Abstract
Becoming a parent is one of the most important transitional experiences in adulthood that has significant implications for new parents’ mental and physical health and psychosocial development. A growing body of research examines how men transition to fatherhood and balance their work and family obligations in complex contemporary societies. However, this phenomenological evidence remains under-theorised from the life-course development perspective. In this paper, a semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions is used to explore how a sample of educated and employed Australian men in heterosexual relationships experienced and made sense of their fatherhood and work and family conflicts. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 fathers highlights how these fathers attempt to navigate between multiple, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory societal expectations about fatherhood, while also struggling to balance their desires to be a ‘good father’ with their wives and partners’ attempts to be a ‘good mother’, thus evidencing the weak cultural guidance of transition to fatherhood. The analysis shifts the focus away from developmental outcomes and moves towards understanding the semiotic processes through which development occurs in the complex intertwinement between person and their environment. The discussion of men’s dilemmas about fatherhood also underscores the future orientation of human development and highlights how persons are actively and intentionally involved in this movement towards an unpredictable but imagined future.
Keywords
Introduction
Becoming a parent can be seen as one of the most important transitional experiences in adulthood that has significant implications for psychosocial development, including identity development in the life course (Saxbe et al., 2018). Reconstructing one’s identity, recreating self-continuity and finding new life-goals beyond this transition can be challenging and if not experienced successfully and supported appropriately can lead to poor mental health outcomes for parents and children alike (Caperton et al., 2020; Kings et al., 2017; Laney et al., 2015).
Raising children or ‘parenting’ is in our complex contemporary societies typically constructed as the most important job in the parents’ lives, with the health, welfare, and success (or lack of it) of the children directly depending on the decisions that parents make (Lee et al., 2014). While the focus of this kind of ‘parental determinism’ has typically been on the mothers’ parenting behaviours (see, for example, Elvin-Nowak & Thomsson, 2001; Faircloth, 2014; Hays, 1996; Johnston & Swanson, 2006; Read et al., 2012), today also the fathers are expected to acquire attitudes, knowledge and skills to play their critical role as a parent adequately. In the context of these socio-cultural pressures, the research on fathers’ experiences illuminates the messy, sometimes troubled and often anxious developmental trajectories that men construct during their adult lives. Yet despite this ample phenomenological evidence, few developmental theories move away from traditional linear conceptualisation of development in the life course. It has been argued that there is value in examining the unique developmental trajectories of individuals in their messiness, complexity and multiplicity, and through this in-depth investigation revealing similarities and commonalities in the basic underlying developmental processes (Zittoun et al., 2013). This paper draws on a study with employed Australian men in heterosexual relationships to address this gap in the existing literature. The study explored how these men experienced and made sense of their fatherhood. Our goal is to build on the semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions (Märtsin, 2018, 2019; Zittoun, 2012; Zittoun et al., 2013) and examine how men’s development is culturally guided by ambiguous and contradictory messages about contemporary fatherhood in Australia. In discussing how men construct their personal life-goal orientations in relation to this weak cultural guidance, we concentrate on the ways men navigate between two competing and co-occurring meaning fields related to parenthood: first, involved father and breadwinner father, and second, involved father and good mother.
We first provide a brief background overview of the ideological and social policy context in which Australian men make transitions into fatherhood. Then, the semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions is briefly described, followed by a description of the study and its main results. Finally, the discussion summarises the main ideas about theorising life-course development and transition to fatherhood that were highlighted by the analysis.
Ambiguous expectations about fatherhood
Ideals of fatherhood have undergone significant transformations during the last half century due to a complex set of social, familial and economic reasons (Kings et al., 2017). The interest in how fathers spent time with their children emerged in the late 1970s, encouraged by feminist critiques of masculinity and femininity (Lamb, 2000). Diverging from the unidimensional and universal role of father as a breadwinner, research began to explore how fathers were performing other significant roles within their families such as companion, care provider, protector and role model and showed that fathers were engaging differently to the ‘detached and distant’ model of father embedded in the ideals of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005). Through discussion of three types of paternal involvement – engagement, accessibility and responsibility – researchers began to shine light on fathers who were nurturing and involved with their children, as well as emotionally and materially supportive of their partners (Marsiglio & Pleck, 2005). These ‘new fathers’ or ‘involved fathers’ engaged in hands-on care with their children while also maintaining paid employment (Banchefsky & Park, 2016). It is now the expectation in western countries that fathers provide their children hands-on care, as well as the financial support that they have been traditionally responsible for (Johansson, 2011; McGill, 2014). This expectation is exemplified by representations of primary caring fathers throughout mainstream popular media, academic literature and everyday discourse ((Crabb, 2019)Finn & Henwood, 2009; Henwood & Procter, 2003; Marsiglio et al., 2000).
