Introduction

This chapter explores men's actual practices of caring when they stay home alone on parental leave. While the avoidance of care has traditionally been seen as a feature of ‘being a man’, fathering has undergone many changes since the 1980s. Researchers seem to agree that change has taken place, although not on the magnitude of the change, as there is a great variety in relation to the circumstances of fathering. Parental leave offers an opportunity for fathers to spend time having responsibility for their children, but the leave may be taken in various ways. In Chapter 6 we saw that time spent caring for children by fathers alone is qualitatively different from time when the mother is also present.

Being home alone on leave means taking daily responsibility for the child, which helps facilitate a move from being the mother's helper to being a more equal co-parent. Such results confirm what Radin and Russell (1983) reported many years earlier, namely that being in charge of the children alone seems to be the ‘cutting edge’ with respect to fathers’ positive feelings of involvement and competence. Interestingly, Radin and Russell also reported that solo fathering was important when it came to feelings of overload and distress. In their study the proportion of fathers who took care of their children when the mother was not home was low, but several later studies have noted that fathers are more likely than mothers to spend time with the children in the presence of the other parent (Kitterod, 2003; Craig, 2006).

To date, studies comparing the effects of fathers’ solo leave with leave when the mother is also present are scarce, but those that exist give clear indications that caring alone over a period of time has the greatest effect on the development of father involvement and gender equality (Wall, 2014; Bünning, 2015; Ranson, 2015; O’Brien and Wall, 2017). The care practices of fathers on parental leave alone may also have a lot in common with ‘stay-at-home fathers’. Research on stay-at-home fathering has provided knowledge about fathers who have taken on the responsibility of childcare (Doucet, 2006), but while this group is out of work for a variety of reasons, fathers on parental leave are returning to work. Moreover, stay-at-home fathers constitute a small group, whereas parental leave is common practice for fathers in Norway.