Interchangeable parents?

An article I have co-authored with Paul Hodkinson, has just been published in Current Sociology. It draws on research that Paul and I conducted with fathers who had taken on primary or equal caring responsibilities for young children. We argue that the men’s comfort in presenting themselves and their partners as interchangeable equivalents suggests that they had begun to move beyond clearly differentiated motherly or fatherly roles. The article goes on, however, to show that certain emotional, organisational and social aspects of parenting sometimes continued to be centred on mothers. In explaining the endurance of these areas of maternal responsibility within otherwise interchangeable partnerships, we outline mutually reinforcing sets of maternal pressures and paternal barriers. The full article is available here.