There is evidence that some contemporary fathers appear to embrace their role of ‘involved father’ and distance themselves from the idea of the authoritarian, disinterested and emotionally distant traditional father (Kings et al., 2017; McGill, 2014; Ranson, 2012; Thompson et al., 2013; Westerling, 2015). These new ways of performing non-dominant masculine identity that centre on a gender equality-friendly family orientation seem to be particularly evident in the case of younger middle-class men in Nordic countries (Bach, 2019; Brandt & Kvande, 2018; Johansson, 2011). Yet some research also questions whether an actual shift towards involved fathering has occurred and suggests that the old ideals of fatherhood have simply gone ‘underground’ where they continue to influence the ways men construct their identities as fathers (Hunter et al., 2017). Furthermore, it is important to note the disparity that exists between the roles expected of contemporary fathers. Being ‘involved’ requires a father to devote significant time with his children, while ‘breadwinning’ requires dedication and commitment to spending time on one’s job (McGill, 2014). Machin, 2015, for example, reported that fathers experience considerable tension and guilt when trying to balance their desire to be involved in care as well as to provide financially. While some fathers in Machin’s study experienced guilt related to leaving their partners to carry most of the burden of child care, others felt guilty that they resented caring for their children after a long day at work.
Transition to parenthood also creates tensions within the family setting. Research suggests that heterosexual couples often respond to parenthood by adopting gendered division of paid and unpaid labour (Rehel, 2014). Furthermore, as Tichenor (2005), for example, has shown, unequal division of housework can persist even when wives out-earn their husbands, suggesting that financial contribution bears little influence on division of domestic labour. While fathers may be spending more time with their children than they were 30 years ago, their involvement in caregiving is still a fraction of that undertaken by mothers, despite the mothers’ increased participation in the workforce (Baxter et al., 2008; Wall & Arnold, 2007).
Researchers suggest that the greatest obstacle to the development of gender equality and involved fatherhood is found in the organisation of work arrangements and government policies which do not fully support fathers to provide hands-on care for their children and families to implement more gender equal parenting practices (Johansson, 2011). Although, globally, the social policy direction in countries is towards implementing or extending paid parental leave schemes, it has been questioned whether these policy developments have kept pace with the expectations placed on fathers (Machin, 2015). Countries like Norway, Sweden and Canada implemented paternity leave policies between 1970 and 2000. However, in Australia, the context of the study reported here, similar developments have occurred only in recent years. Until, 2011, Australia was one of only two OECD countries without a national paid parental leave scheme (Broomhill & Sharp, 2012). Australian families are now provided an extended period of unpaid parental leave, as well as a separate legislative provision of government financial support equal to the minimum wage for working parents for a lesser period of up to 18 weeks. The scheme is directed at birth or adoptive mothers to enable them to spend more time with their baby after birth, while maintaining connection to their workplace (Baird & Whitehouse, 2012).
Two years after the implementation of parental leave policy, 2 weeks of Dad and Partner Pay was introduced to Australian legislation (Rush, 2012). The Australian Government announced that they hoped the leave payment would allow fathers and partners to ‘Support new mothers in their caring role’ and promote bonding between fathers and children (Macklin, 2012). The Australian Institute of Family Studies described this as a ‘significant first step’ towards addressing workplace barriers and expectations surrounding the legitimacy of fathers’ claims to family responsibilities. The current paper helps to shed light on how these changes in the policy landscape have fed into the actual desires, fears and expectations of Australian fathers.
