A Cultural Model of Parenthood as Engineering: How Caregiving Fathers Construct a Gender-Neutral View of the Parent Role

Why Engineering?

Some may find our choice of the term “engineering” to be surprising, unwieldy, and perhaps even offensive when employed to the practices of parenting. Engineering is often viewed as a highly technical and intellectualized field divorced from human emotion; it may seem ill-suited to describe a practice as ostensibly instinctive, commonsensical, emotional, and timeless as caregiving. We take our use of the term to be justified, however, precisely because it emphasizes that the complex emotional arrangements which many deem central to caregiving are neither natural nor to be taken for granted.

First, in line with the growing scholarly recognition that parenthood is not a pregiven role but the product of social construction (Gerson, 1997; Phoenix & Woollett, 1991; Rich, 1986), the concept of engineering underscores how parents must actively and self-consciously construct their parental arrangements. Whereas in the traditional scheme of mothers as caregivers and fathers as breadwinners, the active construction involved in parenthood maybe hidden from view, women’s need to “juggle” between work and home and more recently men’s growing participation in child care brings to the surface these covert elements of individual social engineering.

Second, engineering rests on the lay appropriation of psychological expertise and implies an exercise of personal agency and deliberate action with the aim of meeting individual and social standards of child rearing. It provides an illusion of control and clear causality between parents’ attitudes and actions and their children’s behavior. Taken together, an understanding of parenthood as engineering can be considered part of the modernist project of governing human conduct through technologies of the self (Rose, 1992).

The existing scholarship on parenthood offers up several concepts remotely associated with the idea of engineering, but which lack much of the deeper meanings we intend by this term and does not construe parenthood as a form of lay expertise. The most common of these concepts is “family planning,” which focuses on the deliberate planning of pregnancies and the number of children in the family (e.g., Keenan, van Teijlingen, & Pitchforth, 2005), but neglects the wider range of parenthood practices. Another related concept is parenthood “by choice,” which focuses on the very decision to become a parent and makes the problematic distinction between families in which pregnancies were the result of informed decisions and ones in which they were not (Bock, 2000). The popular concept of “juggling,” which addresses the time- and resource-related challenges of parental care is largely applied to working mothers (Hochschild, 1989) and centers on the predefined roles of work and home between which women need to maneuver, thus ignoring the broader social construction implied in engineering parental roles.

Finally, Hays’ (1996) influential concept of “intensive mothering,” calls attention to the gendered cultural ideology that has encouraged women to consecrate mothering as an expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, time-demanding, and labor-intensive practice, one which is closely connected to middle-class child-rearing practices of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau, 2003), understood as an interventionist style of parenting involving planned strategies to foster children’s talents and skills through the careful structuring and orchestrating of their leisure activities. Bernstein and Triger (2010) expanded on contemporary norms of intensive parenting. They described how the growing expectation that parents actively cultivate their children, acquire sophisticated knowledge of best child-rearing practices, and utilize this knowledge to closely monitor the child’s development and daily activities often results in “overparenting” that may carry adverse social and individual ramifications, particularly for women.

However, this emphasis on intensive, expert-guided, knowledge-seeking, and child-rearing practices does not capture the full force of engineering as a self-conscious construction of the parental role itself and does not examine how parents explicitly appropriate the therapeutic discourse. As we will attempt to show, parents, and specifically caregiving fathers, not only act as clients of therapeutic expertise but also consider themselves as lay experts in child care and adopt this position as means to legitimize and make sense of their roles as parents.

Although the folk model we describe presumes a gender-neutral understanding of parenthood, the actual term “engineering” conjures a distinctly masculine imagery (which could be attributed to the cultural association between rationality and masculinity and more concretely to the preponderance of men in the field of engineering). This “regendering” is intended on our part and aims to recapture the gender constraints that may accompany the actual use of this model, given the current structure of power relations and gender hierarchy that associates expertise with men and undervalues the work and skills of women, a point to which we return in the conclusion.

We demonstrate the folk model of parenting as engineering as it emerges in narratives of caregiving fathers set in new family forms. The traditional model of gender specialization views women as having the competence and knowledge necessary for child rearing, whereas men—even those partially involved in actual care—wrestle with notions of parental inadequacy (Dienhart, 2001). Consequently, men may have greater legitimacy than women “to ask questions” about child care practices. This becomes even more significant in the case of fathers in new family forms, particularly when raising their children without maternal presence in the household. Given their marginalized familial arrangements, these men are inclined to be self-reflective as they need to actively carve out their understandings of parenthood and fatherhood from cultural models available to them as means to justify their own positions. In doing so, we can gain insights into novel, emerging models of parenthood in postindustrial societies. While all parents facing the challenges of child care potentially make use of the therapeutic discourse, because the position of heteronormative parents is largely interpreted in terms of maternal and paternal roles it may obscure the gender-neutral ideals of parental lay expertise. As novel and highly active agents of this discourse, parents in new family forms—particularly fathers—may shed more light on the underlying folk model.

