Home Alone on Leave or with the Mother Present

This chapter compares fathers who have been home on leave alone with fathers who took their leave with the mother also at home. The analysis finds distinct differences between the two leave situations and their consequences for the father-child relation, his ability to understand their non-verbal language of and his development into a confident and competent caregiver. The situation where the mother is also at home, means that she continues in her role as the primary parent, translating the child’s language to the father, which means that he assumes status as a supporting player and an assistant. He looks forward to the child growing older for him to become a more central dad and companion.

Fathers Experiencing Solo Leave: Changes and Continuities

The research question is what fathers do when home on parental leave without the mother. During the period the quota has existed the father's quota has been substantially extended. Based on interviews with fathers, who have used 10 and 12 weeks leave, this article aims to explore how being home alone has impacted their caring practices. When the fathers describe their experiences, they focus on care work as hard work. While fathers staying at home on a shorter leave right after the introduction of the quota concentrated on taking care of their children, and housework was an area of conflict in the family, the current fathers integrate cleaning and cooking with caring. Because the current generation of home-alone fathers are home for a longer period and have the primary responsibility for their children’s well-being, they also seem to develop stronger emotional ties and relational competence.

Decomposing Policy Design: An Outsider-Within Perspective on the Father’s Quota

Research has documented that fathers in countries with individualized, non-transferable parental leave policies take leave to a greater extent than in other countries. Studies have not, however, explored the processes of constructing these outcomes. We have investigated this issue by means of interviews with middle-class immigrant fathers from various European countries to Norway. The ‘outsider-within’ perspective represented by immigrants’ experiences is our intake to understanding this. Results show that the principle of earmarking and non-transferability combined with a generous income compensation is experienced as a great possibility to care for children and perceived as important. It is in comparison with the care regimes of their homelands that this insight becomes perceptible. These results can be seen as supporting the tendency to convergence, not in the actual care policies, but in the attitudes toward parental leave held by the fathers from these countries.

Managers: Irreplaceable in Caregiving and Replaceable at Work

This chapter is based on interviews with middle managers in engineering who have used the father’s quota. It explores their experiences with taking leave for their career development. The concepts “availability” and “irreplaceability”, which are often applied in studies of the career logic, are here used to analyze these fathers’ experiences with childcare and work. By making themselves continuously available for their babies while home on leave the managers find themselves irreplaceable in caregiving rather than at work. They experience that being replaceable at work need not have any consequences for their career development. The chapter discusses how this might be a sign of shift in the career logic.

Masculinity and Childcare

This chapter focuses on fathers who took parental leave before they were granted earmarked rights. Fathers taking parental leave were rare at that time. The chapter explores how they include caregiving in their construction of masculinity. Using an interactionist perspective, viewing mothers and fathers as negotiating their caregiving roles, we find that fathers assert masculine identity by using several strategies. One of them is shaping their form of care-work differently from mothers' interaction with the child. Another is defining caregiving as an extension of the “masculine sphere” of the outdoors. Both mothers and fathers, however, take part in the process of reproducing masculinity as normative by giving masculine care higher status than women’s care work. Care-giving activities are adopted by the hegemonic form of masculinity with its strong connection to paid work.

Conclusions: Change in Policies, Fathers’ Caregiving and the Ideal Worker Norm

This concluding chapter discusses the ways in which the parental leave design in terms of the father’s quota may have consequences for change in fatherhood and caregiving and thus for the wider processes of change towards a dual earner/dual carer model. It highlights change in fathers’ sense of entitlement to leave, which has made it into a norm. Aspects such as flexible use and the possibility for mothers to stay home are identified to harm the process of change towards dual caring. A focus on the content of the leave identifies further aspects of change in the father-child relation and care competence of fathers in the direction of caring masculinities. Working life’s supportive role contributes to placing a change of the ideal worker norm within sight.

Immigrant Fathers Framing Parental Leave Use and Caregiving

There has been a concern that Norwegian family policies may be problematic for immigrants because such policies carry normative expectations about gender equal divisions of work and care. The study explores how immigrant fathers to Norway frame taking parental leave and practicing childcare. Parental leave for fathers, being rare or non-existent in their home countries, is justified in a favorable way to their family and friends at home. Hence, in a transnational perspective, the leave is narrated into an account of the auspicious aspects of their life in a new country, and they oppose being defined as lesser men because of having to take leave. The analysis shows that staying home with the child increases their capacity to provide emotional and practical care for their children. They situate themselves in terms of what they understand to be the dominant understandings of fatherhood. This is the “involved father frame”, which may be variable in content but fits well in a Norwegian discourse.

Workplace Support of Fathers’ Parental Leave Use

This article highlights the importance of social policy and working life contexts for employed fathers’ use of parental leave. It directs attention towards the Norwegian model, which is known for its gender equality aims and welfare-state support to families, but which is also active in the regulation of working life. Based on interviews with fathers who have used the father’s quota, findings run counter to work-family research where gendered assumptions in work organizations are found to prevent active fathering. The interviewed fathers report positive attitudes and supportive practices among employers. Fathers’ stories show that their use of the leave is subject to cooperation and compromising processes at the workplace level that research on fatherhood and organizations have hardly addressed.

Fathers’ Sense of Entitlement to Earmarked and Shared Parental Leave

In most countries, parental leave systems consist of several parts with different lengths for fathers and/or mothers. We compare fathers’ sense of entitlement to two parts of the Norwegian leave policy available to them, namely the individual, non-transferable father’s quota and the shared parental leave. The objective is to gain knowledge of the rationale for fathers’ different take-ups of the two types of leave. Analysis of interviews with 22 fathers shows culturally divergent understandings of the two types of leave among fathers. Using the concept of ‘entitlement’ as theoretical lens, we find that fathers feel entitled to the father’s quota based on gender equality norms in working life and the wider society. Fathers do to a much smaller degree feel entitled to the shared parental leave, which is culturally understood as mothers’ entitlement. This understanding is, however, challenged by some fathers’ claim to the shared leave based on their being competent parents.

Negotiating Parental Leave and Working Life

The development of parental leave policies was the most important area of expansion for the Norwegian welfare state in the 1990s. Schemes were extended, and special rights were granted to fathers. This chapter shows how fathers in various male-dominated work organizations relate to the obligation to take leave at a time when the father’s quota was in its infancy. It underscores the importance of work context as well as personal agency and perceptions. Four different leave practices are described, and they show variations in how seriously the fathers and their work organizations relate to the new policy, and how they adapt to it. Some opposition is demonstrated, but there are clear indications that something is set in motion by the introduction of the father’s quota.