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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how professional men in dual-career relationships craft and enact their fatherhood role ideologies during the transition to fatherhood. In particular, the authors focus on the impact that the development of a more involved approach to fatherhood has on the mother's ability to combine career and family.

This study utilizes a longitudinal, qualitative methodology. Pre- and post-natal interviews were conducted with 18 professional men in dual-career heterosexual relationships.

Although the traditional mode of fatherhood that is rooted in breadwinning continues to be the dominant approach among working fathers in the US, new modes of more involved fathering are emerging. The results of the study indicate that a general shift away from a strict, gendered division of household labor is taking place in today's dual career couples, and this is leading to an increase in men's involvement in childcare. Further, although much of the extant research conceptualizes fatherhood as a role typology, the results reveal that all fathers are involved in caring for their babies, though to varying degrees. Thus the authors propose a continuum of involvement. Finally, the authors discovered how men are finding creative ways to use official and unofficial workplace flexibility to be more involved at home.

The findings offer novel insights into the factors that encourage involved fathering. The authors encourage organizations to create more supportive environments that foster involved fathering by extending paid parental leave benefits to men and providing more access to flexibility.

The Nordic welfare model is known in the literature for its explicit support of the equal treatment of men and women in both family and gender equality policies as well as its achievements in these policy areas. Policy arguments have to promote gender equality and act in the best interest of the child, ensuring that the child access to care from both parents as well as to early childhood education and care. However, the knowledge of how the Nordic welfare states frame and promote active fatherhood remains fragmented.

The chapter asks whether the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) have developed similar policies on fatherhood or have taken different paths. Hence, the chapter examines three main policy areas affecting fatherhood: family law, family cash benefits and paid parental leave. Comparative perspective is applied and the chapter asks how the policies frame and promote active fatherhood while also looking into how fatherhood is shaped in interaction between policies, cultures and the daily practices of fathers.

Results show that while all Nordic governments promote a dual-earner/dual-carer social democratic welfare state model emphasizing the active participation of fathers in the care of their children, variations exist in policy and practices. Care policies and entitlements to a father quota of paid parental leave are a defining factor for enhancing fathers’ role in care of their children and the findings show that Nordic fathers are making use of their quota and gradually increasing their share in taking leave for the care of young children.

Using data from a qualitative longitudinal sample of 31 non-traditional fathers-to-be interviewed in 2011 and then again in 2013, when the child was about 18 months old, we examine the relationship between prenatal anticipation and the development of ‘positive paternal involvement’ (i.e. an engaged, accessible and responsible type of fatherhood). We expect differences with regard to the antenatal development of a non-normative father identity to explain variations in subsequent paternal involvement. While there might be – and there often is – a discrepancy between fathers’ prenatal intentions and actual practices after childbirth, anticipating concrete needs and actively foreseeing particular paid work adaptations favour the development of a positive paternal involvement. Our analysis reveals the importance of anticipation during pregnancy – that is, the development of an identity as a father and of explicit plans for employment adaptations – in facilitating men’s greater implication in care. The empirical findings also show that non-traditional gender attitudes and favourable working conditions facilitate fathers’ involvement, yet are not enough in themselves to guarantee the development of a positive type of fatherhood covering the three noted dimensions of care. Achieving the latter in Spain will likely require the encouragement of shared parenting responsibilities through normative changes in workplaces, the revision of parental leave policies and the integration of fathers-to-be in prenatal education classes. Our research contributes to shedding new light on the elements that favour a positive paternal involvement, which has the potential to enhance both children’s well-being and gender equality.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize such a feature of the gender contract of Russian men as fatherhood escape, as well as to determine the social consequences that it has for family relationship.

The study was carried out in the design of qualitative sociology. The methodology is based on the theoretical construct of a gender contract, adapted to modern Russian society and the concept of social practices. The empirical base consists of six expert interviews with specialists in family psychology and conflictology.

The fatherhood escape in modern Russia is characterized by the depreciation of emotional labor; marking communications with children and caring for them as exclusively female activities; presentation of their employment in the public sphere as a legitimate reason for avoiding family problems; the active use by men of the technique of ignoring replicas of the interlocutor as a technique in communication with family members. This worsens the quality of intra-family communication, leads to the separation of family members from each other, especially children and leads to an increase in their deviant behavior.

The design of a qualitative study makes it impossible to assess the level of prevalence and severity of the phenomenon, this study is a pilot. Its purpose is to record the very fact of the existence of fatherhood escape in everyday family (social) practices. Subsequent studies should be able to show the relationship between fatherhood escape and domestic violence, as well as the role of this trait of the male gender contract in the reproduction of toxic masculinity.

The phenomenon of fatherhood escape and its social consequences in modern Russia is under-studied. This study contributes to the description of this phenomenon on Russian materials and also reveals some of the social consequences of this feature of the male gender contract, in particular its effect on intra-family communication, increasing the risk of deviant behavior of children and complicating the fulfillment by women of the “working mother” gender contract.

Purpose – Interest in work/family management among professors has lead to a plethora of research about female professors with children. Very little research exists about professors who are fathers. What does exist is comparative in nature. In this chapter, the author takes an in-depth look at such men's work/family management.