The Therapeutic Discourse in Parenting and Fathering

Contemporary practices of parenting are influenced by the therapeutic discourse, which has taken center stage in postindustrial societies since the late 20th century. Rooted in the science of psychology and nested in processes of individualization and liberalism, the therapeutic discourse challenges individuals to develop a sense of heightened reflexivity and to create an authentic narrative of personal transformation (Furedi, 2002; Taylor, 1991). The modern subject is expected to work through past experiences of distress as means to become more whole and to adopt a self-conscious, expressive style of emotionality (Illouz, 2008). Among other things, these normative prescriptions have accompanied changes in masculinity and are manifest in the emergence of a self-aware, therapeutic new masculinity ideology, one that rejects the emotional self-restraint associated with traditional masculine norms (Rosenmann & Kaplan, 2014).

The pervasiveness of the therapeutic discourse has to do with the ways through which psychological knowledge and techniques have grafted themselves to practices of everyday life including family life and the pedagogy of child rearing (Rose, 1992). Indeed, the science of psychology is central to the social construction of modern parenthood in Western societies (Phoenix & Woollett, 1991). This can be traced back to early psychoanalysis and clinical studies of child development. The psychologizing of child rearing suggested that parenting was a skill that had to be learned and parents, mostly mothers, were encouraged to turn to psychologists for expert advice. In the United States, for example, by the mid-1930s half of all middle-class mothers reported that they subscribed to a magazine on child care (Mintz, 2004). In terms of fathering, psychological studies undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s centered on the effects of paternal absence. At first, the focus of these studies was on the father as a masculine role model and his absence was associated with negative outcomes on boys’ sexual and social development. Only later did studies recognize the emotional significance of paternal absence more broadly to children of both genders (Chodorow, 1989; Lamb, 1997).

Since the 1960s, psychological literature on child rearing has gradually began to address men as caregivers, encouraging them to develop awareness of their emotional lives, express their feelings, and acquire the skills necessary to form significant relationships with their children (Doucet, 2006; Lupton & Barclay, 1997; Miller, 2011). The ideal father was expected to provide some primary care alongside the mother, and—time permitting—chat and play with the children and even read child care guidebooks. However, fathers’ chief role as breadwinners often remained beyond doubt (Weiss, 1998). In turn, scholars began documenting and studying fathers who responded to these challenges. Captured primarily by the term “involved fathering,” a growing body of literature explored how men increasingly share household tasks with their spouses and take a more active emotional and practical role in child care (e.g., Dowd, 2000; Gerson, 1994; Stephens, 1996). Townsend (2002) showed how with growing expectations that fathers become more involved in the care and nurturing of their children many men face conflict of time and place in attempting to fulfill a dual role as both provider and involved father. Other studies turned to fathers who deprioritized breadwinning and assumed primary or coequal roles as caregivers, including “stay-at-home dads” (Doucet, 2006; Grbich, 1995; Kaufman, 2013), divorced fathers, and gay fathers (Marsiglio & Pleck, 2005; Segal-Engelchin, Erera, & Cwikel, 2005).

The significance attributed to emotional involvement and attunement of mothers and fathers has been reinforced by government policies promoting therapeutic intervention in family life with the objective of altering parenting practices through the skillful management of interpersonal emotions between parents and their children (Furedi, 2002). This approach has transformed parents into clients of therapeutic experts, such that “seeking advice and help” is seen not as failure, but the action of “concerned and responsible parents,” as stated, for example, by the British home secretary (Furedi, 2002, p. 21). Therapeutic discourse advocating emotion management by parents is increasingly promoted by popular media in talk shows and reality shows and instilled among parents in the form of self-help practice (Lunt, 2008). In connection to fathering, a recent study by Milkie and Denny (2014) has shown how the dominant cultural model of involved fathering advocated by the American Parent’s Magzine shifted in the second half of the 20th century to a narrative of personal fulfillment. This cultural shift is manifest in an array of self-help books on paternal caregiving (e.g., Paternal Intelligence, Katz, 2008; Fathering Right from the Start, Heinowitz, 2011) and the development of grassroots and governmental projects initiating responsible fatherhood programs, courses, and media campaigns such as The Fatherhood Project (J. A. Levine & Pitt, 1995) or the National Fatherhood Initiative (Marsiglio & Roy, 2012). Randles (2018) discusses how the key feature of responsible fathering policies directed to low-income men of color was to advocate “newer” ideas of paternal involvement centering on nurturance and emotional expressivity as a reflection of masculine strength and skills rather than a liability. The goal was not necessarily to promote gender egalitarian attitudes as to encourage nonprivileged fathers to engage emotionally as “real” men and serve as role models of healthy masculinity to their children.

