When Dad Stays Home Too

Abstract

Drawing from 85 semi-structured interviews with fathers and mothers in three cities (Montreal, Toronto, and Chicago), I argue that when fathers in heterosexual couples experience the transition to parenthood in ways that are structurally comparable to mothers, they come to think about and enact parenting in ways that are more similar to mothers. I consider the specific role played by extended time off immediately after the birth of a child in structuring that experience. By drawing fathers into the daily realities of child care, free of workplace constraints, extended time off provides the space necessary for fathers to develop the parenting skills and sense of responsibility that then allows them to be active co-parents rather than helpers to their female partners. This shift from a manager-helper dynamic to that of coparenting creates the opportunity for the development of a more gender-equitable division of labor.

Keywords

fatherhood gender parenting paternity leave

The transition to parenthood is a time of dramatic change for a couple. New mothers often exit the workforce, for varying lengths of time, to recover from birth and to adjust to their new role (Fox 2009). In the United States and Canada, maternity leave, whether state or employer sponsored, often provides the context for this temporary exit.¹ Far fewer fathers experience even a temporary absence from the workforce at the transition to parenthood. Instead, new fathers typically maintain, or sometimes strengthen, their employment ties in the post-birth period (Glauber 2008; Sanchez and Thomson 1997). As a result, men and women experience structurally different pathways into parenthood, which can contribute to different understandings and enactments of parenting.

Research on this important life course event consistently demonstrates that the birth of a child results in a gendered division of labor for most heterosexual couples (Cowan and Cowan 1992; Walzer 1998); women take on the bulk of the unpaid labor, particularly child care (Bianchi et al. 2000; Craig and Mullan 2011), even when couples’ pre-parenting relationship was relatively egalitarian (Calasanti and Bailey 1991; Shelton 2000). A manager-helper dynamic often develops between new parents: Mothers are primarily responsible for child care and related matters, while fathers serve as helpers when needed and asked (Allen and Hawkins 1999; Coltrane 1996; Ehrensaft 1987; Gerson 1993). Largely overlooked in the literature, however, is what happens when men and women experience the transition to parenthood in structurally similar ways. More specifically, do men develop understandings and enactments of parenting that mirror those of women when they, too, exit the workforce temporarily in the immediate post-birth period?

In this article, I argue that when the transition to parenthood is structured for fathers in ways comparable to mothers, fathers come to think about and enact parenting in ways that are similar to mothers. The opportunity to experience the transition to parenthood freed of the demands and constraints of work provides fathers the space to develop a sense of responsibility that is often positioned as a core element of mothering (Fox 2009; Hays 1996; McMahon 1995; Ruddick 1995), while simultaneously gaining mastery of and confidence in parenting tasks. Extended time off for fathers, defined here as greater than three weeks, challenges the popular perception of the naturalness of mothering by highlighting the hands-on, learned nature of parenting (Lamb 2004). By comparing fathers who took extended time off following the birth of a child to fathers who did not, I demonstrate that when fathers do take time off after the birth of a child, they are drawn into the daily realities of responsibility and active parenting much as mothers are. By sampling fathers employed by the same financial services firm but living in three different policy contexts (the Canadian province of Quebec, Canada, and the United States), several important aspects of a father’s employment are held constant across policy context. This research design highlights the importance of state-level policy in facilitating leave-taking experiences for new fathers.

Gender and the Transition to Parenthood

Research on parenting consistently finds that heterosexual couples respond to parenthood by adopting a gendered division of paid and unpaid labor (Baxter, Hewitt, and Western 2005). This finding endures, even as men continue to increase their levels of involvement in family life (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Sayer 2005). Time use data from the United States and Canada have shown a steady increase in the number of hours men spend in both domestic labor and child care (Fisher et al. 2007; Hook 2006), but research also illustrates that men’s involvement is somewhat selective (Jump and Haas 1987). Men tend to participate more in “fun” aspects of child care, aspects of domestic labor that suit their tastes and interests (Coltrane 1995), and highly visible, or public, fathering activities (Shows and Gerstel 2009); women continue to do the more quotidian, labor-intensive tasks, such as meal preparation and bathing (Offer and Schneider 2011).

