Beyond “Traditional” and “New”: An Attempt of Redefinition of Contemporary Fatherhoods through Discursive Practices and Practices of Care

Abstract

In this article, I use thirty-five interviews with heterosexual Italian fathers to problematize the distinction between “traditional” and “new” fatherhood. Adopting a performative approach to gender, masculinity, and fatherhood, I pursue my objective showing the existence of several contemporary fatherhoods, combining two dimensions: men’s discursive practices of self-positioning with respect to fatherhood and the actual practices of care performed with their children. By creating a taxonomy, I identify a third hybrid model of fatherhood and clarify the features that characterize new and traditional fatherhood, respectively, while exploring the interactions between practices.

Keywords

new fatherhood plural fatherhoods practices of care discursive self-positioning performativity

Despite the wide use of the label “new fatherhood”—often used in opposition to traditional fatherhood—a shared academic definition of this concept and of the practices related to it has not yet been reached. In the present article, combining the doing gender theory of West and Zimmerman (1987) with the positioning theory of Hollway (1984), Davies and Harré (1990), Baxter (2003), and Harré et al. (2009), I will use thirty-five interviews with heterosexual Italian fathers to problematize the distinction between new and traditional fatherhood and to reflect upon the practices of fatherhood. I will employ the adjective new instead of “involved” or “intimate” (Dermott 2008; Miller 2011b) because in an Italian context, the concept is typically invoked in opposition to the traditional model of fatherhood, in a deliberate attempt to mark the distance from the men of the past. However, several elements are still unclear: when such an innovation occurred, what exactly makes this fatherhood a break with the past, and whether this Manichean vision is useful to represent actual experiences of contemporary fathers.

My choice of Italy as case study derives from three reasons. Firstly, Italy is a very traditional country in terms of both welfare structure and practices of parenthood. This country, in fact, is characterized by a familialistic mother-centered welfare state (Saraceno and Keck 2011), an unbalanced sharing of care duties in heterosexual couples, and traditional gender norms that associate women with care work and men with breadwinning. However, in the last few years, more equal policies and gender attitudes (though not necessarily practices) have been emerging, and the issue of fatherhood has been arising. The second aspect that makes Italy a particularly interesting case study is to do with this ongoing evolution, as well as with the limited number of academic researches on fatherhood focused on this national context. Finally, since these changes are quite recent, Italy is a country where innovation and tradition still coexist, creating contradictions between men as well as in individual fathers’ lives.

This article is organized in three sections. The first section explores the state of art of research on fatherhood in Italy and in Western countries and is meant to show how fatherhood, and new fatherhood in particular, are conceptualized in the academic debate. The second section explains the aims of this article and the methodology used to pursue them. Since gender, masculinity, and fatherhood are all enacted in daily life, I decided to interview fathers and to analyze my data distinguishing between discursive practices and practices of care performed by fathers through an analytic approach centered on critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Combining the discursive self-positioning of men (Hollway 1984; Davies and Harré 1990; Baxter 2003; Harré et al. 2009) with respect to fatherhood and the actual practices of care they perform with their children, in the third section of this article I describe the heterogeneity of my sample, recognizing the existence of several fatherhoods. This approach has allowed me to compile a taxonomy in which both discursive practices and practices of care are relevant: while fathers at the two extremes embody a “market-oriented” and a “care-oriented” fatherhood, respectively, the fathers in the central positions constitute a hybrid model.

Fatherhood in Contemporary Academic Debate

In recent years, academic researches on fatherhood as a sociological phenomenon have been spreading throughout Europe including Italy. The notion of involved/intimate/nurturing/new fatherhood has become more commonplace both in academic and in public debate. However, new fatherhood remains quite an indefinite object, whose empirical referents still need to be accurately defined.

In fact, as pointed out by Dermott and Miller (2015), even if some shifts in policies, practices, and language are taking place, it is still difficult to say how far these shifts are indicative of a new type of fatherhood. This is particularly true also because no researches on fatherhood from before the 1970s are available; this makes it difficult to say what is new in contemporary fatherhood and in respect to what.

Nevertheless, social expectations as well as men’s individual expectations are moving toward the ideal of the new involved father, who is emotionally and economically engaged and who spends time with his children (Dermott 2008; Featherstone 2009; Miller 2011b; Murgia and Poggio 2011; Dermott and Miller 2015; Naldini 2015).

