Can a baby save a man? Why paternity leave could be the answer to the manosphere crisis

Somewhere between autoplay and insomnia, a promise emerges. You are not broken, the internet says. You are betrayed. The world is rigged against you, and someone is finally telling the truth.

At three in the morning, a baby is much worse at marketing itself.

There are no slogans, no villains, no grand theory of decline. There is only a red, furious face, a body that won’t stop squirming, and a set of needs that cannot be postponed.

And the reward comes slowly: the quieting of a cry, the weight of a sleeping child on your chest, the dawning realisation that you can do this.

For a growing number of men, those two experiences are colliding.

One offers a script. The manosphere, as it’s become known, isn’t a singular thing but a loose ecosystem of online communities and influencers organised around anti-feminist grievance, whose growth since the mid-2010s has been tracked by researchers, regulators and civil society groups.

The other offers no script at all. Paid paternity leave, still treated as marginal or optional in much of the world, does not explain men’s problems or assign blame. It simply reshapes how men spend their time, how they see themselves, and what society expects of them.

The real reason men get pulled into the manosphere

What draws men into manosphere spaces is not always hatred, at least not at first.

Research by Ofcom published in 2023, based on in-depth interviews with men who engage with this content, found that many were initially attracted by humour, openness, or the sense that conversations about masculinity were otherwise missing from public life.

Several men described personal experiences, including divorce, custody disputes, and workplace grievances, that left them feeling dismissed or unfairly treated.

Strip away the provocation and the misogyny, and the underlying message is often this: men are disposable.

The manosphere teaches men that their value lies in dominance, earnings, or who they can attract

What the manosphere is teaching those men is that their value lies in what they earn, how they dominate, or who they can attract. If you fall short, it’s not your fault — but you should be angry about it.

That story flourishes in environments where men’s identities are narrow and brittle. Where being a “provider” remains the primary measure of worth, but stable jobs are harder to find. Where emotional competence is expected in private but mocked in public. Where care work remains invisible, feminised and undervalued.

Gender scholars such as Debbie Ging, professor of digital media and gender at Dublin City University, have described the manosphere not just as a site of anti-feminist backlash but as part of a broader crisis of male meaning and identity.

In her work, Ging has traced how these online spaces frame masculinity around status, grievance and perceived loss, shaped by wider social and economic change.

The manosphere mobilises narratives of personal suffering to build affective consensus about an allegedly collective, gendered experience of men’s position in the social hierarchy

The manosphere sells anger. Fatherhood builds meaning.

If the manosphere offers men a story about what has been taken from them, paternity leave may offer something less dramatic but more tangible: a chance to be needed.

“When I took leave, it was the first time I felt irreplaceable in a non-work way,” says Dan, a 34-year-old first-time dad in the north of England, who earlier this year took three months off after the birth of his daughter, Elsie.

At work, someone can always step in. At home, there was no substitute. That changes you.

Dan’s experience is echoed in a growing body of international research.

How paternity leave reshapes men’s sense of self

Analysis from the global policy forum, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), drawing on data from over 100 countries, has found that fathers who take paternity or parental leave, particularly two weeks or more, are significantly more involved in childcare when children are young, and that this involvement often persists years later.

Later OECD reviews have reinforced the pattern while noting that the evidence is largely correlational rather than strictly causal.

More granular insight has come from countries that introduced father-specific leave quotas. In Norway, researchers were able to compare fathers before and after the introduction of the so-called “father’s quota”.

Those who took leave increased their long-term involvement in childcare and domestic labour, with spillover effects on household gender norms, including a more equal division of unpaid work post-leave. Similar results were found in evaluations of Quebec’s paternity leave reform in Canada.

What’s happening here isn’t just a redistribution of chores. It’s an identity shift.

Care isn’t instinctive. It’s learned.

Parenting, at its core, is not instinctive. It’s a skill acquired through repetition, through doing.

Developmental psychologists and sociologists have long emphasised that care is learned through time spent failing, adjusting and trying again.

This idea, that care is learned rather than instinctive, runs quietly through decades of research on family life.

Studies of fatherhood consistently find that people become competent carers through exposure and repetition, not innate aptitude. Men, who have historically been shielded from that process, often experience early caregiving less as incapacity than as unfamiliarity.

The more men do it, the more competent they feel. The more competent they feel, the more they internalise a version of masculinity that isn’t built solely on dominance or earnings. That, in turn, alters how susceptible they are to narratives that frame men as victims of societal shifts, particularly that of women’s advancement.

None of this means that becoming a father magically cures misogyny, or that paternity leave is a silver bullet for radicalisation. But it does point to something often missing from discussions about the manosphere: the role of structure.

Grievance politics thrive in a vacuum. Care fills it.

Decades of research on political extremism show that it flourishes in the space between what people are told they should be and what they are actually able to do. For many men, that gap has widened.

Economic precarity, delayed adulthood, declining social institutions and shrinking avenues for esteem have left a void.

