Fatherhood at Work and at Home

Abstract

Men's experiences at home and at work are changing, bringing to light new ways in which fathers identify with these two realms. This research expands upon current understandings of paternal identity by analyzing the potential for overlap and reinforcement between men's attachments to work and parenting. In this analysis, non-hierarchical, independent measures of work and parenting identities are constructed from a recently surveyed sample of 726 "New fathers"--professional, high-earning white men with children under 18, a group arguably marked by the desire to be more involved in home life, yet also faced with high work demands. In order to determine the differences between men that report identifying strongly with both work and parenting from those that do not, I use multinomial logistic regression to capture the association between demographic traits, time spent in both roles, support from others, perceptions of enrichment and the odds of identifying strongly with either work and family, neither, or both. The results demonstrate that time spent in a role, support from coworkers and managers, and higher reports of enrichment between the spheres are all associated with a respondent's odds of reporting dually strong attachments to work and parenting. The findings yield both theoretical contributions and practical implications, providing 1) new understandings of how some fathers experience synergistic parenting and work identifications, 2) evidence that fathers' perceptions of workplace support and positive overlap between their roles are associated with reports of higher identification with both, and 3) directions for future research that address how institutional practices in the workplace relate to fathers' reports of dually strong role identifications.