Transition to fatherhood through the lens of semiotic cultural psychology
In exploring the ways men experience and make sense of their transition to fatherhood, we build on the semiotic cultural psychology that focuses on investigating complex human semiotic systems, including how people experience and make sense of change and development in their lives (Märtsin, 2019; Valsiner, 2014; Zittoun et al., 2013). We view the experience of becoming a father as a transitional experience or an ‘event of becoming’ (Greco & Stenner, 2017, p. 148) that is triggered by a rupture – a clear break from the way things were before and how they are now and could be in the future. Zittoun (2012) defines ruptures as ‘moments in which existing modes of progressive adjustment are interrupted’ (p. 517). While the exact time of the rupture is often hard to define, its consequences are unmistakeably noticed. In the case of transition to fatherhood, the rupture of becoming a father clearly dismantles some of the existing ways of making sense of one’s life and foregrounds a range of questions related to one’s identity: Who am I now that I am also a father? What kind of father do I want to be? What kind of father should I be? Due to a rupture, then, the taken for granted and ordinary flow of our being that was supported by the existing semiotic architecture of the self-system – the hierarchically organised system of signs about one’s self – becomes disrupted and dismantled and as a new system is not yet built we are thrown into a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity (Märtsin, 2019). Rupture thus makes the multiplicity of possible meanings that can be created out of this uncertainty visible and pushes us to reconsider these in order to re-establish a sense of self and identity, including drawing new boundaries between self and others, various others, and between past, present and future selves. While uncertainty and ambiguity stemming from the disappearance of previously existing structures of meaning can be difficult to tolerate, uncertainty is also developmentally crucial, for it is out of this uncertainty that an opportunity for novelty and change emerges (Abbey, 2012).
Zittoun (2007) suggests that ruptures are typically followed by a period of transition, where new meanings about one’s experiences become created, new skills are learnt and new identities are created. In all this intense meaning making and identity work that is happening during the transition period in order to carve a way out of uncertainty that was created by a rupture, individuals rely upon a range of semiotic devices, including their life-goal orientations – semiotic constructions that orient the person towards a certain kind of imagined and desirable way of life in the future (Bühler & Massarik, 1968). In other words, as future-oriented and intentional beings, humans construct images for and of themselves, including images of themselves as certain kinds of men, fathers, parents and workers, that they thereafter start to pursue in their everyday living. The rupture of becoming a father is likely to shake and dismantle some of the existing values and life-goal orientations and so part of the intense psychological work that occurs during this transition period is related to the redefinition and reconstruction of new life-goal orientations. While the most intense redefinition of life-goal orientations related to the new parental role and identity might occur during the period following the birth of the child, this transition period can also be extended beyond that. In this paper, we are particularly interested in those transitional experiences that are related to fathers’ work and family conflicts following the birth of their child(ren).
Importantly, though, these life-goal orientations and related images about oneself are not created in vacuum but their creation is guided by the culture in which individuals are situated (Valsiner, 2014). The idiosyncratic developmental trajectories and identities related to these trajectories thus emerge through a complicated process of navigating and negotiating cultural messages and societal expectations with one’s personal needs, desires, pursuits and motives. Notably, if the cultural guidance of the transition is clear, and transition is ritualised and institutionalised, then the reconstruction of new life-goal orientations that allow bridging the past, present and future is more straightforward and uncertainty related to the loss of initial life-goal orientations is likely to be experienced less intensely than it would be in a situation where the cultural guidance is weak or lacking altogether (Salvatore & Venuleo, 2017).
While the semiotic cultural perspective sees any transitional experience as one that creates ambiguity and uncertainty, we suggest that this ambiguity is particularly pronounced for new fathers in contemporary western societies, such as Australia. This is because the cultural messages and societal expectations about contemporary fatherhood are themselves ambiguous and even contradictory. (Nash, 2018) provides a good example of this ambiguity in her study of expecting fathers’ experiences of antenatal programmes in Tasmania, Australia. In this study, she describes the confusion and uncertainty of men attending an antenatal programme, held in a typically masculine context of a local pub, that invites them to participate in a typically feminine activity of openly talking about their feelings of becoming a father. In our view, the ambiguity reported by (Nash, 2018) reflects the general lack of consensus about the ways fathers should be performing their fatherhood and combining their roles of being a breadwinner, a caring and involved father and a supportive partner. In this kind of context of weak cultural guidance, we argue, it is hard for Australian men to construct images about one’s desired fatherhood that would create a bridge between what has been but no longer is, and what can be, but is not yet real, and allow them to deal with the tensions that are characteristic of transitional experiences. The creation of these images is part of the process of making sense of the change and enables men to reposition themselves in relation to their past, present and future. In other words, knowing what kind of father one wants to be provides guidance for actions in the present and in the future, as well as enabling positioning of oneself in relation to experiences of fatherhood from the past (e.g. men’s own fathers and grandfathers). Yet, as we will show, for the fathers who participated in this study, such images are difficult to create, as the signposts for those creations are themselves in a flux and constantly changing. That is, the image of a ‘good father’ is itself ambiguous and thus provides little support for men negotiating their trajectories into the future. Furthermore, the results of the current study indicate that fathers are not creating their future-orientations as separate and individual projects, but their attempts to make sense of their experiences are inherently intertwined with the attempts of others around them, especially with the attempts of their partners who are also struggling to create meaningful developmental trajectories for themselves in the absence of unambiguous and achievable societal expectations about ‘good’ (employed) motherhood (see, for example, (Märtsin, 2018) Uriko, 2018).
