Developing Fatherly Roles and Identities: Towards Parental Equivalence?

Abstract

The focus for this chapter is on the detail of the roles and responsibilities equal and primary carer fathers were discharging and the ways they had come to understand themselves as parents. The authors show how many fathers in the Sharing Care study had come to regard themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in their caregiving and how most were successfully discharging a striking range of care responsibilities that went significantly beyond dominant notions of masculinity or fatherhood. However, certain key aspects of parenting, including emotional comfort, care coordination and networking with other parents, had sometimes remained centred on mothers, and the authors outline domestic and external factors that had apparently placed limits on the extent to which the fathers’ parenting had become fully gender-neutral.