Three theoretical approaches have guided much of the research on why this gendering occurs: relative resources, time availability, and gender ideology (Coltrane 2000; Greenstein 2000). The first two approaches, drawing heavily from economics theory (Hank and Jurges 2007), emphasize rationality in the division of paid and unpaid labor, positioning housework as something undesirable that both men and women attempt to avoid. A relative resources explanation posits that the partner who brings the most resources to a relationship, often in terms of income, has the most power, enabling that partner to opt out of unpaid labor (Lundberg and Pollack 1996). Similarly, a time availability explanation suggests that child care and domestic labor should fall to the person who has the most time available (Greenstein 2000); more specifically, that the partner who is engaged in the most hours of paid labor performs less unpaid labor. The gender ideology approach emphasizes how attitudes around who should do what vis-à-vis paid and unpaid labor shape how these forms of labor are distributed within couples (Bianchi et al. 2000; Davis and Greenstein 2009). Beliefs that certain tasks and responsibilities are appropriate for women or for men explain why women are more likely to take on certain tasks, while men are more likely to do others (Bulanda 2004).

Although these theories provide useful frameworks for thinking about the division of domestic labor, some argue that they are less helpful in thinking about child care (Coltrane 2007; Craig and Mullan 2011). Both men and women now spend more time in child care than any previous period since the 1960s (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006). Scholars trace this to emerging ideals around intensive parenting (Craig and Mullan 2011; Hays 1996) and concerted cultivation (Lareau 2003). Despite fathers’ increased hours spent in child care, models developed specifically to understand father involvement illustrate a persistent lag in the ways fathers are involved with their children.

Lamb and colleagues provide a useful and popular model for understanding father involvement in child care (Lamb 1987, 2004; Lamb et al. 1985). Unlike previous approaches that enumerated specific (and often very gendered) tasks, this typology identifies broad groupings of ways a parent might be involved, specifically engagement, accessibility, and responsibility. This model captures various forms of involvement, from reading and playing (engagement), to meal preparation while a child does homework (accessibility), to planning and orchestrating around the child (responsibility). When framing the available data on father involvement using this typology, we see that fathers have significantly increased their levels of engagement and accessibility but have changed little in terms of responsibility. Responsibility for children is consistently understood as one of the most fundamental elements of good mothering (Christopher 2012; Doucet 2009; Fox and Worts 1999; Ruddick 1995) and continues to be a form of labor, often invisible, that adds to women’s share of labor in significant ways.

The days, weeks, or months new mothers spend with their newborns following birth, often in the absence of other adults and free of work obligations, is when what is colloquially referred to as maternal instinct develops (Chodorow 1978; Oakley 1979). During this initial period, women develop a sense of responsibility that comes from being the primary care provider, learning cues, needs, and patterns (Bobel 2002; Miller 2007; Walzer 1998). Fathers, more often than not, do not have this time. In important ways, this period establishes parenting patterns that are both difficult to undo and difficult to discern as they become naturalized over time. Moreover, women’s childhood socialization and surrogate caretaking experiences (Coltrane 1989; Lamb 2000) provide them with the opportunity to develop some of the necessary skills for and a sense of confidence in parenting, enabling them to adopt the role of primary caretaker more easily. Together, these experiences contribute to the gendered division of labor when partners become parents.

Although a gendered division of labor is most common among parents, and has strong and meaningful roots in social norms and expectations (West and Zimmerman 1987), several studies of couples that intentionally parent equally illustrate that less gendered ways of apportioning paid and unpaid labor are also possible (Deutsch 1999, 2001; Dienhart 1998; Ehrensaft 1987). Much of this research focuses on whether or not men are capable of being active and nurturing co-parents, rather than simply mother’s helpers. This research suggests that when parents share parenting tasks from the beginning, men develop greater confidence and skill in their own parenting, leading to greater father involvement (Coltrane 1996; Lamb 2000). My study expands beyond the focus on the choices of individual fathers who have elected to share parenting, found in these studies, to highlight the role played by structure in enabling men to develop as active co-parents.

Lending further support to the idea that men can parent as fully as women do is the small, but growing, body of research on fathers who are primary care providers for their children, specifically stay-at-home dads (Doucet 2006, 2009; Rochlen et al. 2008) and fathers parenting alone (Coles 2010; Hook and Chalasani 2008; Risman 1987; Ziol-Guest 2009). Overall, research on both groups finds that when fathers are required to be primarily responsible for all aspects of child care, they are able to do so. By comparing “reluctant fathers,” those who find themselves parenting alone not by their own choice, to single mothers and heterosexual co-parents, Risman (1987) finds that fathers who are situated to parent alone do so in ways quite similar to mothers, revealing much about how structure matters in the enactment of parenting. Much of this research demonstrates men’s capacity for “mothering” (Doucet 2006, 2009), reinforcing the idea that parenting is most often learned by doing, or, to borrow from Lamb, “on the job” (Lamb 1987, 2000).