Institutional support for paid paternity leave in some European countries is likewise often justified by a semitherapeutic logic, presenting the paternity leave as a way to train or socialize fathers toward long-term emotional relationships with their novel children (Duvander & Johansson, 2012).

Underlying these various theorizations associated with the therapeutic discourse and related policy initiatives and cultural norms is a tacit, emerging understanding of parenthood as a specialized job that requires self-awareness, certain training and, ultimately, lay expertise. In addition, unlike much of the previously mentioned literature on emotion management among mothers that often centers on child-rearing techniques, the literature centering on involved fathering appears to be more preoccupied with parenthood as a long-term process of emotional socialization, one that is associated more visibly with lifelong learning and personal fulfillment in line with the therapeutic discourse.

We describe below how such an understanding can be delineated from the narratives of contemporary fathers who assume caregiving roles.

A Folk Model Perspective on Parenthood

In order to conduct a systematic phenomenological analysis of men’s experience as caregivers, we opted to take a folk model perspective. A phenomenological study of parenthood must consider how individuals perceive and interpret their experience to organize their actions, feelings, and cognitions in a coherent manner (Bruner, 1990; Moustakas, 1984). Cultural models of emotional practice are grounded in historically situated discourses and ideological indoctrinations that specify cultural ideals, moral standards, and norms of conduct and are inculcated top-down by institutions such as the education system, science, or the media (Kaplan, 2007; Shields, 2002). But, they also involve the agency of individuals who must repeatedly choose and articulate their self-definitions from this culturally available repertoire as means to justify their own actions.

The folk model perspective avoids a dichotomous distinction between social institutions and personal experiences, as is often found in studies on the social construction of parenthood. A folk model is an outline of the taken-for-granted, culturally shared knowledge that people hold or tacitly employ to make sense of their world and construct particular social and emotional practices in their everyday life (D’Andrade, 1987). A worldview of parenthood can be considered a “model” in the sense that it consists of internal categorizations, ideals, values, and typifications of lived experience (Rogers, 1981). This worldview can be considered a “folk” model because it is grounded in a given culture and captures the commonsense knowledge employed by ordinary people when describing daily parental practices. As such it is contrasted with external, scientific models of parenthood, such as those found in psychological or sociological theories. The model can be compared with a well-learned set of procedures carried out by the informants rather than a body of facts or definitions that they recount (D’Andrade, 1987), as individuals often make sense of their experience in a fundamentally “pre-reflective” way (Rogers, 1981, p. 157). In this sense, the folk model should be taken, not merely as the set of ideas that shape people’s worldview but also as a basis for action. It provides the cultural “toolkit” from which individuals and groups construct their “strategies of action” (Swidler, 1986).

There has been limited attempt to employ the folk model perspective to parenting. One example is the ethnographic work by R. A. LeVine et al. (1994, p. 248) who discussed the “cultural software of parental behavior” among their informants in terms of a “commonsense folk model” that is often unformulated because it is taken for granted. This refers to the ideologies, goals, and values that guide the child-rearing decisions and actions of parents in a particular cultural group (Suizzo, Robinson, & Pahlke, 2008). The focus of these studies, however, is on child-rearing perceptions and its implications for children’s well-being rather than on the cultural understanding of the parenting role in and of itself. A similar focus on child care outcomes rather than on parenthood as a sociological phenomenon can be found in related studies of “parental ethnotheory” or parental “belief systems” (e.g., Harkness & Super, 1996). Our aim, in contrast, is to interrogate contemporary Western lay perceptions of the parents’ role, and specifically the growing role of fathers as caregivers. In other words, we are interested in how the informants’ understanding of caregiving frames the meaning of parenthood, not what it accomplishes for the child.

Case Study and Rationale: Fathers in New Family Forms as Key to Unraveling Cultural Models

To illustrate the proposed folk model, we draw on a qualitative, narrative study of 31 Israeli fathers raising their children without maternal presence in the household (Knoll, 2017). Studying these fathers makes it possible to examine experiences of caregiving that are not directly dependent on mothering although they are often compared with it. The familial arrangements of these men reflect several of many “new family forms,” consisting of various configurations of partnered relationships, child care, and habitation that defy the dominant values of the traditional nuclear family.

The aim of the present study is not to compare these various familial arrangements but to concentrate on what all these fathers shared in common, namely, lack of maternal presence in their household. As such, the narratives of these fathers went beyond the usual focus on gender specialization, ubiquitous in family studies—including those that examine “involved” fathering in relatively egalitarian families—and enabled us to explore other cultural premises of parenthood. By centering our analysis not on what these men do but on how they make sense of their experience, we were able to explore the emerging cultural understanding of parenthood as lay expertise, an idea that may gain traction among other parents in postindustrial societies as well.

