Why Do Dads Watch TV Standing Up?

There’s also the added complication of superstition. If your team scores, and you happen to be grabbing a soda from the fridge while the football crosses the goal line or the…curling pebbles(?) land…wherever they’re supposed to land, you know that it’s your duty to the squad to stay in that place for good luck. This is, of course, accepted and allowed.

Sports, too, can be somewhat of an entry point for standing. “Always for tense sports moments, but since I’ve become a dad it’s for most shows now,” BlueSky user Adam Robinson replied to me when I posed the question about standing while watching TV. “Usually just because there is nowhere to sit, we have two kids, two dogs, and three cats. My wife tells me to just move the cat, but I don’t need that drama, so I just stand and watch.”

Pain Dads

Sadly, this exhaustive catalog of standing dads would not be complete without mentioning Pain Dads. A Pain Dad, of course, is any dad who feels more physically comfortable when they’re vertically oriented. These are dads who may experience specific aches and pains related to age or injury, as well as dads who spend the day sitting for professional reasons and prefer to fold a light stretch into their leisure time.

My own father, historically a Task Dad, recently told me: “I would rather not stand but sometimes my body tells me standing would be more comfortable.” I also wish he felt physically comfortable enough to sit down and enjoy that show he likes where a bunch of guys dig around for treasure on some Canadian island.

Not to be all “What about men’s problems?” but if you look far enough into the meme of the standing dad, you do uncover some underlying issues that aren’t very funny, as is often the case with such broad proclamations.

Non-dads

Of course, watching TV while standing up is not a behavior displayed exclusively by fathers. Many of the people I talked to recognized it in themselves under certain circumstances despite not having any offspring of their own, or even being a man at all. Several pointed out that actual children often refuse a seat when they watch television, but it still feels dad-like. Comedian Amma Marfo describes her six-year-old nephew as a “tiny dad” who stands while watching his favorite shows.

“I think the standing is a kind of balancing between the side of me that wants to be busy and the side that wants to relax,” says writer and podcaster Rebecca Thandi Norman, a mom, who rarely sits down to watch TV. Moms, it should be noted, are also famously busy (arguably, famously busier than dads), and yet they maintain a steadier standing vs. sitting balance, reputationally at least.

So there you have it. Despite their universal obelisk-like positioning while watching television, “dads” are not a monolith. This behavior has a myriad of complex roots and causes, sometimes within individual fathers. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, dads truly do contain multi-dudes, even as the origins of their actions may remain mysterious.

“I was caught doing this other day while watching The Sting,” author Jon Sternfeld told me. “I didn’t notice I was doing it until my wife came in and asked what the hell I was doing.”

“When she asked why, I had no answer—it just ‘felt right.’”