Good dads get more sex. It's official. And not even a little bit surprising.

You won’t believe what gets researched these days. Or maybe you will.

‘Dads who do a fair share of the childcare have more sex, research shows.’

An amazing story on many levels, not the least of which is the fact the folk at Georgia State University thought to compare the amount of sex parents are getting with the amount of child caring they’re doing.

Can you imagine how it came up?

Dad researcher Hank comes in to the lab one day and says in a fabulous Georgian-American drawl, “You know, Darlene, it’s amazin! The more I look after the kids, the more sex I get. The more sex I get, the more kids I get. The more kids I get, the more I have to care for ‘em. Hot dang. I wonder if anyone else is stuck on carin’ sexin’ treadmill the way I am!”

Maybe it was a water-cooler moment between researchers comparing home lives and kids in a very intimate moment. Either way, the research has been done. It included almost 500 couples and the results, frankly, are pretty dang obvious.

Basically men, if you leave the majority of the caring for your kids to your partner, your days of mad romping are over. That’s the nub of it.

Well, what a shock. The world probably didn’t need the scientists from Georgia State University to work that out, but thanks for confirming what we may not have realised we already knew.

The researchers grouped 487 couples into three main categories. Women who did most of the childcare, men who did most of the childcare and couples who split the workload. And it wasn’t only about sex, that’s just the bit that I read first. It was also about the quality of the sex and who has the best relationships.

And the winner is – the couples who shared the workload.

Sharing really is caring.

“One of the most important findings is that the only childcare arrangement that appears really problematic for the quality of both a couple’s relationship and sex life is when the woman does most or all of the childcare,” said assistant professor of sociology Dr Daniel Carlson.

I’ve asked around, and everyone was able to tell me the same thing as Dr Carlson. But they added words like “exhausting” and “tiring” and “couldn’t be shagged with shagging because running a household and kids who give their mums a bollocking all day is incredibly hard work. So when Superdad walks through the door all flush with the excitement of slaying his corporate dragons and sneaking sleeps under the desk and having lunch in a place with shiny cutlery, tablecloths and a cheeky pinot, he can’t expect to be getting what he seems to think he’s working for.”

What I didn’t expect from the research was that for the Dads who took on the role of primary carer, their sex lives were still much the same as those who split the workload, but importantly, the quality of the sex wasn’t as good.

There’s a whole Instagram feed devoted to these hands-on dads –  ‘Dilfs of Disneyland’. Post continues after gallery.  

I know lots of guys who don’t acknowledge a difference between quality and quantity. That may be because they’re older and the law of diminishing returns suggests that something can be better than nothing.

Reading the story, I was reminded of my younger cousin who bailed me up before I got married. He must have been 17 or 18 and he told me, quite seriously that marriage and sex and life worked like this. “When you meet a girl, and she’s the one. Every time you have sex before marriage, you put a dollar in a jar. Every time. Then, after you get married, every time you have sex, you pull a dollar from the jar. You’ll never empty the jar. Ever. Even if the two of you live to a million years old, that jar will never empty.”

I’m not sure he was on the money, but interestingly, he does live in Georgia, USA.

Do you agree with the findings in this study?

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