Narrator: This is Science Today. Recent sociology studies have found that men who get involved early on in their baby's lives are more likely to stay involved as the kids reach school age. Sociology professor Scott Coltrane of the University of California, Riverside says it used to be that men did very little with infants and toddlers and began to do more as the kids could talk and play sports. Now, it seems men are involved more in different ways.

Coltrane: We have patterns of fatherhood that reflect more than being a coach and a disciplinarian. We have men around on a daily basis who are doing the monitoring, doing the caregiving in ways that we didn't used to.

Narrator: Some studies found a rising trend of fathers pitching in with the housework.

Coltrane: Those studies find that if women get help from their husbands, they're less depressed, they have better mental health, they're happier. The stress is reduced by having a helper. We tend to think of housework as trivial, child care less so, but the amount of work that people do in terms of maintaining homes and kids exceeds the number of hours we put in at work. So this is not trivial labor - this is what it takes to reproduce society.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.