Interpreting gender and fatherhood as performative means to consider them as the result of different practices enacted in daily life, which may also be discursive in nature. From the standpoint of discursive practices among contemporary fathers, changes are occurring in the language encompassing the importance of caring, bonding, and emotional connection achievable by spending time with one’s child. The notion of “being there” is a central feature in the discourses about the new good father; this includes men’s self-perception (Dermott 2008; Miller 2011b; Dermott and Miller 2015; Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015; Bosoni, Crespi, and Ruspini 2016). Some authors (Hollway 1984; Davies and Harré 1990; Baxter 2003; Harré et al. 2009) have used the concept of positioning to describe how people position themselves and are positioned by others through discursive practices and how the individual’s subjectivity is generated through the learning and use of certain discursive practices.

“A particular strength of the poststructuralist research paradigm […] is that it recognises both the constitutive force of discourse, and in particular of discursive practices and at the same time recognises that people are capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices. We shall argue that the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. A subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights […]” (Davies and Harré 1990, 46).

Among these discursive practices, Hollway (1984) explores those of self- or reflexive positioning, through which people locate themselves in the gender arena and subsequently build and perform gendered identities. Discourses make gender positions available for subjects to adopt, and these positions are in relation to other people: women and men—but also men and men, and women and women—are placed, and place themselves, in relation to each other through the meanings that a particular discourse makes available to them. Therefore, men and fathers (as well as women and mothers) can identify with and conform to traditional discursive constructions of masculinity and fatherhood. In fact, researches (Robb 2003) have shown that men can make sense of their experience as fathers through the most common culturally available discursive frameworks, which nowadays encompass “presence” and “involvement.” Similarly, they can use these interpretative repertoires to compare and position themselves in relation to other men and fathers, real or imaginary.

If the notion of presence is recognized as central to the discursive construction of the new father in the academic debate about fatherhood, only some authors include breadwinning and material provision for the family among the important features of the new father (Townsend 2002; Henwood and Procter 2003; Dermott 2008); this is in a social and historical context where the man’s role as sole breadwinner of the family has declined. In this scenario, time becomes a key element because breadwinning and a substantial presence at home are very difficult to combine for a father. As already noted by Dermott, in fact, “a good father-child relationship is possible as long as some period of time is given over to it: time is not irrelevant to men’s parenting” (Dermott 2008, 62). However, fathers—unlike mothers—can engage both in fathering, spending more time than in the past with their children, and in breadwinning, without feeling compelled to justify their commitment to paid work (Miller 2011b). In the case of Italy, although fathers spend more time with their children than formerly (Borlini 2008a; Murgia and Poggio 2011; Bosoni, Crespi, and Ruspini 2016), breadwinning remains the keystone around which men’s identity is constructed (Magaraggia 2012). For this reason, Italian fathers very frequently insist on the quality of time spent with their children rather than the quantity (Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015). Nevertheless, research has shown that despite generally long work hours, some fathers are still able to spend time with their children by cutting back on their leisure time or incorporating their children in it (McGill 2014).

As for the practices of fatherhood and care, men are more involved now, on a one-to-one basis, in educational activities and routine care, also because it is socially more acceptable for them to express their feelings and to engage in practices of physical intimacy with a baby (Dermott and Miller 2015). However, fathers continue to be generally more involved in leisure and outdoor activities than in the routine ones (Wall and Arnold 2007; Zajczyk and Ruspini 2008; Kay 2009; Miller 2011b; Naldini 2015). Therefore, especially in Italy, even the so-called new fathers continue to occupy a role of secondary caregivers in most cases—their partners’ “helpers” at best (Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015). In fact, fathers taking on the role of primary carer and stay-at-home fathers remain exceptional (Doucet 2004; Ruspini 2013); when they do so, this is often the result of precarious and difficult labor conditions that force men to stay at home or reduce their commitment to paid work (Borlini 2008b; Dermott and Miller 2015).

