Man Feeding Baby Emoji

A man feeding a baby with a bottle. Before this emoji existed, the only childcare emoji in Unicode was 🤱 (Person Breastfeeding), which showed a woman nursing. Fathers feeding their children had zero digital representation. That changed in 2020 when Google's design director Jennifer Daniel proposed the feeding baby emojis with the argument: "Since an inability to breastfeed doesn't preclude you from nurturing your child, we want to introduce an emoji that everyone can use."

👨‍🍼 represents the shift in how fatherhood looks. Stay-at-home dads have nearly doubled in 30 years, from 11% to 18% of all stay-at-home parents. Fathers taking paid leave jumped from 23% before 1994 to about 50% in the 2014-2022 cohort. The emoji arrived at a moment when fatherhood itself was being redefined.

In texting, 👨‍🍼 means dad duty, baby care, new fatherhood, or the general concept of men as nurturing caregivers. It's used by new dads, by partners celebrating involved fathers, and in discussions about paternity leave, shared parenting, and modern family roles.

👨‍🍼 appears primarily in parenting content. New dads post it with first-day-home photos, middle-of-the-night feeding updates, and Father's Day content. It's the "I'm a dad and I'm doing the work" emoji.

The emoji also carries political weight. In paternity leave debates, 👨‍🍼 is used to advocate for paid leave for fathers. Only 23% of US civilian workers have access to paid family leave, and only 13% of employers offer paid paternity leave to all male employees. The emoji visualizes what policy should enable.

In the broader "fed is best" movement (pushing back against breastfeeding-or-nothing rhetoric), 👨‍🍼 represents the idea that bottle feeding is just as valid as breastfeeding. The emoji destigmatizes bottle feeding by showing it as a normal, loving act that any parent can perform.

On Instagram and TikTok, #DadLife and #GirlDad content uses 👨‍🍼 as an anchor emoji. The aesthetics of engaged fatherhood have become their own content genre, with 👨‍🍼 alongside 👶, 🍼, and ❤️ as the standard emoji set.

Until 2020, the emoji keyboard had exactly one image of someone caring for a baby: 🤱 Person Breastfeeding, added in 2017 after a neonatal nurse named Rachel Lee lobbied Unicode to normalize breastfeeding in digital communication. That emoji was a win for breastfeeding visibility, but it created a gap: fathers, non-breastfeeding mothers, adoptive parents, and non-binary caregivers had no way to represent feeding their child.

Google's Jennifer Daniel identified the problem and submitted proposal L2/19-336 in 2019 for three new emojis: person, woman, and man feeding a baby with a bottle. The proposal explicitly argued for destigmatizing bottle feeding and representing fathers as caregivers. Unicode approved all three for Emoji 13.0, released in 2020.

The timing was significant. The emoji arrived during a pandemic that forced many fathers into unprecedented caregiving roles as schools and daycares closed. Remote work suddenly made it possible (and necessary) for dads to be present for feeding, diaper changes, and all the daily work of infant care. 👨‍🍼 wasn't just timely; it validated a shift that was already happening.

The Census Bureau reports that the percentage of first-time fathers who took no leave at all dropped from 77% before 1994 to 35% in the 2014-2022 period. In states with paid family leave, fathers now make up nearly half of all leave-takers. The emoji represents a demographic trend, not just a design choice.

Added to Emoji 13.0 (2020) as a ZWJ sequence: U+1F468U+1F468 (👨 Man) + U+200DU+200D (Zero Width Joiner) + U+1F37CU+1F37C (🍼 Baby Bottle). Part of a set of three feeding baby emojis: 👨‍🍼 (man), 👩‍🍼 (woman), 🧑‍🍼 (person, gender-neutral). Proposed by Google in L2/19-336 to complement 🤱 (Breastfeeding). Unicode guidelines recommend covering the baby's head so the infant's skin tone doesn't have to match the parent's. Supports skin tone modifiers for the adult.

