The Father as an Idea: A Challenge to Kinship Boundaries by Single Mothers

In separating parenthood from partnership, women have created new family forms in which men may be involved but not as traditional fathers. Through in‐depth interviews with single middle‐class women, I compare families created with anonymous donors to those created with known donors. In the former cases, mothers craft imagined fathers as their children become “looking glasses” into the men they will probably never meet. These children must rely on the mothers’ imagination to create a sense of the fathers’ view of them. While known donors are not “dads” either, the mothers help these children imagine positive fathers, often through more concrete, personal knowledge, and these fathers often know the children from a distance. In an interesting manner, although children may be created without men as physically present “dads,” women contextualize the donors that allowed them to become mothers through acknowledging the social ways that blood kinship creates families. They ultimately reaffirm certain kinds of kinship rather than challenge them.     

The Management of Household and Childcare Tasks and Relationship Satisfaction in Dual-Earner Families

Abstract

The investigation examined the mental work associated with managing a household and raising young children and how such mental work might be associated with relationship satisfaction. Forty-five parents with young children completed questionnaires that assessed marital satisfaction and mothers' and fathers' perceptions of who did what in their household in terms of household tasks, childcare tasks, household management, and childcare management, as well as how much they worried about the completion of each of these tasks. Results indicate that fathers' marital satisfaction and mothers' marital satisfaction differed in terms of the division of labor and management of labor.     

Reconsidering the Division of Household Labor: Incorporating Volunteer Work and Informal Support

The gendered division of household labor is more multifaceted than the allocation of paid work and domestic work. People also engage in volunteer work and informal support. I investigate the applicability of household labor allocation theories—specifically the time constraints, economic, and “doing gender” perspectives—to all unpaid work. I analyze the 1997 Australian Time Use Survey diaries of 1,797 married couples using logistic, ordinary least squares, and seemingly unrelated regressions. Analyses show that volunteer work and support work are substantial expenditures associated with paid work and housework, but they do not create a “third shift.” Volunteer work and support work are part of the gendered household labor allocation process determined, in part, by time constraints and by gender.     

What's Fair Is Fair? Role of Justice in Family Labor Allocation Decisions

ABSTRACT

The theoretical basis on which wives and husbands in the United States evaluate the fairness of the division of household labor is explored. Based on distributive justice theory, separate interviews with wives and husbands are conducted to identify and define the household inputs or contributions that are valued as well as the underlying justice principles that guide household labor allocations. The findings suggest considerable variation in the value placed on household chores and the underlying justice principles used when allocating housework. Gendered expectations also play an important role in these allocations.     

Relationship Quality Among Young Couples from an Economic and Gender Perspective

Less than a third of married couple households in the United States are composed of families with one breadwinner. This is a stark contrast to a mere 40 years ago when men were the primary breadwinner for the majority of households. The goal of this study was to determine how the perception of household chores is related to relationship quality. Specifically we wanted to determine how perception of household chores is related to relationship quality reported by partners from a traditional economic and a gender role theory perspective. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1986 cohort, results indicate that perceived unfairness in household division of chores was predictive of women’s relationship quality, but not men’s. Arguments about affection and money were predictive of relationship quality for both genders.     

Cross‐national variations in the division of household labor

Using data from the International Social Justice Project, we describe the division of household labor in married couple households using a sample of 13 nations (N= 10,153). We find significant differences in the division of household labor based upon respondents’ nations of residence. We find support for the time availability approach; households where the wife is employed outside the home for pay are more likely to respond that husbands perform at least half of the household labor. We also find support for the relative resources approach; in households where wives’ education equals or exceeds that of their husbands, husbands are more likely to perform half of the household labor. We find little support for the economic dependence approach. We suggest that future cross‐national research should place individuals in context to determine why there are nation differences in the reported division of household labor.     

