Föräldraledig pappa: Mäns erfarenheter av delad föräldraledighet : Fathers on parentalleave - Men's experiences of shared parentalleave

Sammanfattning: The central problem area of this dissertation concems fathers' experiences of shared parental leave. The study is based on a questionnaire and qualitative interviews with men who had taken advantage of paid parentalleave for 120 days or more during the years 1992-1999. The fathers who answered the questionnaire numbered 188 and most of them were the main caregivers of their children during their leave period. The results presented here mainly come from this questionnaire and 19 of the interviews made af ter the survey. Both the fathers and their partners were anxious to share the parentalleave and the decision of ten was taken a long time in advance. Many of the men also had made early workplace agreements explaining that they wanted to take a long period of parentalleave. Half of the fathers had used 180 or more parentalleave days and a majority were alone with their children six hours or more each day. Fifty percent of the women worked full time during the father' s parentalleave and about twenty percent worked part time. Almost half of the fathers started their parentalleave when their children were not more than six months old. A combination of male child-orientation and female work-orientation seems to be the most common pattem among the couples in our study. From agender perspective the men's experiences of their parentalleave show only small differences between fatherhood and motherhood regarding the care of the child. About two thirds of the men who answered the questionnaire did not think that fathers and mothers should have different tasks. However, many of the men during the interviews could point out differences between themselves and women on parentalleave. Especially the women's conversations about female experiences such as pregnancy and breast-feeding could make the fathers feelleft out and miss their contact with other men.Those who had contact with other fathers during their parentalleave also described their activities during the parentalleave as different from women's. During their parentalleave many of the men took more responsibility for housework than they usually did during the time both parents were at home. Some of the fathers found that they gained new insights by being alone at home with their child and became more motivated to do housework. The housework acquired a new meaning for them when they could relate it to the well-being of the child. Of the fathers who completed the questionnaire, 22 percent were not bom in Sweden. While the Swedish-bom fathers mainly did include housework in their responsibilities during the parentalleave, the immigrant fathers seemed to concentrate on child care, mainly leaving the responsibility for housework to the women. A reason for this difference could be that more of the mothers living with Swedish-bom fathers were working when the father took parentalleave. Although half of the women in both groups were highly educated, only 43 percent of the women living with immigrant fathers were employed during the fathers' parentalleave, while 79 percent of the partners of the Swedish-bom fathers were working.