Between 2009 and 2012 the second author conducted in-depth interviews with 31 fathers recruited through an advertisement on e-mail lists and social network sites and through snowball sampling. Fathers who raised their children without maternal presence in the household were invited to participate in a study about fatherhood. No incentives for participation were offered. Twenty-three of the participants became fathers through coparenting arrangements, surrogacy, or adoption. All but one man in this group were gay. Additional eight fathers were divorced heterosexual men living with their children at least half of the time. The participants were between the ages of 33 and 59 years with children ranging in age from infancy to late teens. They came from upper-middle-class background, attained higher education and worked in professional occupations (e.g., psychologists, advertisers, businessmen, and academics). All men were Jewish with roughly half of Ashkenazi (European) descent and half of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) descent.

The interviews were conducted mostly in the participants’ homes and each lasted 1½ to 3 hours. Participants were asked to describe their parenting experiences and family life through open-ended yet semistructured questions aimed at eliciting and maintaining a lengthy and relatively free narrative. This ensured systematic consideration of each interview separately, as well as the extraction of recurrent themes across interviews (Denzin, 1970). ¹

Fathers in new family forms stray from pregiven familial patterns and are compelled to deconstruct and reconstruct parental roles, partly replacing dominant norms and partly reproducing them through their own choices. Experiences of this sort were described by one of our interviewees, Danny, a gay father who raises his child through coparenting:

We need to reinvent the wheel. We don’t have that user manual. We don’t have any instructions at all. We have no role model other than the regular straight model that we reject. We have no other model. What is a father’s role? What’s the role of a second father? It doesn’t say that anywhere. What’s the division of labor? Who raises the children? Who does what, who makes which decisions? We have no examples to model ourselves after.

In lacking well-established models for familial arrangements these fathers occupy a position similar to that of lesbian mothers, voluntarily single mothers, or mothers with children in shared custody (Segal-Engelchin et al., 2005). But in assuming primary caregiving roles, these men must also struggle with the dominant cultural model of mothers as primary caregivers.

Although fathers in normative family structures must likewise engineer their parenting experience, they tread a more frequently trodden path. They are expected to “raise” their family, not to plan or engineer it. Their perspective is therefore more seldom the result of self-reflection and self-scrutiny (Lupton & Barclay, 1997). This is not to say that traditional fathers do not exercise choice or deliberation. But the ways in which fatherhood is socially constructed tend to be more transparent to them, making their engineering efforts less visible and overt.

By focusing on a group at the margins of the dominant familial arrangements, we have adopted the methodological premises of “standpoint theory” (Harding, 1986). Based on the understanding that all knowledge is situated knowledge standpoint theory stresses the importance of turning to marginalized groups to acquire new knowledge. As outsiders to dominant patriarchal frameworks of thought marginalized groups may hold an epistemic advantage in observing aspects of family life that remain invisible to those privileged by the dominant order (Henwood & Pidgeon, 1995). In particular, these fathers had to make conscious choices in planning their family life and shaping their roles as primary or coequal caregivers. In this respect, they hold a unique place as informants of the culture of parenting, providing testimonies of their actual participation in child care and at the same time acting as lay researchers of the phenomenon in question by virtue of their self-reflective position (Kaplan, 2003).

Israel offers a fertile ground for studying new family forms and for exploring novel cultural models of parenthood. Israel is considered a highly familistic and pronatalist society, one which assigns a high value to reproduction and fertility (Amir & Benjamin, 1997; Teman, 2003). The heteronormative family is by far the dominant familial arrangement in Israel. However, following processes of liberalization and individualization on the one hand and institutional support for fertility treatments on the other hand recent years have seen growing visibility and legitimacy to new family forms (Fogiel-Bijaoui & Rutlinger-Reiner, 2013). ² The pronatalist pressures in Israeli society may also account for the so-called “gayby boom” taking place in recent decades (Ziv, 2008), whereby rising numbers of gay men become fathers through coparenting arrangements with single women, through surrogacy arrangements or through adoption. ³ With regard to divorced fathers, there is a growing public debate over the continued application of the tender years presumption that legally privileged maternal custody for young children and legal conditions have become somewhat more supportive of divorced fathers acting as primary caregivers. Also, significant for the present analysis is the permeation of the global therapeutic discourse into various domains of Israeli society beyond psychological practice, such as its effect on men of various social background endorsing new masculinity ideology (Kaplan, Rosenmann, & Shuhendler, 2017), its spread among conservative segments of society such as Ultraorthodox families (Hakak, 2011), and its growing ascendancy in family law (Hacker, 2008).

Parenthood as Engineering: Parental Caregiving as Expertise in Emotion Management

The folk model of parenting as engineering that emerged from the narratives of fathers in new family forms can be roughly summarized as follows: parental caregiving is a form of expertise in emotion management, a process of planning and reflective attunement in which parents (a) formulate a vision, (b) pursue information, (c) plan their time, and (d) become emotionally engaged in child care practices. In line with the values of liberal ideology and the principals of therapeutic discourse, all individuals who meet these standards of heightened emotional self-awareness can qualify as “mature” parents.

