Abstract
This article theorises how dual-career couples navigate work and care following fathers’ early solo caregiving, challenging individualised conceptions of careers. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data from 10 UK dual-career couples over 5 years, we examine how fathers’ solo caregiving during periods of parental leave shapes subsequent practices of work and care. We show that this generates practical competence, emotional confidence and shared understandings that reshape how couples coordinate paid work and childcare over time. Our findings identify three interconnected processual movements: (1) (re)forming shared orientations to work and care; (2) embedding care through early practices and (3) enacting linked care(ers) over time. We develop the dynamic linked care(er) framework to theorise how careers and caregiving are co-produced through unfolding temporal and relational processes within dual-career couples. In doing so, we theorise careers as jointly constituted through work and care, rather than individually enacted trajectories. The findings also demonstrate how fathers’ leave and solo caregiving contribute to the emergence and visibility of caring masculinities within organisational contexts.
Keywords
Introduction
Careers have historically been conceptualised as belonging to individuals, even when the relational contexts in which those trajectories unfold are acknowledged. Yet work and family life are increasingly recognised as deeply interconnected, raising questions about how careers are produced within relationships rather than merely influenced by them. While research has begun to recognise careers as embedded within broader social structures and institutions (Adamson et al., 2023; Tomlinson et al., 2018) and shaped through unfolding relational processes (Lee et al., 2011), careers continue to be predominantly theorised as individual projects shaped by personal aspirations and structural constraints. Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) temporal conception of agency emphasises that action emerges relationally within nested layers through ongoing responsiveness to past experiences, present contexts and future orientations. Such a perspective could be used to challenge static and individualised accounts of careers.
Individualised career models sit uneasily alongside the realities of family life, with tensions particularly visible in relation to fatherhood and caregiving. Despite a growing number of young, professional men aspiring to involved fatherhood (Carlson et al., 2025; Gatrell et al., 2022), paternal involvement remains uneven, shaped by enduring ideal worker norms (Bradley et al., 2026) and persistent moral expectations of mothers as primary caregivers (Twamley, 2024). Employed fathers are therefore still frequently conceptualised primarily through their career ambitions, detached from familial responsibility and presumed to have careers unaffected by childbirth (Hoherz and Bryan, 2020). These disparities in men’s and women’s careers have significant implications for gender equality (McDonald, 2018), yet few existing career models allow for less traditionally gendered patterns.
Against this backdrop, this study examines the potential of early solo caregiving to inform fathers’ ongoing engagement in childcare and its implications for careers within dual-earner couples. It is situated within the UK policy landscape in which Shared Parental Leave (SPL), introduced in 2015, sought to address entrenched inequalities in work and care arrangements by creating opportunities for new fathers to take longer periods of leave. Existing quantitative research has established associations between early paternal involvement and subsequent caregiving engagement (Norman et al., 2014, 2024), but this work has largely conceptualised caregiving involvement as an outcome of individual attitudes, preferences or structural conditions. Less attention has been given to understanding how caregiving involvement itself impacts actors’ capacities, identities and relational arrangements in ways that inform career and caregiving patterns.
This prompts the following question: How do dual-career couples’ work and care arrangements unfold in the years following fathers’ early solo caregiving, and what does this reveal about the relational nature of dual careers? We draw on a longitudinal study of 10 dual-career couples where fathers took a period of solo leave during their child’s first year. We explore the intersections between mothers’ and fathers’ careers over a 5-year period. This longitudinal approach comprises two in-depth interviews with fathers, followed by a couples’ interview phase, enabling us to recognise the evolution of care practices alongside consideration of careers as processes ‘unfolding over time’ (Lee et al., 2011: 1532).
The article makes two contributions. First, we advance a temporal-relational understanding of careers by demonstrating how careers are produced through the ongoing coordination of work and care within couples. We find careers are actively co-produced through mutual responsiveness to shifting family needs, as partners revisit past arrangements, navigate present contingencies and anticipate future possibilities. In doing so, we extend Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) temporal-relational conception of agency by demonstrating how agency unfolds across interdependent lives, rather than within individual actors alone. To capture this, we introduce the dynamic linked care(ers) framework, which foregrounds caregiving as constitutive of careers and conceptualises their co-evolution across shared biographies.
Second, we show how early solo caregiving operates as a generative mechanism through which fathers’ practices, competencies, gendered identities and careers are reshaped over time. Engaging in daily, independent caregiving enabled fathers to cultivate enduring capacities and commitments that informed subsequent work and care decisions. From this, we contribute new understandings of how caregiving practices reshape contemporary forms of masculinity and gender relations. Fathers’ growing confidence and commitment to being ‘equal partners in parenting’ (Hodkinson and Brooks, 2020) enabled them to more visibly enact caregiving identities within organisational contexts. In contrast to portrayals of paternal caregiving as marginal, concealed or organisationally invisible (Bradley et al., 2026; Burnett et al., 2013; Gatrell et al., 2022), our findings show how caregiving masculinities can become an explicit and legitimate component of working identities, albeit unevenly and contingently across contexts.