欧美儿童照顾社会政策的发展及借鉴

20世纪70年代以来,儿童照顾问题在西方社会由个体家庭责任演变为普遍的社会需求,被置于国家、市场和家庭关系的政治话语中。面对新的儿童照顾安排需求,欧美国家发展出亲职假、公共儿童照顾服务和经济支持三种途径来重新分配儿童照顾的任务、成本和责任。儿童照顾政策不仅影响妇女的劳动力参与,还与儿童的福利水平高低密切相关。确立照顾权利是公民社会权利的重要组成部分,建构一个由国家、市场、志愿组织和家庭共同提供的"混合照顾"体系,改变照顾工作在家庭内部不平等的性别分工以及把儿童照顾政策作为解决其他社会问题的政策工具都是值得中国借鉴的经验。     

“Swapping” Families: Serial Parenting and Economic Support for Children

The claim that fathers “swap” families when they form new ones—that is, they shift allegiances from nonresident children to new residential children (e.g., Furstenberg, 1995 )—has not been directly evaluated empirically. Drawing on data from the two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households, we test Furstenberg's argument in terms of child‐support transfers to nonresidential children, and we also test an elaboration of his approach that distinguishes between resident biological children and stepchildren. Using static‐score models, our findings indicate that fathers do swap families but only when the trade‐off is between new biological children living inside fathers' households and existing biological children living outside fathers' households. Even though our analytic sample is small, our findings have important implications for child well‐being, child‐support policy, and the meaning of fatherhood.     

Gendered Expectations? Reconsidering Single Fathers’ Child‐Care Time

We take a fresh look at an important question in the sociology of gender and family: Do single fathers “mother”? We add to the theoretical debate by proposing that single fathers face competing interactional pressures, to simultaneously act like mothers and men. Using nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey 2003 – 2006 (N = 16,654), we compare the time single fathers spend on child care to other parent types, paying special attention to differences in employment profiles, household composition, and care arrangements. Accounting for these differences, single fathers spend slightly less time caring for children than do mothers, but more time than married fathers. Interesting differences emerge, however, depending upon the age of the youngest child in the household.     

Conceptualisations of fatherhood and socio-contextual dynamics influencing father involvement in informal settlements in Durban,South Africa

Many men living in informal settlements are unemployed and many do not live with their children. Nevertheless, these men can play a critical role in their children’s lives. In this paper, we explore the extent to which fathers in informal settlements manage or aspire to do this. We explore how they appreciate the social and familial role of “the father” and how they seek to translate these ideas into actions. Findings are based on three FGDs and 19 IDIs with young men in two informal settlements in South Africa. In this setting, father involvement is predicated on financial provision, yet lack of economic opportunities for men condemns them to the undesirable status of “failed fathers.” Men’s involvement in childcare is contested with some men supporting father involvement that goes beyond financial provision. Notions of traditional masculinity, praise and recognition by community, and the view that looking after your own child is tantamount to looking after your own future, are factors that enhance father involvement. Unemployment or precarious work, alcohol abuse, gender ideologies, and maternal and cultural gatekeeping are socio-contextual dynamics that undermine father involvement. For interventions to be effective in promoting father involvement, they should address critical context-specific issues.     

Parental education, time in paid work and time with children: an Australian time-diary analysis

How does parental education affect time in the paid workforce and time with children? Potentially, the effects are contradictory. An economic perspective suggests higher education means a pull to the market. Human capital theory predicts that, because higher education improves earning capacity, educated women face higher opportunity costs if they forego wages, so will allocate more time to market work and less to unpaid domestic labour. But education may also exercise a pull to the home. Attitudes to child rearing are subject to strong social norms, and parents with higher levels of education may be particularly receptive to the current social ideal of attentive, sustained and intensive nurturing. Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time‐use Survey 1997, this study offers a snapshot of how these contradictory pulls play out in daily life. It finds that in Australia, households with university‐educated parents spend more daily time with children than other households in physical care and in developmental activities. Sex inequality in care time persists, but fathers with university education do contribute more time to care of children, including time alone with them, than other fathers. Mothers with university education allocate more daily time than other mothers to both childcare and to paid work.     

Gendered stories of parental caregiving among siblings

Using data from in-depth interviews with eight pairs of male and female siblings, we investigate the influence of gender on the division of responsibility among adult children who are providing care to their elderly parent and how parental caregiving provides an opportunity for the explicit (re)negotiation of gender dynamics across household boundaries. We explore the ways that “helper brothers” and “co-provider brothers” divide care with their sisters, and the impact of this division of care on the sisters' roles as coordinators of care and their future plans for their parents' care. “Specialized knowledge” also emerges as an important factor in the gendered division of care among the respondents. Finally, we examine the consequences of our findings with regards to gender relations and discuss the limitations of this exploratory study.     