In short, the gendered division of labor that occurs when men and women parent together is far from biologically inevitable. We have evidence that men and women can do “parenting” in the same way, but research shows that this occurs less frequently when men and women parent together than when men parent alone. In fact, the research that most clearly and definitively illustrates fathers parenting as completely as mothers is the research on stay-at-home dads and single fathers, fathers who are structurally situated to parent as women most commonly do. All this research led me to suspect that when men experience the transition to parenting in ways that are structurally similar to women, men develop a sense of responsibility that is seen as characteristic of mothers’ parenting but far less common in fathers’ parenting. Drawing primarily from interview data with fathers, I demonstrate that fathers who are home during the initial transition to parenthood come to develop a sense of responsibility that permits shared parenting, regardless of the policy context in which they live.

This article contributes to the growing body of literature on men’s experiences in families. While previous research emphasizes the actions of individual fathers, I focus on the structure of the initial transition to parenthood among heterosexual couples. By comparing how leave-taking fathers versus non-leave-taking fathers experience and understand parenting, I highlight the significance of time off from work during the transition to parenthood for new fathers. Specifically, when men are able to leave the workforce for an extended period of time as they transition to parenthood, they too develop a sense of responsibility that enables them to actively co-parent.

Data and Methods

This article draws on data collected as part of a larger, comparative project examining the influence of social policy on father involvement in parenting in the United States, English Canada, and the French-Canadian province of Quebec. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 fathers and 35 of their female partners in Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal. These cities were selected to reflect three of the different family-focused social policy contexts that currently exist in North America. An important component of each of these contexts is the family leave policy.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the federal policy of the United States, provides qualified male and female workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave following the birth or adoption of a child. Department of Labor statistics estimate that approximately 60 percent of the U.S. labor force is covered by this policy, leaving many without access to any type of protected family leave. The Canadian federal plan, Employment Insurance Maternity and Parental Leave Benefits (EI), provides new mothers with 15 weeks of maternity leave, paid at a 55 percent wage replacement level up to a maximum amount. An additional 35 weeks of parental leave is available to either parent, again paid at a wage replacement level of 55 percent. Although parents must meet employment criteria in order to qualify, these requirements are significantly less than those of the FMLA, allowing more workers to qualify. Structured in a similar way to the Canadian federal plan, the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) provides 18 weeks of maternity leave and an additional 32 weeks of shared parental leave. One notable difference from the Canadian plan is the designation of five weeks of nontransferable paternity leave for the father only. Unlike parental leave, this paternity leave is provided on a “use it or lose it” basis: If a father opts not to take it, his female partner cannot add this time to her maternity leave. The Quebec plan also provides a higher average wage replacement level (55-70 percent), higher maximum salary amounts, and lower workforce participation requirements to qualify.

For my study, I recruited fathers from within a single financial services firm with operations in both Canada and the United States. Recruiting within a single firm enabled me to control for some employer-specific structural variation, such as organizational culture around and management support for men’s involvement in families, which has been shown to influence father involvement (Russell and Hwang 2004). The firm’s interest in providing me access to its employees stems from a strong desire to promote workforce gender equality, a goal consistent with its reputation for workplace diversity initiatives, progressive and generous employee benefits, and corporate social responsibility. With regard to family leave, the firm currently has different policies in Canada and the United States, largely because of significant differences in federal leave policies. Employees in Canada or Quebec who take state-supported leave can have up to six weeks of that leave “topped up” by the firm to 90 percent of an employee’s salary, a benefit unavailable to American employees.

The firm’s human resources department was highly involved in recruitment efforts. It sent an email inviting fathers to participate in a study of work–family balance, outlining the scope of the project and detailing the inclusion criteria. In order to participate, fathers had to be cohabiting with the mother of their child(ren), be between the ages of 25 and 50, have at least one child born after 2006,² and reside in the greater Montreal, Toronto, or Chicago area. This invitation was sent to a randomly generated list of 600 male employees (200 in each city), with a second round of 100 invitations going to men in Montreal and Chicago four months later.³ To reach saturation in each city, I also employed a snowball sampling strategy with those fathers who participated in the study.

The resulting sample of fathers included only men in a range of white-collar occupations. All fathers had at least some college education and household incomes that put them firmly in the middle class. My sample included 14 fathers who were visible minorities. The average age of fathers in the sample was 39. Because the sampling strategy centered on the father’s employer, no stay-at-home fathers are in my sample.⁴

Thirty-six couples in the sample were dual-earner couples. All couples were either married or in a long-term common law partnership. Couples had an average of two children, with the number of children per family ranging from one to five. The oldest child was 11 years old and the youngest was three months old. Child care arrangements varied: Twenty-nine couples listed day care as their primary child care arrangement, five currently had a nanny, two relied on family members, and in the remaining 14 couples, the mother stayed at home full time. I was able to interview men in each city who had taken at least three weeks of parental leave. Given differences in social policy, the largest proportion of men who took leave lived in Montreal, the smallest in Chicago.