The article is organised as follows. We first review key literature on fathers, careers and care before outlining our temporal-relational lens, which is followed by the methodology and UK policy context. We then present our findings through three interlinked, processual movements: (1) (re)forming shared orientations to work and care; (2) embedding care through early and evolving practices and (3) enacting linked care(ers) across time. Together, these movements illuminate how careers and care co-evolve over time as relationally embedded and dynamic processes. The paper concludes by outlining our contributions and the broader implications of our findings.
Fathers, careers and care
Fathers’ involvement in caregiving continues to challenge long-standing assumptions about gender, work and family. Historically, fatherhood was constructed around breadwinning and detachment from childcare, with mothers positioned as financially dependent primary caregivers (Brandth and Kvande, 2016, Gatrell et al., 2014). As female participation in higher education and employment has expanded, such essentialist gender assumptions have become increasingly unsettled. The UK has witnessed sustained growth in dual full-time earner households and a corresponding decline in the standard 1.5 model of full-time father and part-time mother (Connolly et al., 2016), challenging notions that mothers are less work-oriented than men (Kossek et al., 2010).
Contemporary professional couples often espouse egalitarian ideals, aspiring to shared responsibility in their careers and caregiving (Connolly et al., 2016; Garcia and Tomlinson, 2021). Many fathers, particularly those who are educated and middle-class, reject gendered expectations, seeking a closer alignment between work and care (Gatrell et al., 2022), yet these aspirations often falter amid enduring gender norms. Fathers’ participation in unpaid/household labour (including childcare) therefore remains modest and uneven, even amongst couples professing equality (Garcia and Tomlinson, 2021), in situations where women contribute equally (or more) to household income (Bittman et al., 2003) and in cases of male redundancy (Garcia and Tomlinson, 2021). In addition to shouldering the ‘second shift’ of domestic labour (Hochschild and Machung, 2012), there is also a ‘third shift’ of cognitive and emotional work that organises family life, which mothers are largely responsible for, what Dean et al. (2022) characterise as the ‘mental load’. While paternal involvement in childcare has increased, particularly in areas of caregiving that men find more rewarding (Bulanda, 2004; Petts et al., 2025), this seldom extends to more mundane, everyday responsibilities because mothers are subject to distinctive moral expectations surrounding caregiving (Preston, 2025; Twamley, 2024). These inequalities also persist partly because many women internalise cultural scripts of maternal primacy (Connolly et al., 2016; McDonald, 2018), and, as Mannino and Deutsch (2007) argue, sometimes seek to protect male partners from perceptions of ‘gender deviance’ when performing traditionally feminised tasks.
However, divisions of labour are not necessarily fixed (Mannino and Deutsch, 2007). Attempts to explore how dual-career couples organise their work and care should recognise these as temporally negotiated through ongoing interactions (Carlson and Hans, 2020). Through these negotiations, caregiving becomes a site where agency unfolds collectively across biographical and temporal horizons, and fatherhood can become a site of transformation. While many men continue to conform to traditional roles (McDonald, 2018), there is scope for new forms of caring masculinities to emerge (Atkinson, 2022; Garcia, 2021). For example, Chesley (2011) documents fathers who, following employment disruption, embraced caregiving, supported their partners’ careers, and subsequently re-entered the workplace as more empathetic managers.
Extended paternity leave, as exists elsewhere in Europe, can nurture these caregiving dispositions (Almqvist and Duvander, 2014; Fernández-Cornejo et al., 2025), whereas the UK’s shorter entitlements tend to reinforce normative masculinities, leaving fathers ill-prepared for caregiving (Miller, 2011). Early immersion in infant care, especially where fathers assume primary caregiving, can embed embodied caregiving and domestic competencies that endure (Petts et al., 2025) and positively impact mothers’ careers (Norman, 2019), yet most research overlooks the need to explore this temporal unfolding (Norman et al., 2024).
