Abstract

Fathers’ involvement in family life: changing cross-national differences in housework and child care.

In this presentation I examine the changing nature of fathers’ contributions to family life. While there is a relatively substantial literature on cross-sectional differences in father’s investment between subgroups of the population, and rather less on overall changes in fathers’ contributions, there is still relatively little research that takes as its focus changing differences in these contributions. Changing differences is about throwing light on processes: the idea is that by observing the way that differences between subgroups shift over time we can understand more about the underlying processes of change. In this presentation I look at the effect of education on fathers’ changing contributions in low fertility countries, and at fathers’ changing contributions to housework and childcare according to welfare state regime.