Present study
Participants for the current study were English-speaking fathers who had at least one child under 5 years old. A total of 20 fathers aged between 31 and 48 (M = 37 years, SD = 4.68) were recruited using a University employee mailing list or through the researchers’ personal networks. All participants lived in Australia. However, reflecting the multicultural nature of the Australian population, six participants were born in other countries, including Scandinavian countries, UK and Vietnam. Most fathers had 1 (n = 9) or two children (n = 7), with family size ranging from one to three children. Each father was employed in paid work; most were employed full-time (n = 15) and were part of dual-income families (n = 15). In one instance, both the participant and their child’s mother worked full time. Otherwise, the father worked full-time and the mother worked part-time (n = 9), the father worked full-time and the mother did not work in paid employment (n = 5), or both partners worked part-time (n = 5). The sample was highly educated and most fathers held professional or academic jobs. All fathers were currently in relationships with their child’s mothers, either married or de facto, and lived in the same home as their partners and children.
Participants took part in semi-structured interviews underpinned by open-ended questions and standardised prompts. The interview schedule began with a series of questions enquiring about demographic information (e.g. relationship status and family make-up) and the employment arrangements of the participant and the mother of their child(ren). Most of the interview schedule focused on men’s perceptions of being a father and how it related to their career and family life (e.g. Can you describe what the experience of becoming a Dad was like for you? What kind of impact has fatherhood had on your career?). Generic prompts were used throughout the interviews to provoke depth of understanding about responses.
An email explaining the purpose of the study and containing the recruitment flyer was sent to staff via university mailing list. Those who replied to the email were provided with a participant information sheet and advised to reply if they would like to go ahead with participation. After doing so, a convenient interview time and place was arranged with most being conducted on university campus. Written consent was obtained by requesting participants to sign consent forms on the day of the interview prior to its commencement.
The interviews were conducted during an 8-month period in 2016–2017 by the first author and third author. Prior to commencement of the interview, consent was checked verbally and participants were given the opportunity to ask any questions about the study and their participation. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim by a transcription service. To ensure participant anonymity, interview transcripts were de-identified and pseudonyms are used throughout this article to protect the anonymity of the participants. Participants received a $20 gift voucher to a local department store on conclusion of the interview as a token of appreciation for their participation. This study was granted ethical approval by the University human research ethics committee prior to the start of data collection.
A process of thematic analysis was conducted on the 20 interview transcripts to identify and examine patterns contained within them (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Coding was conducted in an iterative fashion. The first author read and re-read each transcript and applied qualitative codes to portions of text with a focus on seeking both commonalities and differences between the participants’ responses. The codes that were applied by the first author were robustly discussed with the other authors in a series of follow-up meetings. These meetings provided a platform to examine the codes and helped to clarify understanding of the underlying meaning contained within each code and transcript. Based on these meetings, the existing codes were modified, expanded, or appended, or new codes were created. Codes containing similar ideas and meanings were collapsed together to eventually create overarching themes.
Results
The interviews revealed that there were noticeable contrasts relating to the amount of time fathers spend with their children; however, all fathers reported enjoying the time that they spent with their children. All of the fathers were able to identify positive aspects of fatherhood and spoke about the positive relationships they had with their children. Analysis of the interview data also revealed that the participants commonly experienced tensions during the early years of fatherhood as they were trying to make sense of their experiences of being a father in the midst of ambiguous and contradictory meanings of fatherhood. In what follows, we will concentrate on two sets of tensions stemming from the fathers’ attempts to navigate between two contrasting and co-occurring images of fatherhood: first, we discuss the pair of meanings related to breadwinner father and involved father and then highlight some of the tensions that arise from the ambiguous images of contemporary fatherhood as these are related to meanings of motherhood.
Breadwinner or involved father?
All the fathers in the study were aware of the contrasting images of breadwinner father and involved father and sought to navigate their transition into fatherhood in relation to these two images. The two images seemed to co-emerge for fathers not as a possible hybrid image but rather in a figure and ground configuration, leaving them in a difficult position of having to choose one or the other. While most of the fathers were pulled towards the image of involved father as an ideal, albeit sometimes unattainable, one father in the study was also seeking to maintain his role as the breadwinner father despite the social pressure to be otherwise. His views clearly highlight the continuing relevance of the breadwinner father image for contemporary fathers, even if it is the image that fathers are trying to distance themselves from.
