ABSTRACT
Obviously the care of infants is a predominantly female occupation, and in most normal families the mother is necessarily the central figure in the child's early life. However, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the traditional pattern of family life is changing. Marriage today is ideally envisaged as a partnership in which husband and wife share each other's interests and worries, and face all major decisions jointly. 'Tackle it together!' is the theme of today's women's magazines and advertising copywriters, and the suggestion is taken to apply equally to planning a holiday, modernizing the kitchen or buying a new car. Marketing surveys agree in recognizing the wife as primary spender of the family income, and the makers of 'do-it-yourself' equipment acknowledge that not only will she decide when the living-room needs to be redecorated, but she is likely to carry out the actual work herself. Conversely, the old joke about henpecked husbands doing the washing-up is now funny only to the late middle-aged; to most younger husbands, washing up is no longer a sign of henpeckery, but something to be taken for granted. Thus the emancipation of women in one generation has been followed by the domestication of husbands in the next; and, in the home, many of the traditional distinctions between what used to be considered women's work and men's work are wearing rather thin.t
This emphasis on partnership is, of course, equally apparent in the care of the children. Articles addressed to mothers-to-be almost invariably include a section on the importance of remembering that fathers are parents too, and often it is
stressed that they must be encouraged to do things for the new baby so that they do not feel excluded and become jealous. Against such a background, it seemed natural for us to inquire into the extent to which fathers actually do participate in the care of one-year-olds. The procedure we adopted was to ask the mothers whether the fathers took an active part in doing things for the children: specifically, we asked whether the father would give the baby his food, change his nappy, give him a bath, get him to sleep, attend to him in the night, take him out without the mother, and play with him. The answers to these questions also had to be qualified according to whether he undertook each activity often, sometimes or not at all. In investigating the frequency of the father's participation, we asked supplementary questions as necessary to find out whether, for instance, the father would change the child's nappy as a matter of course if he found it to be wet or if the mother happened to be doing something else (classified as 'often'), or whether he would do this only if he was specifically asked to or if the mother was out of the house or otherwise unavailable (classified as 'sometimes'); or, to take another example, whether he habitually gave the baby his bedtime bottle or would normally get on with feeding the baby if his food was prepared and the mother was still serving the rest of the family, or whether he would only feed the baby in a minor emergency. Often, of course, no supplementary questions were needed, the mother spontaneously giving us a detailed reply: 'Oh no, he never does that, he draws the line at that'; 'Yes, he will sometimes do that if I'm very rushed or if we're in a hurry to get out'; 'Oh yes, he'll give him his bath every night, he wouldn't miss bathtime for anything, it's the only time he really sees him'. Some fathers, because of the hours they work, do have much less opportunity than others to help with the baby-we found many who never saw their children except on Sundays -and this factor was often pointed out by the mothers, sometimes apparently in extenuation of their husband's failure to help.· We tried to eliminate this possible bias by rating participation, not on an absolute basis of actual time spent by the father in caring for the children, but on the basis of the likelihood of his helping when he was at home, however infrequent this might be.
