Fathering over Time: What Makes the Difference?

Abstract

This article examines how much fathers participate in child care, an important component of domestic duties, and factors related to it. It has the advantage of longitudinal data, so that is possible to look at changes in fathers' participation and factors affecting changes and continuities over time. The data come from the 1987-1988 and 1992-1993 National Surveys of Families and Households. The sample is restricted to White, two-parent families with at least one child younger than 5 years of age at the time of the first survey. The analyses control for the number of children and the gender of the child for whom there is fathering information. Based on prior theories and research, the study variables related to fathers' child care include performance of household tasks, their marital quality, gender role ideologies, perceptions of the fairness of the division of domestic labor and the mothers' childcare hours. The labor-force variables are the husbands' and wives' hours of paid employment, as well as the earned incomes of husbands and wives. The findings indicate that hours on the job keep some men from active fathering, but if they begin taking care of young children, a continuing pattern is established. Mothers' child-care hours are positively related to fathers' child care, and fathers do more with sons. The discussion places the findings in theoretical context. Key Words: child care, childrearing, fathering, parenting, paternal involvement. One of the continuing, contentious issues in the research on families has been the division of household labor. Early studies (Blood & Wolfe, 1960) showed that wives performed the majority of domestic tasks, presumably including child care. Since these reports, an increasing proportion of women have entered the paid labor force, thereby adding breadwinning to their housekeeping and child-care responsibilities. Despite this change, there is little evidence that men are doing more around the house to compensate for their wives holding jobs, as well as taking care of domestic responsibilities (Hochschild, 1989). Men's household participation would make for more of a balance in the family's division of labor. Critics of this argument note that husbands may do less around the house than their job-holding wives, but they tend to have longer hours on the job (Perry-Jenkins & Folk, 1994; Pleck, 1985). Thus, many men have less time off the job to devote to domestic tasks than do their employed wives. Although some recent studies have shown that the gender gap in family housework is diminishing (e.g., Pittman, Solheim, & Blanchard, 1996), research indicates a continuing discrepancy in the performance of domestic tasks, even when both spouses are employed full-time (Barnett & Shen, 1997; Wright, 1997; see also, Pleck, 1997, p. 85). This research is devoted to looking at the lessexplored topic of men's activities as fathers. The research has the advantage of longitudinal data so that the seldom studied issue of factors related to continuities or discontinuities in fathering can be examined. In addition, these data avoid the possible confounding of the age of the child and the age cohort of fathers. Different ages of respondents who have different parenting expectations due to the historical era in which they grew up and the different ages of their children make this a possible problem in cross-sectional studies (Parke, 1995, p. 43). Because there has been some research that suggests housework and child care may have different antecedents (Ishii-Kuntz & Coltrane, 1992), this study concerns specific factors related to fathers who look after their children. The focus is on variations in the extent of fathers' child-care activities and what seems to be related to these activities. RELEVANT THEORY Despite a growing body of literature on factors that influence fathers' involvement in the lives of their children, psychologist, Ross D. Parke (1996) writes, Surprisingly, we know much more about what fathers do than why they do it (p. …