First, parenting is construed as a process of planning and formulating a vision based on self-probing and self-reflection and as such is contrasted from notions of parenting as a self-evident and spontaneous matter. This distinction is made explicit by Alon, a gay father in coparenting arrangement, when comparing his experiences with that of heteronormative families:

Straight people—not all of them, but a lot of them—take this very obvious path: you get together with a female partner, and at some point she’s going to want children, so you agree, and you just go for it. I’m trying not to generalize—sometimes it’s done with a lot of thinking and planning; but often it’s just part of that path, no questions asked. Gay people need to ask questions—they have no choice . . . you can have sex all you want, but no children are going to come out of that . . . [laughs].

The experience of deliberation required in parenting is not necessarily more intense for gay men than it is for their straight counterparts. Arguably, with the gradual normalization of same-sex family arrangements gay and lesbian individuals of younger generations may face growing pronatalist pressures to have children (and for many, becoming a parent is a path for acceptance by their families; see Lustenberger, 2013). The point is, rather, that for Alon such deliberation and self-reflection on the part of the prospective parent becomes an ideal, a psychological (if not moral) requirement that should guide all parents, as he vividly sums up his argument:

For their children’s sake as well as their own, I think [prospective] parents should stop and do some thinking about their fantasies regarding this thing called parenthood.

This cultural expectation that would-be parents “stop and think” about their inner “fantasies” before they start a family—or in other words, that they articulate a vision of parenting by probing their emotional lives—forms the basis of the folk model in question and places it within the bounds of the therapeutic discourse.

According to this folk model, developing an elaborate vision of parenting should be also based on a consideration of future emotional scenarios and how one expects to manage them. This expectation was expressed tangibly by Arik, an adoptive parent describing the planning and emotional preparation that he underwent prior to adoption:

It’s been planned to the craziest miniscule details. I’ve been trying to imagine how I’d react or behave in all kinds of situations, for example how I’d defend [my child] against people who tried to insult him. All these things went through my mind long before I knew I was actually going to adopt.

A second component of parenthood as engineering is the need to actively seek out information. Thanks to the growing dissemination of expert discourse to the general public parents are increasingly expected to be well-informed about the latest medical, psychological, and material aspects of child care and to acquire sophisticated knowledge of what experts consider proper child development in order to recognize and respond to every stage of the child’s emotional and intellectual development (Bernstein & Triger, 2010). As noted in Walzer’s (1996) study of new mothers and fathers, processing information about infant care is itself part of the work of parenting and like other caregiving responsibilities is expected to be performed and managed by the mothers. Indeed, seeking out information is part and parcel of “intensive mothering” (Hays, 1996). Walzer (1996) studied the “mental labor” associated with such information gathering and delineated the process into several stages (such as: identifying the need for advice, locating and reading the literature, involving one’s partner, assessing the advice, and planning for its implementation).

The psychological literature on parenting offers its readers highly detailed information about the various stages of child development, going into the most particular minutia. Alon described his reaction to such literature:

I found child development to be very interesting. . . . I bought a few books right away. I took the twelve volumes of developmental psychology and read them cover to cover several times over, and kept checking the right age for everything. . . . I always say I know everything there is to know about children up to age 7, but that’s it . . .

The irony, as Alon jokingly indicated, is that such intricate mastery of highly specialized knowledge may have the effect of limiting the parent’s understanding to the ages about which he or she has managed to become an “expert.”

In addition to consulting the authoritative sources of the psychological literature, parents often solicit information through peer consultation with other parents, whether in person or by participating in self-help groups that are readily available on Internet forums. Yair, an adoptive father, related:

I seek out a lot of advice. . . . I write in several Internet forums, where some of the other participants are people I know in the real world. . . . There’s one forum in particular . . . called Gay and Lesbian Parenting, where most of the members are lesbian. Actually, they’re the ones I consult the most about parenting, because I feel more comfortable. . . . Their experiences in childrearing are similar to mine, and I find it easier to discuss these things with them.

The intense dedication and expertise required by the logistics of infant care were vividly described by Erez, a father in coparenting arrangement:

There were lots of things I needed to learn that were very difficult. Now, I’m a learner—but [I had to learn] where to put the milk formula, and how to mix it, and then how to pour the boiling water, and pour it into the bottle early in the morning to give it time to cool down. . . . And how to change the sheets—three layers of sheets, one in this little cradle, then one [to absorb] the reflux, then the blanket, and the bumper pad. . . . I had to learn all that. And [I had to] buy everything at the store, and put it all together, and clean everything, and get tons of clothes, and wash them, and sort them into piles, and learn what each piece of clothing is for—which to dress over the head, which not to . . .

