The exhausted father is sprawled on the sofa. The 10-year-old son pops up and demands: “Wanna play catch?” It’s the last thing the father wants. The son “doesn’t say anything, just gives me the look that says: SOMEDAY WHEN YOU ARE OLD AND I AM GROWN YOU ARE GOING TO REGRET EACH DAY YOU DIDN’T PLAY CATCH WHEN I ASKED YOU.” So they play catch.

This vignette appears in Fathering through Sport and Leisure , a new book of academic essays that charts just how much fathers today parent through sport. True, dads and sons have always played catch. But they probably play more now than ever before, and daughters join in too. Sport solves so many of the problems of contemporary fatherhood. These essays – some beautiful, some vapid – show how.

The Dutch writer Henk Spaan, who like almost everyone first watched football with his dad, has described a stadium as: “A monument to all fathers who are already dead / A monument to the common man.”

But a game with dad used to be a special treat. Before the 1980s, fathers rarely had much to do with kids. In the mid-1970s, according to one study, British fathers with kids aged under five spent an average of just 15 minutes a day on “child-related activities”. When I began playing soccer around that time, my father was one of the few who watched our games. The only time I can remember dads showing up to practice was after we all complained at home that the teenage louts who coached us were kicking balls at our heads.

Then came the new ideology of “involved fathering”. Suddenly western fathers had to spend time bonding their kids, even sharing emotions, while also doing more paid work than before. One dad quoted in the book, asked what was expected of fathers today, replied: “Too bloody much.” British fathers now spend about two hours a day with their children. (Mothers still do far more.)

The obvious question arises: how to fill all this time? In a family there is usually love, but not usually much in common. Kids are from Mars and parents from Venus. Children’s conversation is often as boring to us as ours is to them. There are few activities that both they and we like. Most parents use television as an electronic babysitter, though it’s now usually watched simultaneously with various other activities. However, upper-middle-class parents feel uneasy about letting their children spend all their free time rotting their brains. So they turn to sport.

Sport is particularly useful to men. Women still do most of traditional childcare – microwaving meals, shouting at the kids – but fathers do a lot of play. A 1980s study of Australian fathers showed that 80 per cent of their interaction with their children was through play. Very often, this meant playing or watching sport. That is how men bond with people they don’t want to talk to. Even the most clueless dads can feel at home on the sports field. It’s no coincidence that organised youth sport in the US took off in the 1980s, simultaneously with the ideology of involved fathering. The phrase “soccer moms” was a misnomer even when first coined. For many dads, “leisure-based parenting”, as Liz Such calls it, is the only kind they can do.

Some children even play sport partly to get their dads’ attention and love. This may be particularly true of girls: not only is the father usually the less available parent, but he typically gives his sons more time than his daughters.

A spate of recent books – by Jennifer Sey, Mark Hyman, William Echikson and others – describes crazed parents who push their children in sport. However, this is a side-issue. The larger point is that sport gets many dads through fatherhood. The strategy seems to work well. In one American study cited in this book, “sports fans of both sexes were most likely to cite their father as ‘the single greatest influence’ on their interest in sports”. If it weren’t for sport, many fathers and children might never talk at all.