Methodology/approach – This chapter presents research from a qualitative study with 25 fathers who are untenured tenure track assistant professors at research universities.

Findings – Most men state a commitment to and valuing of family above all else. Yet the two fatherhood ideologies of breadwinning and involved fatherhood privilege these men by allowing them substantial flexibility in their day-to-day lives and an affirmation of masculinity. At the same time, many struggle to minimize their work involvement to be involved with the day-to-day care of their children.

Originality/value of chapter – This study demonstrates how prevailing ideologies about fatherhood allow men a structural double privilege when constructing their work and family lives.

The goal of this chapter is threefold: to bring the context of disability into literature on fathering; to bring voices of fathers into scholarship on parenting children with disabilities; and to examine what individual stories about a very particular kind of fatherhood might reveal about the cultural narrative of the good father, and the reflexive nature of cultural narratives and individual stories.

Transcripts of in-depth, life course interviews with 14 parents of seven young adults, and older teens with severe impairments associated with a variety of diagnoses were analyzed using narrative analysis strategies. Transcripts of the fathers’ interviews provided primary data and transcripts of the mothers’ interviews were used as supplemental material.

Fathers included in this study drew from normative notions of masculinity and widely circulating cultural narratives of fatherhood, even while participating in caregiving tasks that are at odds with this narrative. Five specific narrative tensions that highlight cultural understandings of the “good father” were evident in these stories: (1) evoking masculinity in the context of care work; (2) providing financial security in the context of the high cost of disability; (3) maximizing potential in the context of realistic expectations; (4) protecting in the context of uncertainty and helplessness; and (5) finding a “new normal” in the context of the unexpected.

Findings add to what is known about mothering children with disabilities. Results also add a new dimension to fatherhood studies by illustrating how widely circulating cultural narratives of fatherhood are adapted in stories about fathering children with life-long assistance needs, and how individual stories might serve as a platform for social change.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the interplay between fathers’ perceptions of the workplace and how they enact fatherhood. Data were derived from qualitative in-depth interviews with seven elite, professional fathers employed at multinational manufacturing corporations in Detroit, Michigan. Fathers are highly educated, have a significant income and all but one have wives in the paid labour market. This study shows how the persistence of the ideal worker norm and penalties for using work-family policies (WFP) perpetuate the gendered division of paid and unpaid work. First, fathers who are ideal workers are rewarded; fathers who do not face criticism and obstacles to promotions. Second, management and supervisor’s discretion results in uneven access to WFP, penalizing fathers for asking and preventing most from using them. Third, fathers express desire to be ‘involved’, but their engagement is largely visible fatherhood.

This study extends our theoretical understandings of work, WFP and fatherhood from a distinct departure point – the elite fathers highlighted here have been parenting for at least three years, and live and work in circumstances that seemingly would allow them to disrupt normative expectations of work and family. The United States provides a unique backdrop to examine the navigation of competing work and family demands because reconciliation is largely left to employees and their families. Public and individual company policies are not enough; there must be a corresponding supportive family-friendly culture – supervisor support and penalty-free WFP – to disrupt gendered work and family.

The chapter draws on recent scientific findings on the participation of fathers in childcare, and the perception of the role of fathers by both men and women in the Czech Republic. We apply a mixed method approach, combining qualitative data from longitudinal research on transition to motherhood and fatherhood (TransPARENT), which traced 16 parental couples for four years, with data from quantitative surveys on the topics of parenting and work–life balance. The data are examined for the incidence of breadwinner and the involved father models in Czech families. We focus on the earliest stage of the family life course, that is, when the children are aged between zero and four years. We show that fathers of young children still predominantly assume the breadwinner role, leaving most childcare to mothers. However, the growing number of parents expressing a preference for a more equal sharing of childcare indicates a shift in both the perception of fatherhood and the value placed on the active participation of fathers in early childcare in the Czech Republic. The main limitation of this text is that it only focuses on families with very young children. The future research should fill the gaps in contemporary knowledge of Czech families by addressing the division of roles, and particularly the roles of fathers, in households with school-age children. The chapter suggests that fathers’ greater involvement in childcare could be stimulated by policy measures such as the introduction of paternal leave or broadening the range of (public) childcare services for the youngest children.

This chapter examines the life histories of selected teenage Filipino fathers relative to their experiences of dating, courtship, and the discovery, engagement, and experimentation with risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, and premarital sex. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study conducts family genogram and in-depth semi-structured interviews among eight teenage fathers. In so doing, it interrogates the consequences of sexual behaviors to the well-being of their respective families of orientation as well as the future of their expected family of procreation. The chapter argues how the risks of teenage fatherhood in the Philippines are relatively mitigated by the general conservative culture of Filipino families and the Catholic sense of religious orientation that seems to provide resilience captured in three themed experiences of “natauhan” (realization), “pinangatawanan” (accountability), and “pinanindigan” (owning responsibility). Thus, this chapter unravels the voices of young Filipino teenage fathers who straddles, on the one hand, the risk of premarital sex and pregnancy, and on the other hand, the challenges of responsible parenthood. In conclusion, the chapter provides policy insights on sex education and gender equality training for the vulnerable Filipino youth in the country.