If fathers care, how do they share? The temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time to parenting activities

Abstract

Contemporary fatherhood comprises active parenting: emotional involvement and more time spent on parenting activities. The latter is often explained by fathers’ response to a higher demand for childcare as the result of mothers’ employment schedules. Whereas time-use surveys are widely used to analyze fathers’ parenting time, only a few studies fully exploit the contextual information present in time-diaries. This study does so to analyze the temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time spent on parenting activities. Belgian time-use data of intact families with at least one child under the age of 7 (n = 950) reveal that fathers’ rise in solo physical childcare comes at a cost: when mothers are present, fathers spend less time in both physical and interactive childcare. At the same time, ‘new fathers’ – fathers who share household work more equally with their partners – spend more time in childcare no matter what, whether solo or in the presence of children’s mothers.