Research Design

The aim of this article is to problematize the distinction between new and traditional fatherhood, reflecting upon the relative practices and challenging both a linear model of the changes that have occurred in fatherhood and a conception of contemporary and past fatherhood as homogeneous entities. Although it is quite difficult today to explore past fatherhood(s), it is possible to broaden our understanding of contemporary fatherhoods and to grasp their variability in the present. Therefore, the aim is to show the existence of various forms of contemporary fatherhood that the label new alone is unable to describe. In fact, if the label new fatherhood can be applied to every father who generically defines himself involved and present with his children, potentially every man could be considered as a “new father.” Besides, if every practice enacted in the present defines the innovation, this criterion is no longer useful to discern and to grasp differences between fathers.

To pursue my objective, in 2015–2016, I interviewed thirty-five heterosexual Italian fathers living in the Piedmont region in Northern Italy, who had at least one child aged under three. The interviewees were all employed in the private sector, with open-ended contracts, and they came from disparate cultural and social backgrounds, though most were well educated. Twenty-five of them used parental leave. All the interviewees, except for one, were married and/or lived with their partners, who were also all employed. The characteristics of the sample are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1.

Characteristics of the Sample.

Age	30–35	36–40		>40
	8	12		15
Degree	Junior high school	High school		Master
	5	10		20
Position	Blue collar	White collar		Middle manager
	11	17		7
Type of contract	Freelancer	Fixed-term		Open-ended
	—	—		35
	Full time		Part time
	31		4
Position and contract of the partner	Freelancer	Employee with fixed term Contract		Employee with open ended Contract
	6	2		27
	—	Full time		Part time
		21		8

I conducted semistructured interviews, focusing on four main areas: the practices of fatherhood, the construction of their own model of fatherhood and the role of other people (their fathers, partners, friends, colleagues), the relationship with the main features of masculinity (especially paid work), and the ideal models of fatherhood and motherhood. The interviews were audio recorded, then transcribed verbatim and analyzed through the Atlas.ti software version 7.5.18. I used critical discourse analysis, which is not just analysis of discourse, but a systematic analysis of relations between discourse and other social processes (Fairclough 2013)—in this case, the social construction of fatherhood and masculinity, and the impact of power dynamics on them. Since critical discourse analysis is not just a general commentary on discourse, but also includes some form of systematic analysis of texts (ibidem), I conducted a thematic analysis. Thematic analysis was based on multiple readings of the entire data set and was conducted in three phases. I began by elaborating an interpretive grid with families of codes to explore the interviewees’ practices and experiences of fatherhood, the significance that men attach to their experience as fathers, and how fatherhood relates to the construction of masculinity and its keystone, that is, paid work. Secondly, I used Atlas.ti to analyze every interview singularly. Finally, I conducted a comparative analysis of all the interviews. In order to guarantee confidentiality and privacy to the interviewees, participants were invited to sign an informed consent form. In quotations, all their identifying characteristics and real names have been changed.

Beyond Traditional and New Fatherhood

In order to problematize the distinction between traditional and new fatherhood, a deep reflection upon the respective practices is needed. In fact, as already acknowledged by other authors, “in the discourse of new fatherhood, fathering is an—increasingly important and increasingly demanded—additional requirement for paternity, but it is not an essential defining characteristic, as it is for maternity” (Lengersdorf and Meuser 2016, 156). In public debate, indeed, there is a strong insistence on the culturally available repertoire of presence and emotional involvement as opposed to past fathers’ absence and distance, but there is a lack of discussion on contemporary fathering, practices of care, and gender power dynamics within heterosexual couples. Especially in Italy, in fact, the trend is to prioritize the discursive self-positioning of men toward fatherhood, without exploring in depth the actual practices of care they perform.

For these reasons, I adopted a distinction between “practices of fatherhood,” referring to actual practices of care performed with their children, and “self-positioning,” referring to discursive practices used to describe themselves as fathers and the effect of fatherhood on their identity construction. Starting from the discursive cultural repertoire that separates fathers between traditional and “new,” I added a further dimension of analysis that concerns the actual practices of care to distinguish how these men talk about themselves from what they do as fathers (Figure 1). In this way, I was able to build a taxonomy, with the aim of creating an analytical tool that may help bring order to practices of fatherhood; in fact, the identification of a third hybrid model that results from this research helps clarify the features of traditional and new fatherhoods.

Figure 1.

