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This study examines what can enable or constrain Hungarian fathers to be actively involved in care through analysing interviews by applying Hanlon's approach to caring masculinities as valued identities for men and Dermott's concept of intimate fathering. The empirical base of this qualitative study – the first of its kind in Hungary – is a collection of 55 semi-structured in-depth interviews. Several interrelated factors were shown as potentially enabling or constraining men's active engagement in their paternal role, including work- and work–life balance-related factors, practical cost-benefit calculations, quality of life concerns, childhood socialisation patterns and attitudes towards the gendered parenting models of one's own parents.

This article discusses several limiting factors that affect queer reproduction desires and practices in present-day Hungary, including distorting media representations, legislative frameworks, and social inequalities. It draws on relevant legal developments and results from previous research studies. The article focuses on how Hungarian LGBTQI people can resist the social norms and policies of heteronormatively prescribed childlessness resulting from normative expectations that non-heteronormative reproduction must be limited as much as possible, and highlights that better-off couples and individuals have more chance to realize their fertility plans through adoption, surrogacy or accessing ART than those in a more disadvantageous situation. In this context queer reproduction can also be seen as potentially contributing to the re-stabilization of reproduction as a feature of privilege.

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In many post‐socialist countries, there is a strong social ideal that, in order to live a fulfilled life, men and women should have children; thus "childfree" lifestyles are much less popular than in North‐Western Europe. In this article, we explore factors leading to childlessness among men who were mostly socialized under state‐socialist conditions and in the subsequent transition period by analysing 30 in‐depth interviews conducted with heterosexual childless men over 50 in Hungary. Older interviewees who grew up in state socialism followed a standardized life‐course and went through the same life‐course events—including school, work, and, in some cases, childless marriages. However, the political change of 1989–1990 interrupted these standardized life‐courses. Our results show that, besides individual‐level factors, macro‐level factors connected to the political‐economic transition in the early 1990s influenced our interviewees' pathways to childlessness. In this sense, we can say that the change of policy regime influenced these men's choices, as in most cases there was a strong interplay between the individual‐ and the macro‐level factors.