As sociologist Michael Kimmel, who has spent decades studying far-right movements, puts it: “If you feel entitled to something and you don’t get it, that’s a recipe for humiliation — and humiliation is the emotional fuel of extremism.”

UK scholars of populism, Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, similarly argue that support for extremist movements is driven less by economic decline than by a broader sense of marginalisation tied to status and social roles.

These movements are fuelled less by absolute poverty than by relative deprivation — a sense of lost status, respect and belonging

The manosphere, fuelled by the attention-extracting, always-on nature of social media, fills that void with certainty and blame. But paternity leave? That fills it with obligation and responsibility. Belonging.

Those obligations and responsibilities are not glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are profoundly grounding. Caring for a newborn collapses abstraction. It demands patience, humility and sustained attention, qualities that grievance politics actively discourages. It also makes dependence mutual. You are needed, but you also need help.

This matters because one of the core appeals of the manosphere is the fantasy of autonomy: the idea that a man should owe nothing, rely on no one, and dominate rather than negotiate. Parenting, by contrast, is a crash course in interdependence.

Not all paternity leave is created equal

The global policy landscape around parental leave, however, tells a disjointed, uneven story.

In the United States, there is still no federal entitlement to paid paternity leave at all.

In the UK, statutory paternity leave lasts just two weeks and is paid at £187.18 per week or 90% of your average weekly earnings (whichever is lower), making it financially unrealistic for many families.

Although shared parental leave exists on paper, government evaluations suggest that only around 2% of eligible fathers have used it since its introduction, citing low pay, lack of awareness and workplace culture as major barriers. And who can blame them?

In practice, many fathers patch together a few days of annual leave and return to work quickly, reinforcing the idea that care is something men assist with rather than inhabit.

If leave for fathers is poorly paid or treated as optional, most families simply cannot afford for men to take it and inequality is reproduced by design.

At the other end of the spectrum are countries that have treated fathers’ time at home as a cornerstone of social infrastructure rather than an optional perk. Nordic countries offer months of well-paid leave reserved for fathers. Uptake is high, and fathers’ caregiving has become a visible feature of everyday life.

But the provision of well-paid leave doesn’t always translate so cleanly to uptake.

Japan and South Korea complicate the picture. Both countries now offer some of the most generous parental leave entitlements on paper, yet uptake among fathers has historically been low.

Studies and government surveys consistently point to long working hours, fear of career penalties and entrenched social norms around breadwinning as deterrents. Men who do take leave have report being sidelined or treated as unserious at work as a result.

In South Korea, this contradiction between state encouragement of caregiving and institutional punishment for practising it has unfolded alongside an intense online backlash against feminism, particularly among young men, illustrating a deeper point: when men are told they should change without being given viable, socially-supported ways to do so, grievance narratives gain traction.

Where leave is well-paid, non-transferable and culturally normalised, ultimately designed to be used, the story looks different. Fathers taking leave are visible in public life, not as exceptions but as part of the everyday social landscape.

When fatherhood is visible, it changes the culture

In Sweden, they even have a name for it: latte pappor — fathers on parental leave who meet other dad-friends at playgrounds and cafés, babies asleep in prams, coffee cups in hand.

This visibility is not incidental; it is the product of policy. Swedish parents are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave per child, 90 days of which cannot be transferred to mothers. The result is that men caring for infants on weekday mornings are not seen as heroic or suspect. They are simply doing what men do.

The cultural effects are cumulative. When men are routinely present in spaces once coded as maternal, like playgroups, baby classes, and playgrounds, care stops looking like a deviation from masculinity and starts to look like one of its ordinary expressions. Over time, that ordinariness matters.

Men pushing prams on weekday mornings are not making a statement; they are participating in public spaces, in shared routines, and in forms of care that are visible to others.

That participation has the potential to expand men’s social worlds rather than narrowing them, quietly eroding the idea that care is feminine, or that masculinity must be defended against it.

This matters because, as Debbie Ging’s research on the manosphere suggests, what distinguishes men who briefly encounter such content from those who become deeply embedded is isolation: “These echo chambers function to exclude, intimidate and punish, reinforcing grievance in closed, homosocial spaces.”

This isn’t a silver bullet—but it is a start

While paternity leave may not be the sole solution to the manosphere’s grip on modern men, it does something rare in modern social policy: it changes men’s daily lives in ways ideology struggles to compete with.

It places men in situations where competence is earned through care rather than asserted through dominance. It makes dependence mutual. It offers a source of meaning that is concrete and socially sanctioned, not contingent on winning, outperforming or blaming someone else.

The manosphere promises meaning without responsibility. Paternity leave offers responsibility that, over time, creates meaning.

One of these scales easily online. The other works slowly, unevenly and far from the algorithm, in kitchens, living rooms and nurseries, in the small hours of the morning, where masculinity is not argued over but quietly relearned.

“When you’re up at three in the morning with a baby, it’s hard to keep feeling like the world is out to get you,” Dan says. “You’re too busy, and someone actually needs you.”