Earlier in this year’s World Cup, Belgian winger Jeremy Doku decided to be with his wife, Shireen, during the birth of their son instead of playing in the first few matches. French broadcaster France Pierron labeled the moment “disgusting,” adding that the father is “completely useless” during that process.
Facing much backlash, Pierron apologized and retracted her comments.
After his son, Praise, was born, Doku rejoined the squad within 48 hours, missing only one match.
Jeremy Doku with child
Yet the debate continued — ironically, over Father’s Day weekend — centered on the question: What is the role of fathers in parenthood?
Perhaps, the better question would be: What have we, as a society, allowed that role to shrink down to?
Whether we like it or not, mothers are disproportionately tasked with parenthood responsibilities because of their biology. However, beyond their role in birthing and breastfeeding children, mothers also take on 76% of unpaid care work around the world — worth more than $1 trillion annually.
So not only are mothers taking on more parenting responsibilities because they are biologically required to, they also are assuming the bulk of the care work burden that could be shared by fathers.
The role of fathers, as parents in their own right, is crucially important for childhood development. According to a meta-analysis, father involvement is significantly linked to early childhood socio-emotional development, including emotion regulation and relationship building, independent of maternal involvement. The American Academy of Pediatrics also shared a fatherhood-focused clinical report that highlights that fathers “do not parent like mothers, nor are they a replacement for mothers, … they provide a unique, dynamic, and important contribution to their families and children.”
Despite the critical significance of fathers, our society seems to have built an entire economy of fatherhood around a transactional relationship: Money in, obligation discharged. We have reduced fathers down to the hustle and provisions. As long as the account is funded, the man has done his job.
Somewhere along the way, “I provide” became a complete sentence — A father’s whole résumé, closed for further questions.
Be present for their birth? Optional.
Diaper changes, school pick-up, homework help? Someone else’s department.
Learn your child’s fears, friendships and visions for the future? Not my responsibility.
Sahar Jamal
Wainright Acquoi
But a bank transfer never once has taught a child how to sit with fear or shown a child courage or what it looks like when a man apologizes and means it. That work — the slow, unglamorous work of shaping how a child understands themselves and the world — doesn’t happen through a wire transfer.
It happens in the room, and too many fathers have made themselves permanent absentees from those rooms, while telling themselves they’ve paid in full.
Here is the tradeoff: A man spends 30 years proving he can be the provider and wakes up to find he’s a stranger to the people he has provided for.
He mistook the invoice for the relationship. And when the money isn’t the hardest thing anymore — when the real ask is presence, patience, the willingness to be known — some fathers discover they are not equipped to offer this.
“Childbearing may belong to women, but child-raising does not.”
None of this is really about football, or career, or money. It’s about a script, one women have sometimes helped write and men have been all too relieved to perform; where mothers nurture and fathers fund. As though these roles were biologically assigned rather than culturally chosen. They aren’t. Childbearing may belong to women, but child-raising does not.
To be sure, these ingrained societal roles are increasingly, and rightfully, blurring. The very fact that prominent figures like footballer Jeremy Doku publicly chose to be in the labor ward instead of his World Cup match sets a great example for young men.
In our own work as entrepreneurs supporting communities across Africa, we have seen this in practice. In Kenya, Maziwa’s “father-to-father support groups” create safe spaces for dads to champion and support the breastfeeding journey. Within our high school entrepreneurial education programs in Liberia, we’ve watched fathers show up — to sessions, to conversations about their children’s future — because they wanted a hand in shaping their child’s future.
These fathers were described not only as providers by their children and partners, but as people they could lean on — for encouragement, for perspective, for the confidence to keep going. Provision never was in question; presence made a world of difference.
However, these examples are the exceptions. A global survey found Gen Z men hold more traditional views on gender roles than older generations. And the shift isn’t confined to men: the rise of the “trad wife” movement shows how deeply some women have absorbed the same script.
The point isn’t that choosing to prioritize home and family is wrong. It’s that when submission, not partnership, becomes the ideal being celebrated, we are seeing the same script play out that tells fathers their only job is the paycheck.
When a woman like Pierron labels fathers as “useless” and calls the act of giving birth “disgusting,” it is evidence that toxic masculinity has permeated the mindsets of both men and women — mindsets that ultimately hurt both men and women.
Doku’s critics weren’t defending football. They were defending a script in which a father’s absence from arguably the most important room of his life barely registers as a sacrifice because generations of brainwashing have trained us not to expect him there. We have reduced fathers to the hustle and provision so completely that we barely notice when they’re absent from the moments that matter most.
What would it take to notice?
How might we celebrate the men who do choose to be in the room?
And how can men and women both change the narrative of masculinity so that fatherhood is about connection not transaction?
Wainright Acquoi is the Founder of TRIBE, re-engineering Liberia’s education system. He advises on systems, design and innovation and is a Public Voices Fellow with Acumen and the OpEd Project.
Sahar Jamal is founder and CEO of Maziwa Breastfeeding, an ICF-certified coac, and a TEDxNairobi speaker. She also is a Public Voices Fellow with Acumen and The OpEd Project.