Taxonomy of fathers combining discursive self-positioning and actual practices of care.

As to the discursive practices, I used self-positioning theory to explore how men position themselves with respect to other men, in particular whether they stress more their role as breadwinner or as fathers. Of course, the two “roles” are not necessarily in contradiction and life is more than family and work, but the “separate spheres” approach—at least in the case of Italy—still stands. Analyzing the discursive practices of my interviewees, I was able to identify two groups on the basis of how much importance they give to fatherhood (as opposed to breadwinning) in their identity construction as men and to their emotional involvement with their children.

It is important to note that, even when fatherhood occupies a central position in the discursive construction of these men’s identities, this does not mean that it replaced the importance of paid work, especially considering that in Italy changes in gender models are slower than in other European countries. In fact, generally speaking, many Italian fathers who identify with the culturally available discursive framework of presence and being there and point out that it is important to be with the children on a daily basis, nonetheless continue to devote long time to paid work.

That said, among interviewees for whose in the discursive construction of masculinity fatherhood is more central, a redefinition of the relationship with paid work somehow occurs—sometimes in the direction of a reduction of the centrality of paid work in their identity construction as men, sometimes in the direction of the meaning of paid work, which becomes a practice of care in a broad sense, as we will see more in detail below.

Concerning the second dimension linked to the actual practices of care, I distinguished between innovative and traditional. Of course, this distinction is useful in relation to fathers specifically: there are no such things as innovative practices of care in absolute terms, but there are practices that fathers in general do not perform.¹ As already mentioned, especially in Italy, fathers tend to perform recreational nonroutine activities with their children, leaving the physical and routine ones to mothers. Therefore, I distinguished between fathers who perform routine activities of care on a regular basis and fathers who never or very rarely spend some time with their children, and when they do engage at most in leisure activities. In the following sections, I will try to point out the main features of the three models I have identified, weaving together theory and empirical observation.

Neoliberal Fathers

The first peculiar aspect of this Italian case is that some fathers of the sample (six of thirty-five) (I) (see Figure 1) do not describe themselves as involved with their children either emotionally or as concerns practices of care. This is interesting because, although the dominant discourse about fatherhood concerns involvement and bonding, they do not feel ashamed by admitting their distance from their children, making it clear how much, in the Italian context, traditional stereotypes about gender roles are still relevant and legitimized. These men embody the model of fatherhood defined as traditional in academic parlance, being absent, emotionally detached and career-oriented (Finn and Henwood 2009; Miller 2011a; Baker and Bosoni 2015). However, these fathers, far from being “men of the past,” are products of the neoliberal era, combining as they do some traits belonging to traditional bourgeois masculinity with others belonging to contemporary transnational business masculinity (Connell 2005; Connell and Wood 2005). In fact, the neoliberal era’s emphasis on competition (re)produces a long-hours culture, combined with a tendency to treat private life as an enterprise and the abandonment of some of the traditional content of bourgeois masculinity, such as domestic patriarchy (ibidem). As can be surmised from the quotation below, taken from an interview with a father of a six-month daughter, for these men the commitment to paid work has absolute priority over other aspects of their lives, and they do not even describe it as a form of care practice in a broad sense. In the case of this group of fathers, breadwinning has the mere function of building a solid traditional identity as a working man. It is worth pointing out that the strong sense of responsibility they express toward paid work is completely absent when they talk about their children and their role in the family.

My working time ends at 5 p.m. […], but I have never got out of the office at 5 p.m. No one told me to do that, it’s just me, frankly it’s a personal choice. I mean, I think it is worthwhile to stay longer at work. Of course, you cut some time off your family, but you have to do it because if you want to do things right you have to stay longer at work. It is right to stay longer at work; to dash off as soon as it’s time is not in my DNA. (Luigi, thirty-three years old, master’s degree, white-collar worker)

The interesting aspect here is the fact that these men are not (only) driven by traditional gender stereotypes but also by a globalized neoliberal labor market whose demands are regarded as not negotiable. Therefore, on the one hand, these men explicitly choose not to be present at home; on the other, they describe a labor market that does not allow any kind of choice. At any rate, it is evident that for these interviewees being a good man equals being a good worker, an equation where there is no room for fatherhood.