Hierarchization and segmentation of informal care markets in Slovenia

The article is the result of qualitative research of informal care markets in Slovenia in the field of childcare, elder care, and cleaning. The author assesses Slovenia's position in the “global care chain” and finds that “local care chains” prevail in the field of childcare and elder care, while a co-occurrence of female gender, “other” ethnicity, and poverty is typical in the field of household cleaning. The main emphasis of the article is on the analysis of hierarchization of the informal market of care work according to following two criteria: social reputation of individual type of care work and citizenship status of care workers.     

Children's Time With Fathers in Intact Families

This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine children's involvement with their fathers in intact families as measured through time spent together. Our findings suggest that although mothers still shoulder the lion's share of the parenting, fathers' involvement relative to that of mothers appears to be on the increase. A “new father” role is emerging on weekends in intact families. Different determinants of fathers' involvement were found on weekdays and on weekends. Fathers' wages and work hours have a negative relationship with the time they spend with a child on weekdays, but not on weekends. Mothers' work hours have no effect on children's time with fathers. On weekends, Black fathers were found to be less involved and Latino fathers more involved with their children than are White fathers. The weekday‐weekend differential suggests that a simple gender inequality theory is not sufficient in explaining the dynamics of household division of labor in today's American families.     

“Doing Gender”

Abstract

Through thinking about and empirically analyzing lesbigay domestic arrangements in Sweden, this paper aims at broadening the understanding of gender and further developing the “doing gender” perspective as applied to housework division. It begins with a review of empirical findings of and the application of the “doing gender” approach to housework division, identifying problems associated with a focus on heterosexual units in a context where gender norms are seemingly homogeneous and conventional. To make full use of the perspective, it is necessary to allow for contradictions in and resistance against normative expectations of gender. Empirically, this translates to exploring domestic arrangements in a variety of settings with different normative expectations of gender. This paper takes a small step in this direction through undertaking an empirical study of the division of housework in lesbigay households in Sweden and finds a strong pattern of egalitarianism that consists less in a 50% split between the couple in all household tasks but in the fluidity, complexity, and deliberateness in which housework is shared, especially among lesbian couples. The analysis further underscores the importance of gender in lesbigay households.     

Travail salarié, travail domestique,travail au noir : l’économie domestique à l’épreuve de l’accession à la propriété

A survey conducted in a recent housing development located in an exurban township to the east of Lyon, France, investigated how owning a house affects the work for wages and work in the household of each person in a couple. Though an economic burden, a house can represent a family and occupational resource for low-income households in a context where wage earning is precarious. This is especially true for women with few skills who “choose” to specialize in day-care work, whether declared or not. Home ownership often reinforces the division of labor between men and women. The articulation of the occupational and household spheres also depends on the household's financial and social resources and on the distance from family networks of exchange and support.     

Marital Status,Gender, and Parents’ Psychological Well‐Being*

This study analyzes the associations between marital status, gender, and depressive symptoms among parents. The regression results indicate that married parents report fewer traditional depressive symptoms and lower rates of alcohol abuse than do single parents. Mothers and fathers also appear to be more likely to exhibit different depressive symptoms: Mothers are more likely than fathers to report traditional depressive symptoms and fathers are more likely to report the abuse of alcohol. Finally, we find evidence that indicators of parenting burdens such as economic strain, household labor, childcare, social support, and religious involvement mediate and moderate these relationships.     

Who Helps with Homework? Parenting Inequality and Relationship Quality Among Employed Mothers and Fathers

This study investigated the relationship between parenting inequalities and feelings of relationship quality, and whether those patterns differed for women and men. Using data from the nationally representative 2011 Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Survey (N?=?1427), we documented the relevance of perceived unfairness of the division of parenting and the ways that employment status and work hour preferences (“mismatch”) modify those relationships. We found that mothers in dual-earner households experience greater parenting inequalities than do similarly-situated fathers, net of housework inequalities. The negative association between parenting inequality and relationship quality was stronger among mothers—but that was due to perceived unfairness in the division of parenting tasks. We also observed that the detrimental effect of parenting inequality was stronger for mothers who worked part-time—but that was because of work hours mismatch: they tended to prefer to work longer hours. Our results contribute to the gendered nature of the division of parenting labor and its intersection with work hours and preferences.