‘The domestic handoff’: stay-at-home fathers’ time-use in female breadwinner families

Abstract

This paper empirically assesses a relatively unexplored topic: the time-use of stay-at-home fathers in female breadwinner families. Using a combination of microdata from the 2003–2013 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) and in-depth interviews conducted with 30 stay-at-home fathers living in the United States, we critically examine the time-use of male caregivers, particularly during evening and weekend hours. Findings suggest that some stay-at-home fathers and breadwinning mothers shift or swap their domestic responsibilities when their wives return home from their paid jobs, allotting husbands more time to pursue other activities. As a result, some parents continue to ‘do gender’ in more conventional ways during evenings and weekends, even when fathers specialize in caregiving and mothers specialize in breadwinning during the day.

Keywords:

• stay-at-home fathers
• time-use
• gender gap in leisure

Notes

1. When selecting variables to distinguish the five family types, we use a number of key measures. To establish labor force status of both respondents and spouses, we code individuals and spouses who report current employment as ‘employed’ and those who report current unemployment (‘on layoff’ or ‘looking for work’) or state they are ‘not in the labor force’ (have not been employed any weeks in the past year and are not looking for work) as ‘unemployed’. Following the Current Population Survey's definition, respondents and spouses who usually work less than 35 hours per week are considered ‘part-time’, while those who usually work 35 or more hours per week are ‘full-time’.

2. We also re-ran both ATUS sample summary statistics and time-use estimates to examine whether the age of children in the household affects the results. We produced new estimates for (1) families with a child under the age of 13 and (2) families with a youngest child under the age of six, to account for the fact that parents of younger children potentially have greater housework and childcare demands. We also examined restricting our sample to families with a child under age one, a child aged one to two, and a child aged three to five. While limited data exists about whether stay-at-home fathers are more common when their children are pre-school aged (Kramer et al., 2013), mothers are more likely to be out of the labor force for childcare reasons if they have young children (Cohn et al., 2014). The results of restricting the dataset to families with a child under 13 and a child under six did not result in any significant differences in estimates for breadwinner mothers/stay-at-home fathers. The results were very similar to the findings from the larger sample of families with children under 18. Limiting the sample to families with young children also significantly reduced the sample size of stay-at-home fathers. For example, when limiting the sample to fathers with a youngest child under six, the sample size was reduced to N = 333 for estimates presented in Tables 3 and 5, and N = 165 for estimates in Table 4. The number of stay-at-home fathers reporting weekend time-use also fell to N = 106 when limiting the sample to men with a child aged three to five, N = 64 for men with a child aged one to two, and N = 42 for men with a child under age one. These results are available from the first author upon request.

3. Another potential dataset of use, the National Survey of Family and Households (NSFH), possesses several strengths and limitations. It includes questions about gender ideology that are not included in the ATUS. The NSFH also includes measures of housework, childcare, and paid work for respondents and spouses, but does not include questions about leisure (a key variable of interest in the present study) or whether men are unemployed for caregiving reasons. In addition, data are older (with collection starting in 1987–1988) and the sample size is smaller. The NSFH also asks respondents to retrospectively report (in hours per week rather than minutes) the time they spent performing tasks, unlike the ATUS’ 24-hour time-diary method. Past literature questions the accuracy and validity of questionnaire based time-use estimates (Bianchi et al., 2006; Bonke, 2005; Marini & Shelton, 1993), adding support to our hesitancy to use NSFH data to conduct further quantitative analysis. Press and Townsley (1998) also found that due to social desirability bias, men are especially likely to overinflate their household contributions in questionnaire studies, which could be problematic given our interest in the time-use of stay-at-home fathers.

4. Descriptive statistics calculated for fathers in the three rationale categories suggests that this domestic shift could be more common among younger men who are earning money or going back to school while they are home and plan to reenter the labor force. In addition, a portion (about one-third) of fathers interviewed for the study made no explicit reference to a handoff. In these households, fathers described an egalitarian distribution of labor during evening and weekend hours.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the University of North Carolina's Royster Society of Fellows Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the University of North Carolina Graduate School's Smith Research Grant, and Appalachian State University Graduate School's Graduate Research Associate Mentoring Program.