Fathers adopting new practices? Changes in the time use of Finnish parents
Author(s): Johanna Närvi, Anneli Miettinen, Johanna Lammi-Taskula
Thursday 15 | 13:40-14:00
Room: TP45
Session: Parenting in the Nordic countries
This paper focuses on the time use of Finnish parents in unpaid household labour and childcare, as well as gender differences and changes in time use during the 2000s. Parental time is characterized by several parallel developments in Western countries in the past decades. First, there has been an increase in parents’ time devoted to childcare, related to norms and expectations concerning ‘good’ parenthood and an ideology of intensive parenting (Rose et al, 2014; Miller, 2017). Second, the idea of caring fatherhood has gained popularity, and fathers have increased their involvement in childcare, and, less markedly, in housework (Dermott, 2008; Johansson and Klinth, 2008). The Nordic countries have been forerunners in this change, especially by developing policies that promote gender equality in work and in childcare. Yet, ideas and practices related to the gendered division of labour change slowly (Ellinsgaeter & Kitterød, 2023). Despite a long tradition of women’s labour market participation, even in the Nordic countries, mothers use more time in unpaid labour than fathers, especially in families with young children (Grunow & Evertsson, 2016; Ylikännö et al., 2015). Moreover, when involved in unpaid labour, women and men often adopt gender specific tasks such as women/mothers doing the laundry or actual childcare, and men/fathers doing repairs and maintenance at home or engaging in playing with the children (Attila et al., 2019).
We use the Finnish Time Use Survey data from years 2009–2010 and 2020–2021 to study the time used in unpaid housework and childcare by Finnish mothers and fathers with children. We ask 1) How have the time use in different tasks of unpaid work and the gender differences changed over time? 2) Are there sociodemographic differences especially in fathers’ time use? We use regression analysis to investigate time trends, and factors related to the division of unpaid work in the family.
The preliminary results show that the gender gap in time use has continued to narrow in both housework and childcare, mainly due to fathers’ increased time used in these tasks. Mothers, at the same time, have decreased their time spent in housework, but they too use more time than previously in childcare, especially of under school-aged children. Looking in detail into the different housework or child-related tasks, the changes decreasing the gender gap have taken place especially in tasks that have previously been typical for women. Furthermore, while higher education predicts higher participation in both housework and childcare tasks among men, the increase in time use in these tasks over the past ten years has been stronger among lower-educated men, diminishing educational differences in time use in unpaid work among men. Based on the results, we discuss the possible mechanisms of change in different types of unpaid labour and reflect the meaning of the changes for today’s parenthood in Finland.