Honestly time goes fast; I work almost ten hours per day, sometimes even more, then I have to sleep at least eight hours, so I spend most of my life in here, at work […]. But I think this is normal in our society, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, it’s just like that. (Nicola, forty-three years old, master’s degree, middle manager)

When a change in these men’s relationship with paid work occurs, it is in terms of increasing their commitment to paid work, consistently with the retraditionalization of gender roles in heterosexual couples after childbirth in Italy (see Naldini 2015). However, the peculiarity of this group of fathers is that the experience of becoming a father (without taking on a caring role) is depicted only as an additional source of virility that reinforces their (traditional) construction of masculinity.

At work, too […] the fact that I am a family man has given me more authority and more confidence. For sure, paternity has changed me in this sense, but you should ask someone who’s more attentive to their emotions, I am not good at elaborating my feelings. (Salvatore, thirty-five years old, master’s degree, white-collar worker)

Similar accounts are also common among some fathers who used parental leave coherently with the results emerged from other research on this topic (see Brandth & Kvande 2016). Some men, such as the one who provided the quotation below, decided to use parental leave because it was not an intense period at work, and they worked from home on a daily basis anyway. Therefore, the choice to go on leave was not the result of a change in priorities, nor was it a real interruption in paid work.

My colleagues used to call me during my leave period because I told them to, it’s in my nature, I told them to call me whenever they needed to […] and I worked from home several times during the month I spent at home on leave. (Filippo, forty years old, master’s degree, white-collar worker)

The fact that these men, among all the interviewees, are the most satisfied of their work–life balance and of their time allocation being strongly unbalanced in favor of paid work is also interesting. Moreover, these fathers are not only absent in their children’s life in terms of the amount of time they spend with them but also in terms of the practices they perform. Almost all of them declared that they rarely or never spend time with their children and/or engage in caregiving activities such as changing diapers, bathing the kids, putting them to bed, and so on.

100% my wife and 0% me, as all the men in the world! Well, now I do something sometimes, I can change a diaper, I can feed her [my daughter], but I prefer it when my wife is in charge […]. I think women have more aptitude for these things. Sometimes I bathe my daughter, but if I do it twice my wife does it one hundred times. (Diego, thirty-eight years old, high school degree, white-collar worker)

While the fathers making up the other groups are mixed in terms of educational and social background, these fathers share similar working positions as white-collar employees that strongly identify with their jobs, consistently with researches on business masculinities (Connell 2005; Connell and Wood 2005).

Care-oriented Fathers

On the opposite side of the spectrum are care-oriented fathers (twenty interviewees of thirty-five) (III) (see Figure 1). These men show many features of the new fatherhood. One of their defining characteristics is that they redefine the meaning and their relationship with paid work in favor of paternity.

When I started working part-time my quality of life increased to an incredible extent. The reduction of my salary is nothing compared to what I am experiencing now in terms of personal satisfaction. If I look at my day, during which I go out cycling with my little baby, then I help my other daughter to do her homework, we make a cake for mommy who comes home in the evening…I think that I am super lucky […]. There is no career that is worth more than that! (Michele, forty-four years old, master’s degree, white-collar worker)

For example, an option that we are evaluating is that she [my wife] starts advancing in her career, changing her role at work, while I start working part-time so she can come back to her full-time job. (Carlo, forty-four years old, high school degree, white-collar worker)

While paid work remains important in their lives, all these men declare that, since they became fathers, they have been less willing to work overtime, and they complain about the (practical and/or moral) demands coming from their work environment. Those who work part-time are more likely to be satisfied of their work–life balance, while those who work full-time point out that they resent the lack of time spent at home because for them physical presence is fundamental.

Therefore, while for neoliberal fathers the importance of paid work increased precisely because they had become fathers, for this group paternity reduced the centrality of paid work in their identity construction. Then, the significance of being a father is very different between these two groups: for the former group, paternity is a way to reinforce the traditional construction of masculinity; for the latter, in turn, it is a chance to call it into question.

Care-oriented fathers, in fact, not only make sense of their experience of fatherhood through the culturally available discursive framework of presence (Robb 2003; Murgia and Poggio 2011; Dermott and Miller 2015), but they are also involved in actual practices of care. They perform all relevant activities including routine ones such as changing diapers, bathing the babies, feed them milk, and wean the children when they grow up. In fact, they feel (and they are) very expert in care giving and describe themselves as autonomous in taking care of their children. Their role, then, is not or no longer that of mothers’ helpers (Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015).