‘You’re just considered a total bastard’
Bryan, a 33-year-old pilot with a two-year-old child, expressed that his primary role as father was to provide as much financial support to his family as possible. His partner, Sarah, worked 3 days a week and was the main caregiver of their child. According to Bryan, his work responsibilities saw him working more than his partner would have liked and greatly limited the hands-on support that he provided his partner and child. On numerous occasions during the interview, he justified his parenting style by explaining that he learnt it from his own father and stated that he enjoys his time at work more than being at home.
However, tensions arose for Bryan as he discussed the societal expectation to be more involved in the hands-on care of his children. Although he clearly identified with an image of the father as breadwinner, he was also acutely aware of the alternative images of fatherhood: “So whilst you kind of feel like you’re doing a good thing, for me, where it’s like oh, this is great, it’s a positive thing, I can provide for my family, it’s actually - you get a lot of negative feedback [from my wife] in return, like “oh, well, I’m stuffed if you’re gone”. I’m very traditional mindset of I’d be more than happy just to work 15 hours a day and Sarah looks after the kids and that’s all that happens, but that’s not the expectations anymore around what’s expected of men. It’s very different, the expectations, and even talking like that, if you talk about it in a public arena, outside of somewhere like this, you’re just considered a total bastard.”
Both, the breadwinner and involved father images were thus evident in Bryan’s talk, and he was trying to construct his own trajectory in relation to both, being pushed and pulled by both images. Bryan begrudged the criticism that he and his peers experienced as they performed fatherhood roles that were considered the norm only decades ago: “I kind of do feel, as a father in this modern world, that I’m probably, for the last 12 months, starting to feel quite resentful about it and starting to feel that my contributions are no longer rightly or wrongly valued as they were previously and that the roles and the definitions of what we should be doing are stretching to a point where it’s actually having a negative effect on men, because they can no longer meet the expectations... so if you can’t meet the expectations now of what a modern father is defined by other people in terms of input and this and that, you’re either a sexist, you’re a chauvinist, or you’re a bad father.”
Bryan thus sought to reject the socio-cultural suggestions of many people around him, such as his wife and his colleagues, to maintain his own ideal sense of being. In doing so, he attempted to avoid the ambiguity that came from making a transition into fatherhood in an era with multiple visions of fatherhood. Bryan held on tightly to the structures of meaning that allowed him to make sense of the world and his place in it prior to becoming a father. Yet the collective meanings and social suggestions about involved fatherhood continued to destabilise these structures, creating tensions and dilemmas that he needed to continuously make sense of.
‘That sucks, I hated it… I’m not seeing them and I’m not having an impact on their life’
Differently from Bryan, most fathers in this study sought to move away from being merely a breadwinner in their families and instead desired to be involved in the care of their children. Several fathers experienced tensions related to the time they spend away from their families as a result of their work responsibilities. They commonly discussed how they would like to resolve these tensions by making changes to their own or their partners’ work arrangements. These comments were most commonly followed by a desire to help more with the hands-on care of their children and to offer more than financial support for their partners.
One of the fathers who shared these views was William. He was a 34-year-old brand manager with three-year-old twins. He worked 5 days a week and often had to travel overseas as part of his work arrangement. The time that William spent with his children and partner was limited to late afternoons and weekends. Unlike Bryan, who appeared happy to be working as many hours as possible, William experienced tension that exists in the conflict between providing financial support for his family and his desire to spend more time with his young children. “It just gives you a reason to get up and go to work and all that sort of stuff. You’ve got these amazing kids that you need to provide for… But now after doing it and all that sort of stuff, I don’t know, sometimes I think it might be just easier to take a bit of an easier role, just not to have that stress and to be able to be with the family as much as possible and provide the support that my wife needs and also the kids are probably looking for.”
Steven, 34-year-old public servant and father of two, also struggled to balance work and family responsibilities. He worked 6 days a week while his partner worked 3 days a week. Steven experienced tensions similar to William’s regarding the limited time he had to see his children: “Some of the days I’d get home at 10:30 at night and be back at work four o’clock in the morning just to get things done. I didn’t even see the kids, I didn’t even see Lisa. Emily would wake up briefly when I gave her a cuddle when I got home. But other than that, I wouldn’t see them at all. That sucks, I hated it… I’m not seeing them and I’m not having an impact on their life, not able to read to them at night like I always - like we like to do. So not even having the most basic of contribution to their day.”