Table 1.

Leave-Taking by City.

	Montreal	Toronto	Chicago
Leave	10	5	4
No Leave	5	12	14

All fathers who took paternity leave did so at the same time their partners were on maternity leave, overlapping their partners’ time off by between three to eight weeks.⁵ As such, none of the fathers in my sample were sole care providers during their leave. The influence of leave-taking is therefore likely underestimated in this project: the influence of taking leave would be greater were fathers to be on paternity leave alone and acting as sole care providers than on leave with their partners.

Three weeks of paternity leave emerged as a dividing line in defining “extended”: After three weeks, the initial stress and chaos of the immediate post-birth period begins to subside and patterns and routines develop. It was also often the case that extended family members who came to help decreased their involvement after the first two to three weeks, leaving the couple to parent on their own. The presence of extended kin appeared to serve as a block to father involvement, as suggested by prior research (Gerstel and Gallagher 2001). Given these two factors, it is only when fathers remain at home beyond the first three weeks that they begin to develop a parenting style mirroring that of mothers.

Interviews, conducted at a location of the interviewee’s choice, lasted between 45 minutes and almost three hours. All but 10 interviews were conducted in English, the remaining in French. The interview guides for fathers and mothers were structured the same, covering such topics as ideals around good fathering, the division of domestic labor and child care, balancing work and family, and attitudes towards and uses of family leave. Interviews were coded and analyzed using Atlas.ti, drawing on the principles of grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). I draw most heavily from interviews conducted with fathers in this analysis. This choice is motivated, in part, by an interest in highlighting how fathers themselves describe their choices, actions, and experiences as they navigate the transition to parenthood, particularly the still uncommon practice of paternity leave-taking. This emphasis will add significantly to what we know about how fathers understand parenting, gender, and the division of paid and unpaid labor. Space constraints also factor into the inclusion of only limited data from mothers.

This study makes an important contribution to the growing conversation about how men can help address gender inequality, but it is not without limitations. The mothers and fathers in this study all had access to some type of parental leave, whether government or employer supported, and the financial resources that allowed them to take advantage of these leave policies. Not all families have these resources at their disposal. Moreover, the white-collar occupations of the fathers in this study afforded them a degree of workplace flexibility and access to paid personal, sick, and vacation days. Significant numbers of North American workers do not enjoy such a privileged employment position, and the findings presented below should be considered with this in mind.

Deciding to Take Leave

To understand the influence of leave-taking on a father’s parenting requires first considering the decision to take, or not take, leave. Individual attitudes, structural opportunities or limitations, and maternal desire influence this decision in complicated and nuanced ways. My data suggest that although some men make leave-taking decisions based on personal attitudes about work, family, and parenting, others’ decisions are enabled or constrained by policy.

Personal attitudes certainly inform fathers’ decisions around taking leave. This is just as much the case for fathers who do take leave as it is for those who do not. Many fathers who took leave, like 43-year-old Montreal father Tony, expressed a clear desire to be a very involved father, right from the start. For Tony, this included taking the five weeks of paternity leave available to him: “I was just so excited, I was so excited for him. I wanted to be around him 100 percent of the time. I wanted to be his whole world, you know?”⁶ Chad, a 39-year-old father of one from Chicago, articulated a similar interest in being involved right from birth: “You know, I just wanted to be there from the beginning with our first child. I wasn’t actually sure how much time I wanted to be home, so I wanted to be home as long as I could, really.” Tony and Chad captured what most leave-taking fathers described: a sense of excitement about becoming a dad and an enthusiasm for being an involved co-parent. These types of explanations for leave-taking hint at self-selection in terms of who takes leave.

Personal attitudes also played a role in the decision of those men who did not take leave. No less enthusiastic about becoming a dad, fathers who did not take leave either did not see a need to be home or simply did not want to be out of work for an extended period of time. When asked if he would have taken extended (paid) leave were that available, 32-year-old Chicago father Mark said:

I wouldn’t have stayed home for two weeks when [our daughter] was born. Even if it was written in stone and that was common practice, I wouldn’t have stayed home for two weeks. I was home for a week, plus the weekend, and they didn’t need me, so I don’t know if anything more generous, I would take advantage of.

Opting out of leave-taking because of a lack of interest indicates perhaps a more traditional orientation towards gender, parenting, and division of labor. For these leave-takers and non-leave-takers alike, personal beliefs and orientations figured prominently in leave-taking behavior. However, structural factors also influenced fathers’ decisions around leave-taking in important ways.

