In countries across the Global North, fatherhood is understood to have moved away from the 1950s’ stereotype of the distant breadwinner father to be replaced by an involved type of fathering in which fathers take an active role, both physically and emotionally, in their child's upbring (Dermott, 2008; Dermott and Miller, 2015; Farstad and Stefansen, 2015; Johansson and Andreasson, 2017; Brooks and Hodkinson, 2020). Fathers’ caregiving is now culturally acceptable, if not required, partly as a response to women's increased role in the labour market which has warranted an increase in father's contributions to everyday childcare and housework tasks. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, just as the moral imperative for women to care has not been displaced by their active engagement in the labour market, nor has the expectation that fathers should care for their family through breadwinning.

This chapter draws on data from the first set of interviews and explores how the working fathers to whom the mothers were partnered navigated their commitment to paid work and the home. All the fathers had worked full-time prior to having children and all but one was still working full-time when they were interviewed. The chapter begins by outlining a typology of fathers that inductively emerged from the data: ‘breadwinner fathers’ and ‘work-and-care fathers’. The two types of fathers differed in the importance they attached to paid work in the construction of their identities, how they understood their fathering role and the value they placed on their partner's paid employment.