Yet a third element of the folk model of parenthood as engineering based on the therapeutic discourse is reflected in the interviewees’ focus on time management. Unlike fathers who assume traditional breadwinning roles, working fathers who act as primary or equal caregivers must negotiate with their workplace and buy time to be with their children. Many of them used the term “quality time” to rationalize and justify this effort. Elad, a divorced father, noted:

What’s most important about all of this is that the kid has a father. Quality time with the father. When I worked in hi-tech I’d see colleagues going home very late, and I’m not sure it was necessarily because they had work to do. . . . As a divorced father I get out of work early twice a week [because] I need to pick my son up from kindergarten. . . . So my kid gets to have his father, which unfortunately doesn’t happen very often in a lot of regular families.

The term “quality time” is borrowed from the expert therapeutic discourse and was first popularized in the 1970s mainly to address the concerns of career mothers. The idea was that engaging with the children during unstructured, naturally occurring opportunities could set the stage for developing stronger emotional ties with them (Lois, 2010; Snyder, 2007).

The significance of time management was apparent from the way that interviewees often suggested an implicit hierarchy between different types of dads and different expectations about fathers’ involvement with their children. Such distinctions were made not only between the traditional breadwinning father and the involved (“new”) father but also between the involved father and fathers in new family forms, as Shai, a father by surrogacy reflected:

I think that although we live in the 21st century, even the most progressive straight guy, who gets back [early] from work, takes his kid for a walk and spends some time with him . . . he will often feel like he’s doing more than is expected from him and probably even more than what he expects of himself. It’s like, he would pat himself on the back for doing this.

According to Shai, despite cultural changes in family life involved fathers who spend more time with their children than traditional fathers will feel that they are doing more than is expected of them and more than they expect of themselves. Because these fathers still hold relatively lower standards of availability and limited expectations for involvement with their children in terms of time and effort they are also less likely to become significantly involved in terms of their emotional bonding, when compared with fathers in new family forms. Guy, a gay father in coparenting arrangement, draws a direct line between time management and emotional bonding:

For instance in preschool they are surprised at how much he is attached to me… they’re really surprised that he’s so close emotionally to his father . . . because in straight families the father returns home late and is not part of the child’s life as much I am

By noting these temporal features of intensive parenting and highlighting the implications of paternal presence and absence on their relationship with their child, the interviewees not only stressed their uniqueness as fathers committed to child care but also presented an understanding of how parenting entails the careful engineering of time and resources in order to achieve emotional bonding with the child.

Finally, accomplishing parental expertise entails more than careful planning, acquisition of knowledge, and managing time considerations; it involves the ability to implement this competence in actual family life, using the cultural toolkit provided by the therapeutic discourse. The fourth component in the engineering folk model underscores how good parents must be emotionally engaged in child care practices. In this, the folk model perspective examines not only the ideas and ideals that shape people’s worldview but also following Swidler (1986), acknowledges how such cultural meanings form the basis for action. In the present context, parents are expected not just to familiarize with the therapeutic toolkit intended to deal with the challenges of parenting but also to construct the appropriate strategies of action from this toolkit during actual occasions of care.

Such emotional engagement is key to the fathers’ understanding of “good parenting,” an understanding that is not centered only on child care but on managing the parental role more broadly. Danny, a father in a coparenting arrangement, described how he learned to manage the complex emotions and the frustrations associated with the parental role:

The kids never saw us quarrel about anything. They’ve seen us united, always, regarding anything that has to do with them. It’s the result of a lot of thought by the both us, of course, and negotiation, effort, all the discussions we have after they go to sleep. . . . There are many indicators for good parenting, but that’s one of them. And it’s definitely different from the kind of parenting I experienced with my own parents. We devote a lot of thought to the way we do things. When we disagree—and we sometimes do—her advice is usually better than mine, and I accept that . . . Thanks to my desire to offer good parenting, and thanks to my ability to deal with frustration and delay gratification, I’ve become much more open to options that differ from what I had fantasized. I’ve become more mature.

An understanding of fathering as emotion management in action was encapsulated by Adam, an adoptive father:

Early on, I was the one who was much more into parenting. I was the one who took care of the adoption process. I was much, much less helpless than he was. I was the one who went to the store [to get] diapers, right off the bat.

Q: And how did you know what to get from the store?

Oh, from female friends who were having babies all around me. I have nephews. I’m also very nurturing by nature. Changing diapers is a technical thing; I’m a military paramedic, I know how to bandage, it’s nothing. It’s not about the technical issue, it’s about emotional engagement and dedication.

Adam’s answer reiterates the active process of planning that is central to the engineering model and how this includes gathering of information not only from outside sources such as psychology guidebooks and Internet forums but also from one’s own personal circle of family and friends. More pertinent to the present point, however, is how Adam declares that what is crucial to good parenting is the “emotional engagement and dedication” rather than any “technical” information or know-how. In our words, it is their skillful attunement to the situation at hand that enables these parents to judiciously manage their emotions, positioning them as experts in child care. The expertise in question is the result, not merely of a well-formulated vision and adequate information, but, primarily, of the ability to manage and implement such vision and information through well-attuned emotional engagement.