Steven appeared to resent his current work arrangement and wished that he was able to spend more time with his children. William and Steven thus seemed to be breadwinner fathers, who expressed a desire to be more caring and involved with their children. Yet despite being oriented towards the involved father image, the reality of their life pushed them towards being a breadwinner father. These fathers thus appeared to feel guilty and disappointed that they were unable to spend as much time with their children as they would like, simultaneously describing a desire to provide their partners with more caregiving support. It appeared that their guilt was heightened by the fact that their partners had put their careers on hold to care for their young children. Alistair, a 36-year-old research fellow with a 2-year-old child talked about his family’s struggles of balancing career aspirations in this way: “She’s [Alistair’s wife] also missing her job life, her professional life. I think we always have it in the back of our minds, we’re talking about it, we’re reading job descriptions. I think it’s always a discussion that we talk about and yeah I think the most challenging will be to find a solution that everyone is happy with.”
The topic of balancing family and work commitments and being mindful of the impact the parenting has on their partners’ career did not emerge only in the interviews with William, Steven and Alistair, but was evident in almost all interviews. It is the second set of tensions that fathers experienced and that we turn to next.
Involved father and employed mother
The interviews with fathers indicated that the socio-cultural suggestions about involved fatherhood are not the only ones guiding fathers’ meaning making. Instead, meanings related to contemporary motherhood, and the relationship between motherhood and fatherhood, also impact how fathers understand their place in modern Australian society. That is, the meaning field contemporary fatherhood emerges in relation to the meaning fields related to contemporary motherhood. Yet as these meanings and images are also in flux, the construction of the father image – the life-goal orientation of being a certain kind of father that would guide one’s movement into the future, becomes further complicated.
‘She’s begrudging me of this agreement that we’ve made to both work part-time’
Many fathers in this study reported a desire to spend more time with their young children and some had also made significant changes to their work arrangements to make that happen. Michael, a father of two girls, aged four and six, worked 3 days a week as a data analyst, and was the primary carer of his children on 3 days of the week. Michael prioritised time with his family over his career ambitions and what he referred to as, ‘moving up the ladder’. Michael saw it as his role to spend as much time with his young children as possible and he had adjusted his work schedule to achieve this: “Particularly in this phase with small kids, I’m having to - part of it is a conscious pressure of myself to not let work become too important… I’m in a phase where my kids are small and I want that to be my priority at the moment. I don’t want to be working long hours and I don’t want to be on my phone the days that I’m at home.”
Michael felt as though his efforts to spend considerable amounts of time with his children were validated by the relationship that he had built with his daughters: “…the fact that the kids also see me as someone who can be a comforter and a shelter in times of trouble and other stuff is really nice. I really – that feels like a validation for me of the effort that I’ve put in in that process.”
Michael’s transition into fatherhood thus seemed to be guided by the image of father as a hands-on carer who provides security and safety. It was an image that he used to make sense of his way of being a father at least in the stage where his children were small. However, while Michael enjoyed the time he spends away from work with his children, his current working arrangement had created tension between him and his partner. Michael shared that once his partner returned to work after 1 year’s maternity leave, tension arose surrounding the time each parent got to spend with their children: “…I was looking at her situation and feeling like she’s begrudging me of this agreement that we’ve made to both work part-time… she doesn’t want to have to work and I’ve got my two days, and oh, but I’m not enjoying them as much as she’s enjoying her days at home. So that would feed into itself and I would feel more guilty on the days I was home and not enjoy that, but then also was being more protective of it and going but this was the deal we made, and so on. There was a lot of tension that went on with that to varying degrees… I felt like I was giving up two days a week to work part-time, whereas my wife felt like she was giving up three days a week to not be at home with the kids.”
Michael’s explanation here exemplifies the ambiguity surrounding fathering – on the one hand, he was happy to be at home with his kids; on the other hand, it felt like he was giving up the time he could spend at work; on the one hand, he was not enjoying his time at home with the children because he knew he was taking that time away from his wife; on the other hand, he was also highly protective of that time and did not want to give it up. Michael’s story, as well as Bryan above, thus revealed how the choices they made about how to father their children created tensions with their partners, who were simultaneously navigating their own transition into motherhood. The experiences described by the participants in this study suggest that fathers must make sense of their role not only in relation to multiple views of fatherhood, but also in the context of contested socio-cultural views about motherhood. Similarly to fathers, mothers must also make sense of their experiences of providing care for their children, while continuing (or not) to aspire towards their work-related goals. From the perspective of their partners, Bryan seems not to be enough involved in the care of his children, while Michael seems to be too much involved, not leaving enough space and time for the mother. In both cases, the image of fatherhood needs to be created in relation to the image of motherhood that is ambiguous and changing, thus making the process of creating life-goal orientations that guide the experience of fathering challenging.
