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Résumé En Australie, on reconnaît de plus en plus l'importance du père dans la famille et la nécessité d'approfondir les recherches sur la paternalité. Cet article examine les recherches récentes sur la participation à la vie familiale des pères vivant en couple avec des enfants en bas âge. Il analyse l'apport du père à la coparentalité et au partage des tâches non rémunérées au sein du foyer, ainsi que les disparités observées dans les différentes mesures de la paternalité en fonction des caractéristiques du père et de la famille. Les conséquences sur l'action publique sont également évoquées.

For parents there can be negative aspects of how work 'spills over' to family. This analysis focuses on mothers of young children and considers how aspects of work–to–family strain differ for single and couple mothers. While there has been increased focus on the work–family strains of mothers, less is known about single mothers and their experience of work–family strain. We might expect that single mothers would have more difficulty in combining work and family, given that they do not have the support of a resident partner to assist with childrearing responsibilities. This paper explores the relationships between several demographic, employment and supports factors and work–family strain. It also examines whether these associations are different according to family form; that is, whether certain factors make the work–family balance significantly worse or better for single mothers than for otherwise similar couple‐parent mothers. The analysis is based on the 2004 Growing up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). This dataset contains detailed family and child data for around 10,000 families, all with at least one child aged 5 or under. With such a large sample size, the number of single mothers is sufficiently large to enable more analyses than is often possible from survey data.

Using two waves of paired data from a population sample of 10- to 13-year-old Australian children (5,711 father–child observations), the authors consider how the hours, schedules, intensity, and flexibility of fathers' jobs are associated with children's views about fathers' work and family time. A third of the children studied considered that their father works too much, one eighth wished that he did not work at all, and one third wanted more time with him or did not enjoy time together. Logistic regression modeling revealed that working on weekends, being time pressured, being unable to vary start and stop times, and working long hours generated negative views in children about fathers' jobs and time together. The time dilemmas generated by fathers' work devotions and demands are salient to and subjectively shared by their children.

Although primarily a practical matter in a family, coparenting is strongly modified by the existing culture and surrounding society. The development of coparenting, especially in its early stages is highly affected by existing gender ideologies, work cultures and family policies. Despite the widely agreed importance of socio-cultural embeddedness of coparenting, less is known about the interplay between coparenting systems and wider social and policy contexts. This study analyzed how existing work and family policies and underlying sets of values and beliefs frame the meaning, form, and construction of coparenting during early parenthood. To better understand how the sociocultural context frames the construction of coparenting, a critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) method was applied for searching, sampling, analyzing, and synthesizing the coparenting literature. The interpretative review process included the following phases: a broadly defined search strategy, applying systematic inclusion and exclusion criteria, and conducting a descriptive mapping and an in-depth process analysis and synthesis of all the selected articles ( N = 24). The review yielded three frameworks, in which new parents construct their coparenting in diverse socio-cultural contexts: gender equality, family solidarity, and social support. The studies falling into these frameworks see the effects of the form of the coparenting relationship (parents only/parents plus) and the role of institutional support (high/low) and cultural and religious beliefs (high/low) on coparenting differently. The literature synthesis indicated that coparenting is a dynamic system in which parents and other parental figures adopt culturally appropriate practices and roles when taking care of children. These findings, which broaden the dominant western-centered perspective on coparenting, can be used in the development of family policies, services, and coparenting programs for today's diverse, global multicultural families.

In recent years, several OECD countries have taken steps to promote policies encouraging fathers to spend more time caring for young children, thereby promoting a more gender equal division of care work. Evidence, mainly for the United States and United Kingdom, has shown fathers taking some time off work around childbirth are more likely to be involved in childcare related activities than fathers who do not take time off. This article reports on a first cross-national analysis of the association between fathers' leave taking and fathers' involvement when children are young. It uses birth cohort data of children born around 2000 from four OECD countries: Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. Results show that the majority of fathers take time off around childbirth independent of the leave policies in place. In all countries, except Denmark, important socio-economic differences between fathers who take leave and those who do not are observed. In addition, fathers who take leave, especially those taking two weeks or more, are more likely to carry out childcare related activities when children are young. This study adds to the evidence that suggests that parental leave for fathers is positively associated with subsequent paternal involvement.