As the fathers describe how they gather information and develop their nurturing skills appears that in practice those who impart the requisite information are often women, whether friends and relatives, as in Adam’s case, or participants in virtual forums, as in Yair’s above-quoted description of his consultation with the members of a lesbian mothers’ forum. Yet the fathers tend to downplay these gendered circumstances and ignore the underlying structural constraints and patriarchal social arrangements that shape parental know-how.

Taken together, the folk model of parenthood as engineering invokes a gender-neutral therapeutic discourse, one which rejects essentialist gender roles and tacit prior knowledge and celebrates instead a gradual process of acquiring expertise through learning. Such consciously learnt expertise is more conspicuous when possessed by men, however, precisely because it is women who are viewed as the hegemonic proprietors of parenting knowledge. Fathers’ ability to ask questions, acquire the requisite knowledge, and implement that knowledge using emotion management skills is thus an apt reflection of the lay therapeutic expertise associated with parenthood as engineering.

The notion of acquiring expertise through gradual learning is encapsulated in a recurrent theme in the men’s narratives connecting their incipient fatherhood with greater “maturity,” as Shai noted “We started a relationship; we were both older and relatively mature.” The interviewees’ self-perception of attaining relative maturity prior to becoming a parent was contrary to the common view that considers parenthood as a precondition of personal maturity (Lupton & Barclay, 1997). Whereas under this dominant view, having children is the chief gateway to maturity, more than other social qualifications such as education, employment, or marriage (Donat, 2010), emerging from our interviewees accounts is a view that considers emotional maturity as a precondition to having children. Danny, who decided to become a father through coparenting at the age of 52 years, makes clear this distinction, when comparing his transition to parenthood with that of his parents:

The meaning of being an older father . . . I can’t turn the clock back and there’s no other option; I had the luck of being born to very young parents and I was the one raising them, so to speak; that’s not going to happen here . . .

In this and other accounts immaturity is implicitly equated with an impetuous process of parenting lacking deliberate planning and self-reflection. Consequently, “mature” fathers end up being more qualified parents. By creating a hierarchy of maturity the stress on expertise implicitly creates also a hierarchy of paternal competence and adequacy. These tacit perceptions illustrate how this folk model is imbued in the logic of the therapeutic discourse and liberal ideology. Under this logic everyone, female or male, can become good parents if they specialize in the job, that is, if they display emotional maturity by meeting the required standards and developing the appropriate emotional skills necessary to ascertain their child’s personal growth and self-actualization.

Conclusion

The latter half of the 20th century witnessed a change in scholarly conceptions of parenthood and parenting, away from the view of parenthood as an ascribed relationship and toward its view as a practice or a “job” (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011). A prior conception of parenthood as a job can already be found in traditional discussions of gender “specialization,” where women’s consignment to child care was construed in terms of domestic “production” complementing men’s paid work outside the home (Becker, 1985; Oppenheimer, 1994). In more contemporary accounts that address fathers’ participation in child care, the potential interchangeability of parental tasks is often likewise construed in terms of specialization, albeit one that depends on individual preferences and mutual coordination of relative skills and available resources (Dienhart, 2001). Building on these gradual reformulations of parenthood as a job and as a specialization, we suggest that a broad cultural shift is occurring in recent years toward a gender-neutral understanding of parenthood as an active social construction that requires expertise.

We have identified this shift with an emerging folk model of parenthood as “engineering,” according to which the parent’s role is conceived as a form of expertise in emotion management, a process of deliberate planning and self-reflective emotional attunement that comprises a vision, information gathering, time planning, and emotional engagement in child care practices. Taken together, these components reflect not only how the ascendancy of the therapeutic discourse transformed parents into clients of professional experts (Furedi, 2002), but also how, ideally, parenthood itself transformed into a form of lay expertise. Given the limited scope of our case study, we could provide only a preliminary sketch of this emerging folk model. More phenomenological exploration of contemporary parenting and in various family forms is called for to explore in greater depth this emerging model of parents as engineers.

Interestingly, this reformulation of the parent role as lay therapeutic expertise is scarcely addressed as such in current scholarship. However, going back to important scholarly terms that captured significant historical shifts in contemporary perceptions of parenting such as “family planning,” “parenting by choice,” “juggling,” “intensive mothering,” or “overparenting” as well as terms pertaining specifically to fathers, that is, “involved” or “responsible” fatherhood, one can see how these terms engage with issues that suggest a gradual scholarly shift toward an understanding of parenthood as an engineered expertise. In contrast to most of these scholarly terms, however, which take into consideration gender roles and gender specialization, the folk model we delineated rests on an ideal of gender-neutral parenthood. This ideal is nested in liberal ideology and effectively declares that everyone can be a parent, female or male, as long as they learn and accomplish the self-reflective emotional attunement necessary to “qualify” for the job.