We [my partner and I] have always thought that she [my daughter] shouldn’t rely more on one parent than on the other; she should see us as two parents, equal and interchangeable […]. In fact, I change diapers, I am not one of those fathers who says no to these activities, I do housework, I feed her […], I put her to bed. I used to do these things at the beginning and I still do, so we don’t have specific roles, we are interchangeable; in fact, if she needs to go to the bathroom, to eat, to sleep we are both there. (Riccardo, thirty-eight years old, master’s degree, blue-collar worker)

Parental leave has a great potential to change habits in this sense because fathers who used it for a long continuous period described a strong change in their care giving skills and in their relationship with the child. During the leave period, in fact, they acquired many relational and practical skills because of their role as primary caregivers, which allowed them to become interchangeable with their partners.

Another interesting aspect emerging from the interviews with these fathers is to do with the importance of creating an emotional bond with the child through a strong physical connection as well; this is consistent with the main features of intimate fatherhood (Dermott 2008; Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015). Although it is more common and socially accepted today for a father to openly express his feelings and emotions, the construction of a physical intimacy with a child is a difficult goal for a man. As men, even before they became fathers, many of them did not have occasion to learn the fundamental codes of physical intimacy and of the expression of feelings because of the hegemonic construction of masculinity (Magaraggia 2012). For this reason, the way in which these men combine the discursive language of emotional bonding with the performance of practices of care that involve intense physical contact and intimacy represents a big change from the past and from most Italian fathers. Moreover, this combination sheds light on the potential interactions between different practices, where discourses can reinforce the involvement in practices of care, and vice versa.

Well, I prefer to change my daughter’s diapers on a daily basis as well as spend time and cuddle her, I literally spend hours with her playing and cuddling her in bed and I don’t feel ashamed. It is so beautiful when you see her smiling, when you come back home and she hears your voice and recognizes you, it’s beautiful and it’s so natural […]. Because the father who does not spend time with his children loses so many things […]. My children are always with me, I bring them everywhere, actually now the older brothers are starting to detach themselves, that’s why you have to stay close to them, now with the little one I keep her close because in ten years I will not be able to do it anymore. (Mauro, forty-one years old, junior high school degree, blue-collar worker)

It is important to remember that being a care-oriented father does not necessarily mean engaging in equal coparenting, though it does represent a big change from the “normal” sharing of care activities between mothers and fathers within heterosexual couples. Indeed, “[the] ideal of good fatherhood is based on a strong relationship between father and children, not [necessarily] a gender equality model of parenthood” (Dermott 2008, 112).

Hybrid Fathers

The most innovative aspect emerging from my research, and which is, in my view, its main contribution to scholarship, is the identification of a third, hybrid model of fatherhood (II) (see Figure 1). This addition is useful in two ways. Firstly, identifying this group of fathers also leads one to clarify the contents and the main features that constitute traditional and new fatherhood, as I tried to show in the two previous sections. Secondly, it allows one to go beyond the dualistic distinction between traditional and new fatherhoods, recognizing the existence of several forms of fatherhood that are different and sometimes even contradictory. The category “hybrid fatherhood” itself, in fact, is heterogeneous depending on whether we look at discursive practices or at practices of care. In fact, all the men in this group share some of the features of the academic notion of new fatherhood. On the one hand, there are breadwinner fathers (four of thirty-five interviewees) (IIb) (see Figure 1), who embody the traditional bourgeois father and man, but at the same time discursively position themselves as highly engaged in their role as fathers. The peculiarity of this subgroup of fathers is that they perform few and traditional practices of care but consider breadwinning as a practice of care in a broad sense.

