Attachment parenting among middle-class couples in Spain: gendered principles and labor divisions

ABSTRACT

The time that middle-class fathers and mothers devote to care activities has significantly increased over the last two decades in Spain. In a context of increasingly widespread intensive and child-centred parenting styles, the attachment parenting movement draws on a gender-essentialist interpretation of attachment theory to prescribe a series of practices that place great pressure on women’s time, minds and bodies. Such burdens are likely related to the gendered division of household roles, but this issue remains largely underexplored in research. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the links between gendered interpretations of attachment parenting principles and gendered patterns of labour division. The methodological approach consists of 28 semistructured interviews conducted separately with mothers and fathers from heterosexual couples with professional or managerial jobs and children under three years of age. The findings show that the gender essentialist interpretation of the attachment relationship rather than the amount of attachment parenting performed seems more determinant of task segregation. Prolonged breastfeeding stands out as a major barrier to a more egalitarian division of tasks, even for couples who are critical of the gendered interpretation of the attachment figure.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment parenting
• intensive mothering
• gender boundaries
• gender division of labour
• shared parenting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As a paradigmatic example, see the public controversy that originated after Carolina Bescansa, a Spanish MP, brought her 6-month-old child to Parliament, arguing her right to practice ‘attached care’.

2 We decided to use two cases instead of one to exemplify the critical type because the quotations that were most illustrative of the arguments presented came from two different couples.

3 Puhlman and Pasley (2013, p. 177) define maternal gatekeeping as ‘a set of complex behavioral interactions between parents, where mothers influence father involvement through their use of controlling, restrictive, and facilitative behaviors directed at the father’s childrearing and interaction with children on a regular and consistent basis.’ When the term is used in this article, it emphasizes the dimensions of restriction and control, which may hinder or inhibit the father’s participation and not the dimension of facilitation.

4 In this sense, we would be arguing that it is the gendered interpretations of AP that lead to given patterns of labor division. Conversely, one could also suggest that couples with more egalitarian baseline labor divisions tend to interpret AP in a more gender-neutral manner. The relationship is likely to be more complex, with practices and interpretations mutually influencing each other as they evolve across the transition to parenthood and beyond. Disentangling this issue would require the analysis of longitudinal data, which points to future avenues for research.