‘It’s a choice for us. We really like it’.
Brendan, a 37-year-old administrator and father of three children also talked about the tensions with his partner regarding the time he got to spend with the children. Yet he seemed to have found a way to deal with these tensions: “[Being at work] is much more relaxing and she’ll send me texts about what’s happening and I can just sit back and laugh, knowing that it's not my problem. So I know I’m helping her out enough that I realise that it's very difficult and I feel for her but I also know that it's nice to have that break as well and to have that time off from the kids as well.”
For Brendan, being at home with his children 2 days a week was sufficient to feel that he was contributing to their hands-on care and allowed him to ‘sit back and laugh’ about it on the other days. By stating, ‘I know I’m helping her out enough’, Brendan seemed to consider child care as the mother’s responsibility, but was comforted by the adjustment that his family had made to share breadwinning and child care responsibilities. Brendan seemed to have split his week, both temporally and psychologically, into two segments – one where he was an involved father and one where he continued to be a breadwinner father. This division seemed to provide him with ways to navigate the multiple intertwined images of fatherhood and motherhood and their related expectations and create a trajectory for himself into the future that satisfies the multiple demands. It also seemed to provide him with an opportunity to carve out a space for his involvement that did not threaten his wife’s space to be a caring mother.
Similarly to Brendan, Henry, too seemed to have found a way to move beyond the tensions that arose from having to negotiate the multiple images of fatherhood. Henry was a father of two and worked full-time as a schoolteacher. His partner also worked full-time and they believed that having their children in child care and grandparent care during the week allowed the family to achieve an optimal work/life balance. Unlike some other fathers in this study who also worked long hours during the week, Henry was content with the limited time he spent with his children and believed that being in care taught his children about family values: “Yeah, it’s a choice for us. We really like it, yeah. That’s the trade-off of – you know we’re both full-time working hard during the week but that allows us to then really enjoy that time on the weekend together. […] We think that will give our children the best experience as well because the time we spend with them we hope is quality and then they are exposed to different environments as well throughout the week and understand what working as a family is like and things like that.”
Again, the psychological and temporal division is evident – weekdays are when he was a breadwinner and weekends are when he was an involved father – allowing Henry to navigate the tensions arising from contrasting demands on fathers. Furthermore, Henry seemed to think that his decision to make these psychological and temporal adjustments was also supported by his partner, who according to his view used the same strategies to adapt to being a ‘good employed mother’. In fact, Henry described the importance he and his partner placed on maintaining their own professional identities, while also acknowledging their intentions to spend quality time with their children. In essence, by placing a psychological premium on ‘quality’ over ‘quantity’, Henry was able to rationalise his decisions about being an involved father and a breadwinner father as a negotiation that exists within parenthood.
The men’s explanations thus indicate that the way fathers make sense of their experiences of becoming a father are clearly intertwined with their partners’ ways of making sense of their transition into employed motherhood. Because employment or other personal goals require women to move away from some of the meanings typically associated with motherhood – such as being always present and available for their children – there is a semiotic, temporal and practical space opening up for the fathers to become more involved in the care of their children and move away from the breadwinner father image. As the men’s accounts presented here suggest, for some men, this opening up is a welcome invitation to experiment with involved fatherhood, while for others, it creates unwanted tensions and struggles.
Discussion
In this paper, we used the conceptual tools of the semiotic cultural approach to life-course transitions to discuss the results of a study that explored how a sample of educated and employed Australian men in heterosexual relationships experienced and made sense of their transition to fatherhood and work-family conflicts. The analysis of the interview data revealed that these Australian men were negotiating their transitions to fatherhood in the midst of multiple and changing socio-cultural ideals of fatherhood, many of which were ambiguous and contradictory. Moreover, the data suggested that these fathers were also struggling to balance their desires to be a ‘good father’ with their wives and partners’ attempts to be a ‘good mother’. The results thus contribute to the growing body of research about contemporary fatherhood, providing rich accounts of the diverse ways in which men make sense of and perform their fatherhood.
