New Fatherhood? Post-Separation Parenting Roles and Responsibilities In Australia

This paper addresses parenting roles, responsibilities and outcomes following marital separation in Australia (involving 15% of families with children). Recent research suggests a fathering paradox: although the proportion of lone fathers has increased in Australia over the past decades (now approx 2.2% of families with children) time use surveys show the level of involvement of fathers in everyday child care has increased very little. Despite fathers’ general lack of ‘hands on’ parenting skills, ideological changes to the Australian Family Law Act in 2006 mandated post-separation ‘shared parental responsibility’, which has been widely interpreted by lawyers and parents as a basis for equal (‘50-50’) shared custody of children. However, a 2009-11 qualitative study, entailing three, in-depth interviews found that gender inequity in post-separation parenting responsibility leaves many mothers reliant upon welfare payments. This study included ‘lone’ fathers and mothers – ‘primary time’ parents whose children live with them most or all of the time – as well as parents sharing the care of children more equally.

The socio-political policy underpinning the Family Law changes assumed a degree of interaction and cooperation between separated parents predicated on a new construction of gender in ‘doing family’. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption, since (a) most separated mothers and fathers spectacularly fail to successfully negotiate parenting duties on a daily basis and (b) fathers appear more concerned with their own ‘rights’ while mothers shoulder a disproportionate burden of everyday ‘responsibility’ for children (even in ‘equal shared care’ situations where the children live half the time with each parent) – and this inequity mirrors the continuing greater levels of maternal responsibility within ‘intact’ families. Such findings reinforce the disparity between stated attitudes of concerned fathers versus their actual behaviour.