Welcome to the Summer of the Dad!

Ben Affleck with his daughters Violet and Seraphina. Photo: Getty Images

The dad rumblings began in the spring, when Clemson student Mackenzie Pearson gifted the world with the term “dad bod,” “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” she writes. “The dad bod says, ‘I go to the gym occasionally, but I also drink heavily on the weekends and enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time.’ It’s not an overweight guy, but it isn’t one with washboard abs, either.” Countless think pieces followed (Is dad bod sexist? Is it funny? Do women really like it?) and one LA-based talent manager, CJ Cardenas, applied for the trademark for a dad bod beer, calling it “a lifestyle.”

The dad bod pairs well with puffy sneakers, ball caps, and roomy jeans favored by Normcore-loving urban kids, countless suburban fathers, and President Obama himself. “Obama is alpha cool dad right now,” says the writer Noah Johnson, who wrote a story called “There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Cool Dad” for Four Pins. “Kanye is just below him. I think Steph Curry and his daughter are an important cool dad moment of the summer.”

Dockers, which is practically the official pant of the dad bod, is embracing their dad connection by casting Taye Diggs in a video called DadJam, in which he celebrates “college savings plans” while rapping about “rolling with the stroller giving cheeks a squeeze.” At the end, he entreats all of us to “get down with your dad self.”

In place of last summer’s craze for Hot Guys Reading on Instagram, women are buzzing about DILFS of Disney. And Noah Baumbach’s most recent movie, While We’re Young, is sort of an ode to being a cool dad, casting real-life new dad Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys as a hip yet responsible Brooklyn father.

An image from the DILFS of Disneyland Instagram account. Photo: @dilfs_of_disneyland/Instagram

The mother and child have been fetishized probably since the beginning of time, but being a dad is finally fashionable. “We’ve finally gotten past the mentality that raising kids is exclusively women’s work,” says Jerry Mahoney, who is the author of the Mommy Man blog. “Not only are dads more expected to pitch in, more dads want to pitch in. They realize how important and rewarding it is to take part in their kids’ lives.”

And the numbers—and common sense—back it up. In a study from earlier this year published in the Academy of Management Perspectives, working dads who spend more time with their children are more likely to be happier in their jobs and have less conflicts at home. Of course, they have a way to go to reach parity. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2011 dads did an average of 7.3 hours per week of childcare, almost half of moms’ 13.5 per week.

Gay celeb dads like Neil Patrick Harris, Matt Bomer, and Ricky Martin—and their insanely cute kids, dressing up for Halloween or frolicking on exotic beaches—may be fueling the cool dad persona, too, says Mahoney. “When gay men are raising kids, there’s no woman to give the credit to. The media has to acknowledge that these kids are being raised by men. And that’s opened the door for straight dads to get their due, too.”

Brent Almond, who blogs at Designer Daddy, and recently wrote a post comparing the dad bod phenomenon to gay bears, says that, “I’m still myself, but I’m the dad version of myself. I channel my creativity into doing things with and teaching my son. I’m getting to relive all of the music and movies and superheroes I loved as a kid by passing it on to my son. It’s one of the best parts of being a dad.” He draws the line at dad jeans, though: “never.”

A few years ago, Neal Pollack wrote a book called Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America and has been thinking about the dad moment. “I’ve been looking at this Tumblr of dad pictures from the seventies, and I realized there have always been dads who skateboarded or listened to music with their kids,” he says. “Not every dad is cool, thank heaven, but cool dads have always been around. And now that I have a 12 year old, I realize that what I thought was cool might not have been cool after all. Or maybe I’m the one who’s cool and he’s the dork.”

Perhaps the most important thing to remember in this year’s Summer of Dad is that being a dad isn’t a prerequisite—at least not for the bod, or the style. “Leonardo DiCaprio, the emblem of dad bod, isn’t even a dad,” Pollack points out. Nor is Jason Segel, or any of the Clemson frat boys Pearson was referencing when she coined the term.

Maybe it’s just a state of mind. “None of this has anything to do with actually being a dad, i.e. raising children. Cool dad is a more aspirational lifestyle. It’s a whole attitude that’s sort of sophisticated and leisurely and unaffected,” says Johnson. “It’s just the guy who is always cool, no matter what he does or wears. It comes easy.”