Yet the aim of this work went beyond the description of men’s experiences. We sought to offer a theoretical viewpoint that enables understanding of their experiences from a life-course development perspective. That is, our aim was to use these idiosyncratic and unique accounts of men to say something meaningful about their development in adulthood in general. In this concluding section, we discuss some of the ideas that we think are worth underscoring in relation to this.
First, in discussing the men’s dilemmas and struggles in this paper, we sought to move away from a traditional linear concept of development and sought to unpack the semiotic processes through which development occurs and certain developmental outcomes become created. We purposely avoided grouping the men into categories of those who are more or less successful in navigating the various dilemmas, in constructing diverse strategies or hybrid identities related to fatherhood. Rather, we attempted to foreground how the different meaning fields related to fatherhood and motherhood are brought into dialogue with each other and how these multiple meanings battle for dominance in this dialogue. By doing this, we suggest that it may be much more beneficial to understand how one meaning loses its battle for dominance in a dialogue, is suppressed and ‘hibernates’, only to emerge again into a dominant position in another situation, than merely revealing an achieved status quo after it has already emerged. For it is from the multiplicity of meanings and from the dynamics between them that possibilities for being otherwise, for development, emerge.
Second, our close attention to the diverse ways how men discussed and dealt with the lack of cultural guidance of their developmental transitions did not solely serve the purpose of highlighting the struggles of contemporary fatherhood. Our analysis also suggested that underneath the idiosyncrasy and uniqueness of the fathers’ experiences lie basic psychological processes that enable us to understand how change and development occurs at the intra-psychological level. Despite the unique content of their interviews, each man revealed their attempts to reduce the ambiguity associated with movement into an unpredictable future by drawing and redrawing boundaries between self and others, or between self from the past, present and future, and to decide on which side of the boundary they belong. Each was seeking to settle the matters in a manner where their own position was clear and allowed them to start moving towards their desired and imagined future. For these are the basic ways we humans make sense of our experiences and create continuity between past, present and future.
Third, while our analysis focused on intra-psychological dilemmas and tensions, it was driven by the idea that development does not occur in vacuum within the person, but always between the person and their social and cultural context. The voices we brought forward in our analysis were those of the particular men interviewed, but they were also voices of others around them, real and imagined, individual and collective voices from present, past and future. The dialogues that we analysed were those occurring between the fathers and the researchers, but equally these were dialogues between the men and their broader socio-cultural environments. This aspect of cultural guidance, or in the case of these fathers the lack of this cultural guidance, was indeed something that created clear boundaries for the men’s opportunities to construct their sense of sameness and continuity from past through present into the future and thus channelled their developmental trajectories in particular ways.
Finally, our discussion of men’s dilemmas about fatherhood served a purpose of underscoring that human development is always oriented towards the future and that humans are actively and intentionally involved in this movement. As human beings, we are future-oriented and intentional creatures who construct AS-IF scenarios about the future to cope with the unpredictability of irreversible time and then start to act in accordance with these constructed scenarios in order to turn the imagined into reality. The dialogues that these men had with themselves, in the presence of the interviewer, about what it means to be a father revealed their struggles of creating coherent and functional AS-IF scenarios for themselves. We referred to these scenarios as life-goal orientations for they provide a more or less clear direction towards an imagined life in the future that can be pursued in everyday conduct. The context of contemporary fatherhood discussed in this paper provided a perfect context for highlighting this aspect of human development, for the cultural guidance that ordinarily supports transitional experiences was largely missing for the men and they were left to their own devices to figure out how to integrate the ambiguous and often contradictory societal suggestions with their personal desires, motives and fears. It thus provided a perfect scene for examining developmental processes and how they are made sense of.
In sum, the semiotic cultural approach used in this paper allowed the transition to fatherhood to be seen as one of the rupture-transition cycles in the men’s adult life. This rupture-transition cycle requires intensive meaning making and identity work motivated by the experience of losing previous structures of meaning and ultimately facilitates the creation of new life-goals. Furthermore, the semiotic cultural perspective allowed emphasis to be placed on the role of cultural guidance in supporting this transitional period and revealed what it means for both men and parents together, to make the transition to parenthood in a situation with confusing and often contradictory societal expectations about what it means to be a ‘good’ parent rather than clear cultural guidance. The approach allowed for an unpacking of the developmental and cultural processes surrounding the experience of transitioning to fatherhood and paved the way for understanding why and how the transition to parenthood has serious implications for new parents’ psychosocial development and mental health.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