You must be an example, so in this sense being committed to paid work is necessary to provide for your family, but also to pass down values such as responsibility and work ethic that children could maybe replicate, bringing wellbeing to the whole of society as well. (Giovanni, thirty-five years old, master’s degree, middle manager)

These men, in fact, redefined their relationship to and the meaning of paid work as care-oriented fathers, but not in the same direction. In fact, breadwinner fathers consider paid work on the part of both parents as a form of caregiving in that it helps children to grow up with positive values and in that it educates them to gender equality. Therefore, paternity helps them to redefine the meaning of paid work, which is considered important not only in their construction of masculinity but also as a part of the father–child relationship. However, although some authors (Townsend 2002; Henwood and Procter 2003; Dermott 2008) consider breadwinning and material provision for the family as features of the new father, I disagree, for two reasons. Firstly, this way of interpreting breadwinning seems more like an attempt to be accountable (West and Zimmerman 2009) to current cultural conceptions of fatherhood and to reduce the contrast between attitudes and practices, in that they describe themselves as committed to their role as fathers, but still devote the majority of time to paid work. Yet this is very interesting in its own right because it sheds light on the interactions between different kinds of practices, where the discursive one contradicts those of care, forcing these men to reinterpret the meaning of paid work as care work in order to construct a coherent narrative. Secondly, highly valuing material provision for the children and both parents’ involvement in paid work, regardless of the care work carried out on a daily basis, undermines the acknowledgment of caregiving as work and of the double burden experienced by women who have to perform it. In fact, although these fathers expressed feelings of guilt for not spending more time with the children, none of them used parental leave, and their presence at home did not result in a performance of innovative practices of care work. They were in fact usually involved in recreational activities or house work to support their partners, who remained the primary caregivers, in line with a role of mothers’ helpers (Bertone, Camoletto, and Rollé 2015).

When I come back home, since my wife has been at home with the children all afternoon, we try to swap so I spend some time with the babies; usually I play with them […]. Anyway, it is very hard to keep aspirations at work high as well as one’s ambitions in the family. (Giovanni, thirty-five years old, master’s degree, middle manager)

On the other hand, there are committed fathers (five of thirty-five) (IIa) (see Figure 1) who hybridize their model of fatherhood by performing innovative practices of care work but do not do so discursively. In fact, these men—similarly to neoliberal fathers—describe themselves as very committed to paid work, which remains the keystone of their identity construction, and as unchanged after undergoing the experience of becoming fathers. However, they perform all the routine activities of care giving daily and describe themselves as interchangeable with their partners. Some of them used parental leave only because their partners were not entitled to this right, so their decision was in a sense forced by external conditions and not by their will to be involved fathers. For these reasons, in my view, the label “committed” fits better than involved in describing these fathers because, in their interviews, the theme of emotional bonding is completely absent: indeed, their presence with the children seems to be independent of the cultural repertoire of intimate fatherhood, though encompassing its innovation in care practices.

In the beginning, honestly, it was quite traumatic because I used to have my habits and all my hobbies, and it seemed to me that I was in a sort of cage […]. However, my wife couldn’t breastfeed, so I decided to use parental leave, and I was able to care for him [my son] all day long without her, feeding him with powdered milk, too […] and I learned about his needs day by day. (Federico, forty-one years old, high school degree, white-collar worker)

Interestingly, these men are only partly satisfied of their work–life balance because they feel that having a good work–family balance only is detrimental to their spare time and to their personal recreational activities and hobbies. Nevertheless, they are those who most often include their children in their leisure and outdoor activities (McGill 2014).

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to problematize the distinction between traditional and new fatherhoods, pointing out the existence of multiple types of fatherhood. Analyzing my interviews with these thirty-five fathers (twenty-five of whom used parental leave) through a discourse analysis approach and thematic analysis, two main results have emerged.

The first result concerns men’s discursive self-positioning toward fatherhood and the actual practices of care they perform with their children. It emerges that fathers report very different practices and ways of experiencing fatherhood, which makes it difficult to recognize only one type of fatherhood. Therefore, the label new fatherhood runs the risk of becoming useless in grasping the changes that are occurring and of understating the variability in contemporary fatherhood. The performative dimension of gender, in fact, allows one to investigate the various ways in which men build their identities (as men and fathers) through discursive practices and practices of care. In this way, it becomes possible to move beyond the distinction between traditional and new fatherhoods, pointing out the existence of at least one ulterior model; this, in turn, permits a more accurate definition of the features of contemporary fatherhoods.

The second result is to do with power in heterosexual gender relations. In fact, the distinction between discursive and care practices is useful to better define fatherhoods but also to unveil some power dynamics between genders.

