Stay-at-home-fathering: A Strategy for balancing work and home in Canadian and Belgian families.
(2007) Community, Work and Family — Vol. 10, n° 4, p. 455-473 (2007)
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- Authors
- Abstract
- Rooted in two qualitative research studies of stay-at-home fathers (70 Canadian and 21 Belgian) at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this article explores the innovative ways that families seek to create work-family balance in two countries where relevant social policies are still focused on the encouraging of private family-based solutions to balancing paid and unpaid work. At the level of work-family policy, we note that both Canada and Belgium remain relatively weak in the provision of childcare, especially for children under the age of three, as well as in flexible working options that would allow families to effectively balance work and home. In light of these limited options, some fathers who have a weaker employment position than their female partners, or who are reconsidering their current careers, may opt out of the labor market for months or years in order to provide a private solution to an issue which still has little policy support. Nevertheless, while fathers are at home, they only partially ‘trade cash for care’; that is, they also remain connected to traditionally masculine sources of identity such as part-time paid work, unpaid masculine self-provisioning work, and community work that builds on traditional male interests.
- Affiliations
Carleton University Department of sociology and anthropology
Citations
Doucet, A., & Merla, L. (2007). Stay-at-home-fathering: A Strategy for balancing work and home in Canadian and Belgian families. Community, Work and Family, 10(4), 455-473. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/154328 (Original work published 2007)