were unsuccessful, yet with their 'new and improved' method of qualifying masculinity, they were able to finally show a link.
There's been really quite a lot of research into these kinds of thing. There is no doubt that in many respects the environment that kids are being bought up in today is more stressful, distracting, uncertain, unstable etc.
I don't think you have to look at changes in parenting style to account or them.
And you're again doing what I think is actually quite dangerous, yet also standard practice in the social sciences. While I think your presumption is wrong, you're assuming that not only is it true but if it were true than it would naturally have a causal explanation for another factor. Yet I think there is an extremely strong argument that your presumption would actually have a causal effect in the exact opposite method of which you imply.
Humanity excels when dealing with crisis. Nearly all of our evolutionary existence has been living in times of great adversity. I think the fact we live in such relative comfort and safety now a days is something may be interacting negatively with our evolutionary wiring (such a hypothesis would even explain things such as 'outrage culture' and internet activism - in lieu of problems, create them!) As I mentioned IQs are decreasing (and literally decreasing - not 'increasing more slowly' towards an asymptotic zero), but this is something that's only happening in the developed world. In the developing world, where lives are still much harder and threats more imminent - IQs continue to increase, academic performance is increasing, and so on. Vietnam for instance, today is ranked 8th in the world in science - as they teach with a per student budget a tiny fraction of ours, even parity adjusted. There are clearly many factors to progress that we seem to just have 0 interest in considering.
Bullying was restricted to the playground and the few kids that you kept away from. If you were lucky, your folks probably had a job that they would stay in until they retired, and there was far less homework and exam pressure than these days.
The fact is that no-one really understands why the Flynn effect is apparently reversing. It's likely that the extraordinary increases in from the 1948s until 2008 were prompted by improvements in nutrition, education... or possibly that people got better at the skills needed to do well in the test.
The hypothesis that improvements were down to hardship and adversity is certainly a novel one. Novel and speculative. Novel, speculative and unsupported. Still, if it makes you happy, make sure you scare your kids every night.
On support. I'd say my hypothesis is just about as supported as the average view in social sciences. I could certainly formulate an experiment of passable merit to confirm my biases. Of course that by no means means the hypothesis is right, but rather that the notion of scientific support in social views is something I think we should take as a default to be practically meaningless. There are so many ways to quantify and qualify various aspects of society that near any hypothesis can be proven if you play with the data enough. This paper is evidence of such:
"To date, however, research on the relationship between adherence to masculine norms and fathering has yielded mixed results, which may be due in part to the fact that many studies use measures of masculinity that do not fully capture hegemonic masculine norms. ...we address this question and extend the literature in three key ways. First, we use a multidimensional and more comprehensive indicator of masculinity than used in prior studies... we consider whether masculine norm adherence influences fathering in different way...."
Or to put another way, 'previous research has not yielded the results we wanted to see, so we spun the data in a way such that we could get it.' It's really quite absurd.
[0] http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/CA_Youth_Crime_20...
[1] https://www.scpr.org/blogs/news/2012/10/31/10793/explaining-...
[2] https://johnjayrec.nyc/2013/10/03/databit201304/
[3] https://jjie.org/2015/02/26/ncjj-report-shows-juvenile-crime...
edit: To add to that, of course crime is down - kids are driving later, going out less, having less sex. There are less opportunities for crime, unless you count underage sexting. So if you view more time spent in front of a screen preferable to a decrease in misdemeanor loitering, you'd have a point.