If fathers care, how do they share? The temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time to parenting activities

Abstract

Contemporary fatherhood comprises active parenting: emotional involvement and more time spent on parenting activities. The latter is often explained by fathers’ response to a higher demand for childcare as the result of mothers’ employment schedules. Whereas time-use surveys are widely used to analyze fathers’ parenting time, only a few studies fully exploit the contextual information present in time-diaries. This study does so to analyze the temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time spent on parenting activities. Belgian time-use data of intact families with at least one child under the age of 7 (n = 950) reveal that fathers’ rise in solo physical childcare comes at a cost: when mothers are present, fathers spend less time in both physical and interactive childcare. At the same time, ‘new fathers’ – fathers who share household work more equally with their partners – spend more time in childcare no matter what, whether solo or in the presence of children’s mothers.

Keywords:

• fatherhood
• time-use
• shared parenting
• childcare
• gender

Notes

1. Note that to Arendt work is still subject to some kind of necessity giving it an instrumental characteristic, meaning that it is not an end in itself and thus not an activity that is fully free. Therefore she introduces the concept of ‘action’ to which she assigns the quality of uneliminable freedom.

2. Low level of education = at most lower secondary education; medium level of education = at most higher secondary education; high level of education = at least higher education or university.