Blog: When It Comes to Parenting, Fathers Can Do Just as Well as Mothers

When economics professor Li Jingkui started regularly taking his daughter to her after-school classes, he noticed that he was mostly surrounded by mothers. That got him thinking about the men and women’s child-rearing roles throughout history, along with of his own experience growing up in an farming town in northern China. He came to the conclusion that the traditional division of labor between men and women is defined by productivity and the status of the sexes, both which are changing rapidly nowadays.

A family walks down Qianmen Street in Beijing on Feb. 11. Photo: Noel Celis/AFP