Equally Shared Parenting

Abstract

Conventional images of motherhood and fatherhood, social interactions, and gender-based job pressures push couples toward unequal parenting. Equally sharing parents resist those pressures, and construct equality through everyday negotiations and ongoing decisions about family and work. They do not believe that mothers are more responsible for children, or more suited to care for them, than fathers. They avoid gender-based decisions about jobs that reinforce a gender-based division of labor at home. Qualitative research is necessary to unravel the complex interactions between work and family arrangements, and to show how economic, social, and ideological factors constrain family arrangements, but are also transformed in their creation.