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“I know that you’re all probably thinking, ‘Why the heck is Moms First throwing a fatherhood summit?’” Reshma Saujani, the chief executive and founder of that organization, said to a crowd of fathers, and yes, some mothers, seated in an auditorium.

It was a nod to a question that arose on social media when the advocacy group started promoting the event, an afternoon of talks and workshops under the banner “The Future of Fatherhood.” “People in our community were like ‘Really? We’ve got to do this too? We’ve got to fix it for men?’” Ms. Saujani said later in an interview. “And I get it, we’re exhausted.”

But considering the vastness of the issues that she and her organization care about — child care and paid leave, for instance — Ms. Saujani believes they can’t be fixed without “fathers at the table.”

It was around lunchtime on a balmy Thursday in early June, and this group of men had gathered at the proverbial table — in this case a conference center in Midtown — to discuss all things fatherhood. There were first-time dads, dad influencers, podcaster dads, dads who run dad communities and famous dads, like Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Gary Vaynerchuk, the entrepreneur better known as Gary Vee...

“If this event would have happened 15 to 20 years ago, it would have been like, how can dads support moms?” Matt Schneider, founder of the nonprofit City Dads Group, a panelist and a stay-at-home dad of two teenagers, said in an interview. “It used to be dads were ready to follow a to-do list.”

At least at this conference, in this corner of New York City, the dads onstage and off offered a glimpse of a particular zeitgeist shift, one in which dads not only challenge the idea of moms as default parents but are so earnest about fatherhood that they were eager to buy tickets and spend four discourse-heavy hours discussing its many different facets. When asked by a panelist who in the room had taken paid parental leave, many of the (mostly heterosexual, partnered) men raised their hands. (Though the event was held in the Times Center, it was not affiliated with The New York Times.)

Anecdotally, the stereotype of “dads as buffoons” isn’t really rooted in reality anymore, Mr. Schneider said.Some of that bears out in the data, too. Research suggests that more dads are using their paid leave after the birth of their first child compared with three decades ago. About one in five dads are now stay-at-home parents, and though an overwhelming share of the unpaid, unglamorous labor of housework and child care is still done by mothers, many fathers are doing more than their fathers had done.

As these men begin to play a more active domestic role, they are also trying to redefine fatherhood. They’re gathering in group texts and hosting I.R.L. meet-ups, like the Brooklyn Stroll Club, a walking club for young dads. They’re versed in the wonky universe of parenting advice, throwing around phrases like “cycle breaking” and “mental load” with ease, and they are wrestling with how this new social identity squares with cultural concepts of masculinity.

The afternoon’s speakers touched on lightning rod issues in the national discourse, including boys’ declining mental health, the rise of “toxic masculinity” and pronatalism and, as Mr. Buttigieg put it, the politicization of parenting. They discussed how to model emotional vulnerability, nurture empathy, compassion and emotional resilience in young boys — a set of concerns that largely belongs to those who lean left, as many of the event’s attendees did.

Representative Jimmy Gomez, Democrat of California, who two years ago stole the spotlight when he cast a vote on the House floor with his fussing 4-month-old son strapped to his chest, was among them. Even in the halls of Congress, he told the crowd, he has noticed a culture shift: When he started the Congressional Dads Caucus in 2023, it had six members, he said. Today it has 46."


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