The leave-taking fathers I’ve described were drawn to paternity leave because of a personal orientation toward shared parenting, but other fathers were more extrinsically motivated to take leave, primarily by policy. Here, the case of Quebec’s leave policy is illustrative of how policy matters. In 2005, the year prior to the introduction of the current plan, 32 percent of Quebec fathers took leave (Marshall 2008). In 2011, just six years later, 76 percent took leave (Findlay and Kohen 2012). This dramatic rise in the number of fathers taking leave coincides with the introduction of Quebec’s new parental leave plan. A plausible explanation for this rapid change is that the policy itself motivated fathers to take leave. With five weeks of nontransferable paternity leave paid at 70 percent of one’s salary, the structure of the Quebec policy makes leave accessible to large numbers of new fathers. A type of threshold effect is detectable: The policy reduces barriers to leave-taking, enabling large numbers of men to take leave. As more men take leave, leave-taking becomes normalized. This suggests that new fathers take leave because that is the norm and not necessarily because they share the types of attitudes and beliefs articulated by the fathers described earlier.

Explaining why he took five weeks of leave after the births of both of his daughters, 33-year-old Montreal father Allan aptly captured the idea that, for many fathers in Quebec, the existence of the policy served as a very real motivator:

Because they gave me five weeks and I was, like, “Yeah!” I mean, really? This is Quebec. I pay, like, 40 percent tax on everything I earn plus 15 percent on everything I buy, plus the extra on gas and alcohol, and anything good in life they tax it twice as much, okay? And then, every once in a while, you get a social program. And this is one of them. So you just look and it and say, ‘Yeah, I’m taking it.’

What this comment, which iterates a commonly expressed sentiment, reveals is that taking leave is not simply a matter of individual attitudes. Instead, particular types of family leave policies appear to facilitate leave-taking among fathers who might otherwise be disinclined to do so.

Policy also constrained fathers in important ways. Across all three policy contexts, many non-leave-taking fathers described wanting to be home for more time after birth, but pointed to one of three structural limitations that made leave-taking impossible: concerns about reactions from superiors and colleagues; wanting to maximize the weeks of leave available to their partners; and financial limitations.

The most commonly cited reason for not taking more extended time off was a concern for how this would be perceived by supervisors, colleagues, and, sometimes, clients. When asked about the possibility of taking longer than the two weeks he did take, 43-year-old Chicago father Patrick captured a fear expressed by many fathers: “Well, that’s kind of a tough question. I probably wouldn’t have because of the way it would’ve been viewed. I mean, honestly—and I’ve heard executives say this—excuse the language—‘I can’t fucking believe that guy took a month off after the birth of his baby.’ I’ve heard people say it.” Like Patrick, many fathers felt pulled back to work by concerns about how violating the image of the ideal worker would impact their work lives. That this was the only reason given by Quebec fathers who opted not to take paternity leave points to the continued salience of a breadwinner identity among men.

A uniquely Canadian constraint relates to the structure of the federal leave policy. Because the only weeks of leave fathers outside Quebec have access to are the shared weeks of parental leave, a father taking leave reduces the number of weeks a mother can take. Thirty-five-year-old Toronto father Brad, for example, said his wife wanted to be home for the whole year, so he let her take the fifty weeks of combined maternity and parental leave, plus the mandatory two-week waiting period: “I knew she loved it and I just would never do that to her. It would’ve taken weeks off of her year and I just would never have done that.”

While fathers like Brad describe not wanting to reduce their partner’s leave, others told me that their partners were not open to sharing parental leave, suggesting maternal gatekeeping when it comes to leave allocation (Allen and Hawkins 1999). When I asked Jack, a 43-year-old Toronto father, why he opted not to take leave, he straightforwardly replied that his wife had said she was taking all the available leave.

Finally, many families felt unable to survive the significant reduction in wages that came with both partners being on leave. Here again we see how much policy can play a role in deciding to take leave: American fathers, who did not have access to any wage replacement, invoked this limitation more than their Canadian counterparts.

There is certainly a degree of selectivity in who does and does not take leave. That some Quebec fathers decide against leave-taking in a policy supportive context, where generous paid leave is available, while American fathers do take leave, despite a lack of significant policy support for this decision, certainly validates the idea that a degree of personal preference plays into leave-taking behavior. My data also show, however, that it is not the case that all men who take leave do so because of a predisposition to ideals of co-parenting. Furthermore, it would be inaccurate to assume that all those who do not take leave opt not to because of personal preference or traditional views on gender, parenting, and the division of labor. Whatever the reason for it, leave-taking enables fathers to develop the responsibility necessary for them to actively co-parent along with their partners, as I will now show.