As to actual practices of care, my research has shown that in Italy social expectations about fatherhood are changing but remain less normative than those surrounding motherhood: men can be more flexible in their involvement with the children without experiencing the “sanctions” suffered by mothers who do the same. In fact, all the interviewees got to decide how much time they spent with their children and how; their decision about investing more in paid work or in care work was individual. So, even men who engage in innovative practices of care perform a form of hybrid masculinity that does not necessarily question hegemony. Indeed, being care-oriented or committed fathers does not necessarily mean being “new,” more egalitarian partners in a heterosexual couple. Some authors (Demetriou 2001; Arxer 2011; Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Cannito 2017) have shown how recent changes in performances of masculinity often work to obscure gendered inequality and represent a new form of hegemony. For example, these fathers along with their partners, friends, and family often describe their involvement in care duties through a heroic language that presents these men as pioneers of modern fatherhood, regardless of the kind of practices they perform, and of the amount of time they spend with the children.

As to discursive practices, it is evident that men can talk about themselves in very different ways compared to mothers. Some men, in fact, can describe themselves as emotionally involved fathers without carrying out any actual practices of care, or changing their habits, or redefining their role at work. Actually, they can even reinterpret their commitment to paid work as a practice of care, as in the case of breadwinner fathers, thanks to the culturally available discursive framework of “emotional involvement.” This makes it possible for men to describe themselves as “modern” fathers while leaving the unbalanced gender distribution of care work (and the power associated to it) unchanged. Men can even openly define themselves as not involved with their children, and they feel free to express it with no sense of guilt; this highlights the higher flexibility granted to men about their involvement in care work and the different social expectations that surround paternity compared to maternity.

This study suffers from at least two limitations that should be taken into account in establishing the direction of future research and follow-up studies. The first is the possibility that the interviewees may have feel perturbed by the fact that the researcher interviewing them was a young woman. An interview with a father and a man could represent “both an opportunity for signifying masculinity and a peculiar type of encounter in which masculinity is threatened” (Schwalbe and Wolkomir 2001, 91). However, in my opinion, my gender played a positive role in facilitating the display of their emotions, probably because “women’s traditional positioning as attentive and empathetic emotional listeners […] [allows] male interviewees to disclose without feeling that their masculinity has been compromised” (Hanlon 2012, 18, 19). However, in order to analyze the discursive practices produced during interactions among men, it would be useful to conduct focus groups and for more male researchers to investigate these topics.

The second limitation concerns social desirability and accountability. Interviewers’ overrating of their own commitment might be a real bias, especially because the sample is mostly composed by well-educated men. However, we must remember that in Italy the social construction of fatherhood and the expectations that surround it are far less normative than those surrounding motherhood. As already mentioned, for a father to say that he prefers to devote himself to paid work instead of care work and that he is not emotionally involved with his children carries no stigma. In any case, it would be advisable to replicate this kind of research interviewing a more heterogeneous sample to collect more data on a topic that is still largely unexplored in Italy.

To conclude, a consideration on my choice to distinguish between actual and discursive practices is needed. A “pure” poststructuralist approach to gender posits that discourses “make” reality and might therefore consider this distinction as misleading. Moreover, the “actual” practices of care analyzed in this research are part of the discursive social interaction between the researcher and the interviewees, so they, too, are formally discursive. However, in my view, this distinction is useful to reflect on the possible interactions between practices—which is one of the most important legacies of poststructuralism—wherein discursive practices can affect practices of care and vice versa. In some cases, such as that of care-oriented fathers, they tend toward mutual reinforcement; in others, such as that of breadwinner fathers, they contradict each other, forcing these men to reinterpret the meaning of paid word in order to build a coherent narrative of themselves as “involved fathers.” Therefore, the decision to analyze them separately is a good compromise between the need to develop an analytical tool and the need to use a performative view of gender that does not neglect discursive nor material practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professors Barbara Poggio of the Università di Trento, Chiara Bertone of the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Lorenzo Todesco of the Università di Torino, Luisa Stagi of the Università di Genova, and Sandro Busso of the Università di Torino for their precious comments that helped the author to significantly improve the present article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Italian Social Welfare Institution.

Note

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