From an epistemological perspective, the notion of engineering underscores the agency of individuals in planning and shaping their child care practices based on available cultural models, suggesting that parenthood is not merely a social construction but the result of active social engineering. This was evident in the present examples of fathers in new family forms who had to carve out their understandings of parenthood and parenting by simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing existing models of the family. However, traditional breadwinning fathers or partially involved fathers in heteronormative families must also engineer their fathering practices, interpret the available cultural models and adapt them to their individual needs. They simply do so under the aegis of unquestioned conventions which give their individual choices self-evident legitimacy and exempt them from providing justifications.

We would argue, then, that notions of parenthood as engineering run the gamut from explicit, self-reflective engineering among these fathers, to partially reflective engineering among involved fathers, to relatively transparent engineering in families in which women’s role as primary caregivers is taken for granted. Additional research among other types of primary caregiving fathers and among involved fathers is called for to explore these possibilities. Conducting systematic studies on how mothers construct child care as expertise is even more pertinent to fully grasp the significance, implications, and limitations of this folk model and the extent that it may nonetheless vary between the genders. If nothing else, consider how the very expression “mothering as engineering” sounds much odder than the equivalent male terminology.

Our folk model points to an understanding of the role of parenthood as lay expertise that goes beyond previous models of parenting as an expert-guided practice (Bernstein & Triger, 2010; Hays, 1996) and differs from the ways that studies on intensive mothering often referred to the issue of expertise. Walzer (1996) argued (following Hays, 1996) that expert discourse—as found, for example, in guidebooks—sustains gender differentiation in parenting responsibilities, because it burdens mothers with evergrowing emotional demands in child care despite the fact that women also participate in the workforce. Far from considering how the active cultivation of expertise may contribute to a nongendered understanding of parenthood, this line of reasoning seems to reproduce the matricentric view of parenthood.

In contrast, we assume that a sense of lay expertise may actually arise more clearly among fathers than among mothers because fathers are frequently viewed as lacking knowledge, having to ask questions, and, especially, requiring special effort in order to become emotionally involved, whereas mothers are viewed as possessing “natural” maternal know-how with little need to acquire specialized skills. In this respect, although mothers have been the main clients of the therapeutic discourse over the past decades, it seems that caregiving fathers, particularly in new family forms have recently became active agents of parental know-how, have more legitimacy to seek such knowledge and to celebrate it as a form of expertise. It also appears that while much of the discussion of emotion management among mothers centers on concrete child-rearing techniques turning the focus to fathers brings to the fore a different aspect of emotion management in connection with the parental role, understood as a long-term process of emotional socialization associated with personal fulfillment in line with the therapeutic discourse.

It should be emphasized that as a utopian vision, the model of parenthood as engineering ignores the structural gender and class inequalities that continue to shape family life and constrain access to therapeutic-related resources. For one, as indicated by our findings, even fathers in families with no maternal presence often rely on practical information on child care imparted by women from their social networks. For another, the stress on therapeutic lay expertise can reproduce class and cultural hierarchies among men by marginalizing those who fall short of the shifts in ideals of masculinity (Randles, 2018). As privileged men endorse a new masculinity ideology deeply embedded in therapeutic discourse (Kaplan et al., 2017), they may distance themselves from qualities projected onto less privileged men, including overt displays of domination, emotional inexpressivity, and absentee fatherhood (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014; Hondagneu-Sotelo & Messner, 1994). Thus, men of lower classes who may partly lack the cultural habitus necessary to adapt to the therapeutic vocabulary (Illouz, 2008) could be considered as “disqualified” fathers under this folk model. In its blindness to power relations, this model resembles yet another utopian liberal paradigm arising from therapeutic discourse, that of the “pure relationship” (Giddens, 1992), which was likewise criticized for assuming a democratization of voluntary intimate relations based on the partners’ ability to engage in mutual self-disclosure while underplaying gender inequalities in personal life (Jamieson, 1999).

Finally, whereas the understanding of parenthood as engineering presupposes a gender-neutral model of lay expertise, the actual cultural shift associated with this folk model may also turn out to be significantly gendered, precisely because, as we have suggested, it is reinforced by the entry of men into child care. The implications of this cultural shift may be a renewed division of gender roles analogous to other spheres and occupations where work traditionally done by women has been reconceived as a specialized field of male experts. A telling example is the culinary field where the development of cooking as a (male) profession was accompanied by its deliberate distancing from the everyday domestic cooking of women. This culminated in a culinary hierarchy in which higher status and public recognition is accorded to professional male “chefs” than to domestic female “cooks” (Swinbank, 2002). With the widespread transformation of child care into an area of lay expertise both fathers and mothers—previously viewed as the “natural” possessors of child care know-how—are expected to acquire specialized parenting knowledge. As our interviewees indicated that knowledge is now available, accessible, and easily shorn of its gendered context. Ultimately, a folk model of parenthood as engineering may simultaneously contribute to the “undoing” and “redoing” of parenting as gendered practice.