Leave-Taking Men

Unlike women, who often have some “surrogate” parenting experiences prior to becoming mothers (e.g., babysitting, caring for siblings/extended family), men’s more limited exposure to infant/child care means they often find themselves engaged in child care without much direct experience prior to becoming fathers (Lamb 2004). Eric, a 45-year-old father of two from Montreal, described his experience: “Like, in my case, I had no exposure. I’m the youngest sibling in my family. No exposure to infants, diapers—I was walking into a whole new reality.” For Eric, taking five weeks of paternity leave was an eye-opening experience, one that he felt really showed him what infant care entails:

Just seeing, or being involved in the first two weeks and the three afterwards, you’re doing stuff that you normally wouldn’t have done [if you were back at work]. So it’s more of an awareness, definitely. Obviously there’s task sharing, being more aware of what’s going on, the concerns, challenges, whatever, that she may have, that maybe if I wasn’t there for the first weeks, I would be oblivious and she would have to deal with them on her own.

The availability of an extended period of parental leave allows fathers the opportunity to gain a sense of the “concerns” of parenting, many of which are invisible and therefore might go unnoticed by a father who is back at work. Forty-three-year-old Toronto father James had taken eight weeks of leave after the birth of his first child and six weeks following the birth of his second child. Like Eric, he found the experience to be invaluable in gaining a deeper understanding of caretaking: “I think, you know, every spouse should do that because it’s an experience that will only help you understand in the long run what the heck your wife is going through.” While James’s comment reflects a continued connection between women and care work, he is also pointing to the way being on leave provides men with a fuller understanding of parenting that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. While paternal skill-building is also important, it is this fuller understanding of parenting that enables fathers to actively engage in parenting in a self-directed way, rather than relying on their partner’s guidance. By sharing more than just tasks, partners become more equal co-parents than when one partner manages and delegates child care and related domestic labor.

For Paul, a 27-year-old first-time father from Montreal, five weeks of paternity leave challenged his previous understanding of what it meant to be home with an infant:

I had this naïve thinking that I’m going to be off and I’m going to be able to catch up on all these things. I’m going to have time to myself, to write music and do this stuff. Oh, my gosh, it was such a slap in the face! All my friends at work who were parents didn’t say a thing—they just smirked: “Oh yeah, you’re going to do all of that, eh? Have fun with that.” It did not happen. Those five weeks went by so fast—we were constantly taking care of [our son]. Really made me realize to what extent taking care of a child is more than a full-time job. You don’t get your 15-minute breaks, your half-hour breaks when you want. You don’t get time off. You don’t have a switch off like you do at work. Really, your attention is always—especially with a newborn—100 percent on him.

Expecting a more leisurely experience while on paternity leave, Paul found his expectations to be at odds with the reality of daily life with an infant. In place of “free time,” Paul found his days structured by his new reality as a father. My interview with Paul’s wife, Sarah, revealed how this experience continued to inform his parenting after he returned to work, while Sarah was still on maternity leave:

He’s never once told me, “You have it easy,” you know, he’s never, ever said that. He’s always respected that this is a job and, I think, the five weeks that they give us paternity leave in the beginning is so fantastic. Because it makes the husband realize what kind of a . . . the responsibility and job, everything that the day entails and I think, you know, Paul experienced that and he’s, like, “This is harder than what I do,” you know. And he’s said that before, because he knows he can take breaks and, you know, he could have his hour lunch and he can just walk away and be hands-free.

Sarah’s comment reflects what many mothers whose partners had taken leave said about how leave-taking influenced not only how their partners thought about parenting but also how they enact parenting, even after their leave had ended.

For the men who took advantage of the opportunity to be home for several weeks, this expanded understanding of what it means to care for a child was complemented by the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to share care responsibilities with their partners. Chad, a Chicago father mentioned earlier, pointed to the “24 hours a day” aspect of being on leave as being particularly helpful in learning to parent:

I think I kind of needed that. Because, especially when she was first born, both of us . . . I mean, your mind is going a hundred miles an hour and you really don’t know what to expect when you bring the baby home. And, what you’re supposed to do. And, just in those first few weeks, I think you learn a lot. Being able to spend 24 hours a day, you know, at home with the child, yeah, I think it helped.

“Being able to spend 24 hours a day” is key in extended leave-taking. With this kind of presence, freed of workforce obligations, fathers are able to learn to parent in much the same way as mothers, through continuous hands-on participation (Miller 2007), creating the space for shared parenting.

Claudio, a 41-year-old father of one from Montreal who took a total of six weeks of leave, explained why he thought leave-taking is so important:

Because or else it becomes a routine, where the mom does the everyday necessities with the child and the dad comes home at night, spends a little time, plays with him, and that’s it. But I find that if you’re in there, every day with the child, taking care of him, making his meals in the morning, at lunch, putting him to sleep, like, all the little details, you’ll become attached just as much as the mom. Then it no longer seems like just the mom who has the initiative to look after all these things. It becomes the dad and the mom together.

