‘If I had a job, I’d pay somebody to look after my child’. The practices and discourses of Spanish fathers experiencing periods of unemployment

Abstract

This article critically engages with the practices and discourses around fatherhood of men who had experienced unemployment. Comparing and contrasting men’s testimonies with those of their partners was a key feature of the research design. We conducted in-depth interviews in the Basque Country (Spain) with 15 heterosexual couples, aged 30–50, with children under 12. In every case, the father had been unemployed for a period of at least six months. The results indicate that unemployment affected fathers’ involvement in care in very different ways. In some cases, it promoted co-responsibility and a reinterpretation of masculinity, while in others traditional gender roles remained uncontested. Furthermore, we identified tensions between behaviour, on one hand, and expressed preferences, expectations and self-perceptions, on the other. To capture this diversity, we made use of three categories in our analysis: primary caregiving fathers, helper fathers and breadwinner fathers. Employing a broad and multidimensional definition of care, this research facilitates an interrogation of privilege and masculinity, and the extent to which these are challenged in contexts where men are forced to respond to a disruption of their lifestyles due to unemployment.