1. 2017🤱 Person Breastfeeding added to Emoji 5.0, the first childcare emoji — proposed by nurse Rachel Lee↗
2. 2019Google's Jennifer Daniel submits L2/19-336 proposing person/woman/man feeding baby to complement 🤱↗
3. 2020👨‍🍼 Man Feeding Baby released in Emoji 13.0 alongside 116 other new emojis↗
4. 2021Stay-at-home dads reach 2.1 million in the US, 18% of all stay-at-home parents (up from 11% in 1989)
5. 2025~50% of first-time fathers now take paid parental leave, up from 23% pre-1994↗

Paternity leave and father involvement vary enormously by country.

In Scandinavia, fathers' involvement in childcare is the global benchmark. Sweden offers 480 days of paid parental leave, with 90 days reserved specifically for each parent ("use it or lose it"). Iceland gives each parent six months. In these countries, 👨‍🍼 is culturally normative, not noteworthy.

In the US, there's no federal paid paternity leave. Only 13% of employers offer it. States like California, New York, and Colorado have enacted their own programs, and in those states, fathers make up nearly half of leave-takers. The emoji represents aspiration in states without paid leave and reality in states with it.

In Japan, fathers technically have access to generous paternity leave, but cultural pressure means very few take it. The Japanese government has been actively campaigning to increase the rate, with a target of 50% by 2025. In South Korea, a similar gap exists between policy and practice.

In many developing countries, the concept of paternity leave barely exists. The emoji's meaning in these contexts is more aspirational: it represents what modern fatherhood could look like.

• •Stay-at-home dads in the US have nearly doubled in 30 years: from 11% of stay-at-home parents in 1989 to 18% (2.1 million) in 2021.
• •The Unicode proposal (L2/19-336) explicitly argued that the emoji would "destigmatize bottle feeding," positioning it as a social cause, not just a design addition.
• •In Colorado (2024) and Washington state (2020), fathers now make up roughly half of all parents taking paid family leave.
• •The breastfeeding emoji (🤱) was proposed by a neonatal nurse named Rachel Lee who wanted to normalize public breastfeeding. Three years later, the bottle-feeding emojis completed the picture by representing all feeding methods.

• •Some people assume 👨‍🍼 means a man with a baby bottle (like drinking milk). It specifically shows a man feeding a baby, though the baby may not be visible at small sizes on all platforms.
• •The emoji is sometimes read as exclusively for biological fathers. It can represent any male caregiver: fathers, adoptive dads, foster parents, uncles, grandfathers, or male nannies.

• •Emojipedia titled their announcement of the feeding baby emojis "Now Anyone Can Feed a Baby", capturing the emoji's cultural significance in a single headline. The framing explicitly positioned it as correcting an exclusion, not just adding a character.
• •The "fed is best" movement gained a digital symbol with 👨‍🍼. The movement pushes back against breastfeeding-exclusive messaging that shames parents who bottle feed, whether by choice or necessity. The emoji normalizes bottle feeding visually.
• •The #DadLife and #GirlDad hashtags on Instagram and TikTok have become massive content categories. Engaged fatherhood is now a genre with its own aesthetics, influencers, and emoji vocabulary. 👨‍🍼 is the anchor emoji.
• •Pew Research documented the stay-at-home dad trend: from 11% in 1989 to 18% by 2021, with 2.1 million stay-at-home fathers in the US. The demographic shift happened before the emoji; the emoji validated it.

• •ZWJ sequence: U+1F468U+1F468 + U+200DU+200D + U+1F37CU+1F37C. Falls back to 👨 + 🍼 on unsupported systems.
• •Shortcodes: :man_feeding_baby::man_feeding_baby: on Slack and GitHub.
• •Supports Fitzpatrick skin tones for the adult after U+1F468U+1F468, before the ZWJ. The baby's skin tone is not independently adjustable by design.
• •The baby's head is recommended to be partially or fully hidden per Unicode guidelines. If you're designing custom emoji, follow this guideline to avoid skin tone correlation assumptions.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.