Informed by his experience of being on leave, Claudio described parenting as a mutually shared endeavor between partners. He went on to describe a “divide and conquer” strategy of parenting common among leave-taking fathers:

When you have a child, you have to work together. To give an example, say in the evening, depending on who comes home first, we’ll eat together, but then I’ll go give him his bath and then my partner looks after the kitchen. And the reverse happens: If she goes and does the bath, then I take care of the kitchen and all that.

To use Claudio’s language, leave-taking allows fathers to develop “the initiative,” which moves a couple beyond a manager-helper style of parenting and towards a co-parenting relationship.

With these parenting skills and newly developed carework capabilities, many fathers who took leave did see themselves as co-parents, capable of all aspects of child care, rather than just helpers. After taking two six-week parental leaves, Jon, a 40-year-old Torontonian father, experienced an internal struggle with having to return to work: “Honestly, I can do everything you can do. Why do I have to go back to work? Then there is the argument, ‘Well, I had the kid and I’m the mother.’ Yeah, I get that, but I’m a hands-on dad and I can do everything you can do.” Jon felt he was capable of all the same dimensions of parenting as his wife; he believed his time off enabled him to gain mastery of the necessary parenting skills and the confidence to parent, two factors that have been shown to enhance father involvement (Lamb 1987; Lamb et al. 1985; Pleck and Masciadrelli 2004).

Non-Leave-Takers

The experiences of fathers who took more than three weeks of parental leave stand in sharp contrast to those of men who took little leave following the birth of their children. The understandings of parenting articulated by fathers who did not take leave provide further support for the claim that extended leave-taking by fathers has the potential to challenge gendered understandings of parenting in significant ways.

In North America, extended parental leave is uncommon among new fathers. Although concerns about how extended time off would be perceived by co-workers, particularly managers and supervisors, were often cited as reasons for not taking leave, fathers just as frequently said they did not take leave because they did not have a sense of their own utility at home during the first few months following birth. Jack, one of the Toronto fathers whose partner would not let him take any of the available weeks of leave, stated:

That’s kind of the time [the first six weeks] when you’re the least helpful around the house, from my perspective. Like, if you told me the last six weeks of the [first] year . . . it would make a lot of sense, right? Because at that point your kid is running around, walking, you know, interactive and a lot of work. But the first six weeks they’re just sleeping, pooping, and eating. So, I think that’s part of it. It’s like, okay, so you take six weeks off. You’re really just sitting there most of the time. You’re not really helping.

In many ways, this understanding of infant care reflects Paul’s views prior to taking leave. Jack, who took less than a week of leave following each of his children’s births, believed there would have been little for him to do had he taken leave: “You’re . . . just sitting there most of the time.” Likewise, Paul expected that being home with his new son would involve lots of “free time,” but instead experienced quite the opposite. In the absence of this experience, Jack retained an understanding of infant care as undemanding and non-labor intensive. Jack’s understanding of parenting focused solely on visible material tasks and physical labor, and responsibility, which is often an invisible form of labor, is completely absent from his viewpoint. Instead, a manager-helper dynamic is evident in how Jack articulates his presence as either helpful or not helpful.

Returning to work after a short time off also serves as an impediment to new fathers gaining the mastery and confidence that would enable them to actively co-parent. Mark, who, earlier in this article, said he wouldn’t have taken paid leave were it available, felt that his wife “picked it [parenting] up pretty quickly” and thus saw no reason for him to be home for longer than he was. Later in our interview, however, Mark reflected on the limitations of his parenting:

I need instructions to feed [our daughter]. I could be more, sort of, in tune with, you know, being able to pick up where Leslie dropped off, you know, right away. Like, I sometimes have to think about, what if, you know, something happened to Leslie and it was just me with Haley? You know, would she be in as good hands? And, I think, she would be eventually because, you know, I would . . . I would learn. But, I guess, I just don’t know as much about taking care of [our daughter] as Leslie does now.

In my interview with Mark’s wife Leslie, I asked if they had a system for dividing up child care and domestic labor. Leslie was quick to answer: “Oh yes, we have a system. It’s called I do everything, and Mark does nothing.” She paused and then added, “I take that back; he walks the dog.” Taken together, Mark and Leslie’s comments clearly illustrate the manager-helper dynamic that commonly develops when fathers quickly return to work: While their wives develop the necessary knowledge and parenting skills, their own parenting capabilities are less autonomous and rely more on the direction of their partners. Right from birth, this structurally different experience of parenting produces a gendered division of labor. Mothers’ time at home, engaged completely in parenting, naturalizes and erases the hands-on, learned nature of parenting, while fathers’ return to work curbs their growth in this area.

