Debunking the Myth of the Sex-Starved Father
But that’s just a (very reassuring) narrative. What about the data? Most of the data on the topic is tangential to the inquiry at hand. For instance, scientists tell a curious, horny expecting dad that have a child will lower his testosterone while breastfeeding will lead to his wife experiencing vaginal dryness. And if there’s sleep deprivation, that’s a libido killer. It’s a perfect storm (or drought, rather). Yet, even as research suggests the odds are stacked against parents, actual data may indicate that parents are still pulling out aces.
Ryne Sherman of Florida Atlantic University has some of the first robust evidence—beyond anecdotal reports from Dr. Laura—that the parent advantage is real. In a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Sherman and colleagues found that U.S. adults are having less sex in general. Since Sherman had already gone to the trouble of surveying the sexual habits of 26,620 adults (9,776 of them parents), Fatherly asked him to take a special look at how moms and dads compare to everyone else. Sherman, a new father himself, reran the numbers and found that parents were, in fact, having more sex than non-parents—married or not. There was a clear parent advantage.
Married parents with infants had the most sex overall at 83.08 times a year, compared to childless married couples who had sex only 60.03 times a year. Single people without kids saw the least action, with a mere 44.43 sexual escapades per year. Although the gap tightened as kids got older, parents of toddlers, preteens, and teenagers all had more sex than non-parents. And despite a handful of caveats—the original study wasn’t built to analyze how much sex parents were having, our analysis comes from raw data that’s not controlled for age, and men are notorious liars when it comes to self-reporting their sex lives—the findings are compelling.
“This is certainly contrary to what I think the popular opinion would be,” Sherman says.
Brooke Wells, also a coauthor on the study, had a few theories as to why parents seem to be getting some. First, couples with young children are often limited to activities within the home and confined to early bedtimes, resulting in more “concentrated time alone together.” Given that parent advantage was the most pronounced among parents of young kids, Wells also suspects that the higher rates could be due to parents trying to conceive more children.
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