Between Supportive and Equal Parenting: Exploring Middle‐Class Fathering in Romania Today

The profound restructuring that Romania underwent in the last decades of post‐socialist transformations and EU accession and membership has brought along changes in family life, including fathers’ involvement in parental responsibilities. Today, family arrangements incorporate gender equality values but also opposition to them, alongside an uneven revival of certain conservative norms. Drawing upon a relational approach that analyses the interplay between parental care as a process and gender equality, our research aims to capture the performative, “alive,” and constantly transforming features of fathering. We focus on the experiences of middle‐class fathers with preschool‐age children and their narratives about parental care for infants, balancing ideals of “involved fatherhood” with the everyday actions of involved fathering. To this end, we conducted 41 in‐depth qualitative interviews with highly educated, cisgender, and ethnically diverse urbanite fathers who raise their children together with their partners. Our findings confirm that middle‐class fathers’ involvement is shaped by employment and workplace arrangements, as well as by mothers’ attitudes and the concrete needs of the infant. By looking at fathering as performative, i.e., at “doing” fathering, we could see it as constantly shifting along a continuum of noninvolvement–involvement–disinvolvement–reinvolvement. However, our inquiry highlights that “involved fathering” does not necessarily overlap with “equal parenting.” Overall, we identified a pattern in fathers’ narratives that portrays them as “supportive,” as protecting the mother‐child bond, at least during the first months of the infants’ lives. When this occurs, conjugal partners become solely parents with asymmetric parental responsibilities.