Charles, a 41-year-old Chicago father whose wife was expecting their third child at the time of our interview, planned to take off no more than a week when his son arrived. Echoing the sentiments of other fathers who took about a week off, Charles felt that there was no reason for him, as the dad, to be at home for long: “Well, I mean, I’m the dad, so I don’t really need to take that many days off, so I’ll probably only take, you know, five days, a week, just to help my wife acclimate.” As with the other fathers who were at home briefly, Charles did not see why—as the father—he would need to be off for any extended period of time. Unlike those fathers who took an extended leave, non-leave-taking fathers are not intimately involved in the daily realities of family life beyond this initial period of adjustment. This structural reality very much limits their understanding of parenting, making them less able to respond to new, previously unknown needs or tasks than fathers who do stay home.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that structuring men’s initial experience of parenting in a way similar to how it is often structured for women—that is to say, freed of workplace responsibilities and fully engaged in parenting—allows men to develop the type of parental responsibility that enables them to be active co-parents. Extended leave challenges the perceived naturalness of women’s superior parenting capabilities by providing men with time to develop a similar sense of parenting through hands-on experience. Being present provides insight into what needs to be done, while extended exposure enables participation and practice. Fathers, then, are able to move from the helper role to that of co-parent. These findings, coupled with previous research that demonstrates men’s early and continued involvement in child care leads to greater long-term involvement (Coltrane 1996), suggest that structuring men’s transition to parenting in ways more similar to mothers’ has tremendous potential to distribute responsibility for child care more evenly between partners in heterosexual couples even after a father’s leave has ended. This type of shared parenting, in which couples not only share tasks but also share responsibility, can ultimately shift the gender dynamics in a couple in the direction of equality.

A quick return to work by fathers, on the other hand, establishes a pattern of care that centers on mothers. Research continues to document that men’s responsibility lags behind women’s, even as fathers have become more engaged and accessible to their children. Because women exit the workforce, however briefly, during this initial transition period, new mothers are able to develop not only parenting skills but a sense of responsibility as well. Since responsibility is often enacted in invisible ways, it remains absent from how fathers understand and enact parenting when they themselves are not positioned to develop this sense of responsibility.

The findings presented here likely underestimate how paternity leave can help lay the foundation for a co-parenting relationship where mothers and fathers share responsibility. Because all leave-taking fathers in this study took leave concurrently with their partners, they were never solely responsible for their child(ren). Despite this, leave-taking fathers still gained a broader understanding of parenting than fathers who did not take leave. This suggests that if fathers did have the opportunity to be on leave alone, their understandings and enactments of parenting would have even greater depth. Similarly, the comparatively short leaves taken by fathers, even those defined here as extended, meant that mothers spent significantly longer periods fully immersed in parenting. Again, if fathers spent similarly lengthy periods of time fully engaged in parenting, enhanced parenting skills and sense of responsibility would likely develop.

Further research should consider the transition to parenthood among lower-income and working-class couples across policy contexts. This important line of inquiry would do much to illuminate the motivations, limitations, and impacts of policy on couples with fewer resources at their disposal, providing a more complete understanding of how to best support the highest number of North American families. Given that both the Canadian and Quebec policies allow for equal leave sharing among partners, a second promising line of inquiry would be to consider couples who do share the available weeks of leave more equally, either concurrently or sequentially. Examining the factors that lead to this arrangement, how couples organize the leave, and how those decisions influence parenting by both partners would also expand what we know about the potential of such flexible social policies.

The family leave policy contexts of the United States, Canada, and the Canadian province of Quebec provide a useful comparative framework for considering father involvement. This article has demonstrated the promising ways paternal leave-taking can lead to men becoming active and responsible co-parents. Given the significant difference in leave take-up among fathers in these three policy contexts, and the specific ways fathers pointed to policy as an enabling factor in their decision to take leave, this article also lends support to government-supported family leave policies that provide paid weeks of leave for both new mothers and new fathers. This type of family leave policy would encourage the largest number of men to take advantage of the opportunity to be home with their newborn, leading ultimately to increased levels of co-parenting and more gender-equitable divisions of labor in North American families overall.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Bruce Barry, Laura Carpenter, Holly McCammon, Daniel Morrison, Ken Sun, Joya Misra, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

Erin Rehel is an assistant professor of sociology at Youngstown State University. Her research and teaching focuses on fathering, work and family, men and masculinities, gender, and comparative social policy.

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