Passenger Parenting: When Dad Is Just Along for the Ride
Monday, June 23, 2025.
Franz Kafka never had children.
But if he had, he might have written something eerily familiar to modern mothers scrolling TikTok:
a scene in which the father is present but not quite involved, lovingly useless, narratively adjacent.
In today’s digital parenting memes, he’d be the guy holding the diaper bag like a defeated sherpa while the mother sprints behind a tantruming toddler.
This phenomenon has a name now: passenger parenting.
It’s not exactly negligence. It’s not even intentional.
It’s more like a kind of soft resignation—a sleepwalking through fatherhood.
And while it’s getting laughs online, it’s costing families something real and measurable.
The Viral Joke That Isn't Funny
In recent months, social media has been flooded with videos of dads labeled "passenger parents": fathers fumbling through diaper changes, sitting clueless on the sidelines of school pickups, or trailing behind their families like interns on their first day.
The meme is half-hilarious and half-sad, because behind the trope is a truth that makes the joke sting.
According to Carly Dober, a psychologist and director at the Australian Association of Psychologists, this isn’t deliberate male incompetence—it’s a crisis of confidence and clarity. “Men are often unsure of what their role is,” she notes, “and instead of asking or leaning in, they opt out” (Nolan, 2024). And that opt-out leaves a gaping hole in the emotional infrastructure of the family.
The Science of Disengagement
This isn’t just a vibe—it’s a trend backed by research.
Studies have long shown that when fathers are disengaged from early caregiving, the effects ripple across marital satisfaction, child development, and the father's own mental health (Cabrera, Shannon, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007).
In their landmark study, Cabrera et al. (2007) found that father involvement—particularly in the first five years—correlated with higher cognitive outcomes in children and greater maternal satisfaction.
More recently, Norman et al. (2023) tracked patterns of father-child involvement and found that consistent engagement predicted lower levels of maternal stress, fewer child behavior issues, and better co-parenting outcomes.
Disengagement, meanwhile, becomes self-reinforcing.
As mothers take on more of the emotional and physical labor, they become gatekeepers—sometimes unwillingly—further distancing fathers from the rhythms of daily caregiving (Allen & Hawkins, 1999).
The Emotional Economics of the Family System
Every family is an ecosystem.
In therapy, we often talk about how relationships distribute emotional labor, and how that labor—unlike physical labor—is often invisible. Who notices when the toothpaste is low?
Who schedules the pediatrician visit? Who remembers which child still fears the dark? These small acts are the scaffolding of emotional safety, and in most heterosexual partnerships, they disproportionately fall to mothers (Daminger, 2019).
When fathers become passengers, they’re not just skipping diaper duty.
They’re opting out of this deeper layer of cognitive and emotional engagement—the anticipatory care work that keeps family systems functional and connected.
The cost? Resentment.
Not just from mothers but from children who intuit which parent holds the center of gravity in the family.
The long-term result can be detachment, performative parenting, and intergenerational repetition of the same disengaged male caregiving scripts.
Why It Happens (And Why It's Not Always a Choice)
It’s easy to villainize the passenger parent, but a fairer read is that he’s often a man adrift.
In a 2021 meta-analysis, Shafer et al. found that cultural norms and poor policy support (like limited paternity leave or rigid gender expectations) significantly limited paternal engagement across multiple Western countries. Even when men want to be active parents, systems conspire to keep them from doing so.
We also have to reckon with how gendered conditioning in various human cultures impedes emotional fluency.
In a study on emotional expressiveness in male caregivers, Pleck (2010) noted that fathers who were raised with rigid gender norms were less likely to verbalize affection, set relational boundaries, or even interpret their own emotional exhaustion.
So when we see a passenger dad, we might not be witnessing laziness. We may be seeing a system that taught him that his role was to show up—but never how to engage meaningfully when he got there.
How to Kick Dad Out of the Passenger Seat
In marriage and family therapy, we often approach this dynamic not as a flaw to fix but as a structure to rewire.
If you assume dads want to disengage, you miss the point. Most of them feel like substitute teachers in their own homes—underprepared, underinvolved, and unsure if they’re even allowed to lead.
The work, then, is mutual.
Mothers must risk relinquishing control (especially when they’ve long been gatekeepers by necessity), and fathers must be willing to relearn caregiving as a dynamic, responsive, and imperfect practice.
Here are a few research-backed starting points:
Co-Create Rituals of Engagement
Whether it’s bath time, reading, or Saturday pancake duty, fathers who take sole ownership of recurring caregiving tasks report greater parental confidence and relational closeness (Cabrera et al., 2007).Build Emotional Literacy
Encourage fathers to narrate their feelings, even clumsily. This models vulnerability to children and strengthens relational safety (Pleck, 2010).Normalize Male Caregiving in Therapy
Address the internalized shame many men feel about being unsure. Therapeutic spaces should invite, not pathologize, these hesitations.Challenge the Cultural Scripts
Don't laugh off the memes—interrogate them. What expectations are they reinforcing? Who do they let off the hook?
The Laugh That Hurts
Passenger parenting gets clicks because it feels true for many families.
But it’s a truth we should be trying to dismantle, not meme into permanence.
In the end, children don’t need perfect fathers. They need fathers who are present, invested, and emotionally visible.
The passenger seat may be safe, but no family thrives when love takes a back seat.
Drop me a line, and I’ll send you a downloadable PDF: "Passenger Parenting: When Dad Is Just Along for the Ride"
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Allen, S. M., & Hawkins, A. J. (1999). Maternal gatekeeping: Mothers’ beliefs and behaviors that inhibit greater father involvement in family work. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61(1), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.2307/353894
Cabrera, N. J., Shannon, J. D., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. (2007). Fathers’ influence on their children’s cognitive and emotional development: From toddlers to pre-k. Applied Development Science, 11(4), 208–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888690701762100
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007
Norman, H., Elliot, M., & Fagan, C. (2023). Fathers’ involvement and its association with maternal well-being and child behavioral outcomes: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 37(2), 174–188. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0001079
Pleck, J. H. (2010). Paternal involvement: Revised conceptualization and theoretical linkages with child outcomes. In M. E. Lamb (Ed.), The role of the father in child development (5th ed., pp. 58–93). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Shafer, E. F., Vincent, C., & Wilson, S. (2021). Cultural barriers to father involvement: A meta-analysis across high-income countries. Fathering, 19(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.3149/fth.1901.1
Nolan, H. (2024, March 18). ‘Passenger parenting’ isn’t a joke – even if TikTok thinks it is. The Daily Telegraph. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/passenger-parenting-isnt-a-joke-even-if-tiktok-thinks-it-is/news-story/44751ccfa3499d81aa491930e5bc385b