The Future Is Fathers

An American living in Sweden observes the country’s hands-on, happy dads and wonders: what if the cure to the male loneliness epidemic and burnout isn’t more self-improvement, supplements, or a higher salary…but more fathering?

When Liz Kofman-Burns moved to Sweden, she realized something startling: Fatherhood looked completely different for Swedish men than it did for her male friends back in America. For one thing, Swedish fathers were more present: From playgrounds to playdates, Swedish dads were everywhere—actively caregiving and engaged from the earliest days of their children’s lives. Swedish dads prioritized their role as parents: They treated school pickup as a meeting they couldn’t miss. But most of all: Swedish dads seemed so much happier, even though they were arguably busier with home and work. The male loneliness epidemic and masculinity crisis she read so much about in American men just…didn’t seem to exist in Sweden. 

She started to wonder: Had Swedish men cracked the dad code? What if the cure to American male suffering isn’t just more self-improvement, supplements, or a higher salary…but is in fact more fathering? 

Persuasive and groundbreaking, The Future is Fathers is both a serious work of reported narrative nonfiction and a stealth parenting book. Kofman-Burns, a sociologist and mother of two married to a Swedish man, offers a data-driven and deeply personal argument that the most overlooked force in modern society—engaged fatherhood—holds the key to solving some of our most pressing problems: the health and longevity gap, the pay gap, and the loneliness epidemic.

Drawing from the lives of Swedish and American fathers across the socioeconomic and political spectrum—construction workers and CEOs, immigrants and native-born conservatives—along with research on health, happiness, work, and relationships, The Future is Fathers is an accessible, actionable antidote to the unsustainability of modern American parenthood. It’s for the man wondering why he feels like he’s letting his family down (despite doing so much more than his own dad) and the woman exhausted from carrying the mental load. Flipping the script on the age-old “have it all” debate, The Future Is Fathers isn’t a lecture about what men should do to help women—it’s a reported story about what happens when a country decides men’s caregiving matters: for men’s mental and physical health, and their longevity. It’s a hopeful blueprint for the future.