Within the workplace, despite equality rhetoric, ideal worker norms (Acker, 1990) that are implicitly male, free from caregiving responsibilities and wholly committed to work persist and continue to marginalise caregiving men (Bradley et al., 2026; Reid, 2015). Many men enact paternal presenteeism, maintaining visibility at work while concealing caregiving responsibilities. Bradley et al. (2026) describe fathers treating caregiving as a ‘dirty secret’, fearing exposure could undermine their professional credibility. Such men become ‘ghosts in the organisational machine’ (Burnett et al., 2013: 632), visible as workers, but invisible as carers (Carlson et al., 2025). Fathers who transgress these expectations anticipate slowed progression and stigma (Bradley et al., 2026; Brumley, 2018), what Kelland et al. (2022) term the fatherhood forfeit. Some men do reconfigure their careers to create caregiving space, accepting slower advancement or reduced income (Lupu et al., 2018). While such men (often privileged by class or occupational status) may be celebrated as ‘super dads’ (Kaufman, 2013), they are conversely labelled ‘deviants’ for rejecting employment norms (Tanquerel and Grau-Grau, 2020). International evidence reveals that even when men develop closer emotional bonds with children and undertake soft domestic labour, full involvement is constrained by long-hours cultures and institutional barriers (Madrid, 2017; Vohlídalová, 2017). These dynamics show that agency in work and care is not individually negotiated or even within couples but is shaped through organisational and cultural structures (Adamson et al., 2023).
Hegemonic masculinity endures as a pervasive structuring force. Miller (2011) found that new fathers, despite initially seeking egalitarian arrangements, ultimately reverted to traditional gender norms upon returning to work, demonstrating the value of longitudinal research designs in capturing such shifts. Similarly, Chesley (2011) finds that men’s breadwinner status continues to be privileged, reinforcing the marginality of caregiving. Even couples with egalitarian aspirations encounter entrenched patriarchal histories that can restrict transformative change (Hopkins and Giazitzoglu, 2025). Madrid’s (2017) metaphor of the goodnight kiss and Preston’s (2025) ‘pockets of time’ capture this ambivalence: these symbolic gestures of involved fatherhood signal cultural change yet co-exist with enduring workplace pressures and constraints. Change, then, is neither linear nor complete, but marked by temporal reconfigurations in which men selectively resist, adapt to or reproduce gender norms, which are often context-dependent (Bradley et al., 2026; Hopkins and Giazitzoglu, 2025).
Contemporary career theories
The experiences of caregiving fathers expose the limitations of mainstream career theory. Whereas existing career models, from boundaryless, protean or otherwise, have been adapted to recognise more fluid working contexts (McDonald, 2018; Tomlinson et al., 2018), they still privilege individualistic notions of agency and self-direction. Careers are often conceptualised as autonomous projects pursued by career agents seemingly unencumbered by relational or structural constraints (Tomlinson et al., 2018). This overlooks the limits to individual agency, and the embeddedness of careers in family, personal and community life (Lee et al., 2011).
The Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM; Sullivan and Baruch, 2009) addresses some of these oversights, exploring dynamic career patterns and shifting needs over time. However, focus remains on the impact individual actors have on others and it tends to reproduce gendered assumptions: men’s ‘alpha’ patterns emphasise achievement, whereas women’s ‘beta’ patterns integrate careers with caregiving demands (Clarke, 2015; Scurry and Clarke, 2022). Such categorisations risk reinforcing gender binaries rather than interrogating how collective contexts, such as shared caregiving, can disrupt or reconfigure these patterns.
Understanding the experiences of dual-career couples should recognise the ‘entangled strands’ (Lee et al., 2011) and multiple actors shaping career choices across time (Tomlinson et al., 2018). These understandings often incorporate a life course perspective which emphasises how life events and transitions (e.g. childbirth) affect the interplay between work, family and identity (Moen and Sweet, 2004). The principle of ‘linked lives’ highlights interdependence between partners and how lives and careers are affected by others (e.g. partners/children; Carvalho et al., 2023: 279), signalling the need to attend to ‘collective contexts’ (Lee et al., 2011). Such relational understandings better recognise partners’ roles and support in career success and work–family interface issues (Beigi et al., 2017). These include couples’ expectations of each other’s work and family roles (Hong et al., 2023) thus recognising interdependencies between family and (paid) productive work (Berlato et al., 2025; Norman, 2019). Duncan and Irwin (2004) refer to moral rationalities – the shared and socially shaped norms, values and belief systems – within which family responsibilities are relationally negotiated. This points to a need to understand agency distinct from its oft conceptualisation ‘as an individual characteristic of “independent” actors’ (Landes and Settersten, 2019: 2), with agency more usually associated with self-assertion and behaviours which support individual interests (Scurry and Clarke, 2022).
However, empirical applications of these relational perspectives remain limited. Career architects are often studied ‘as if they exist in isolation of others’, rather than as participants in shared storylines ‘punctuated by and enmeshed with other people’ (Settersten, 2015: 217). Vohlídalová’s (2017) research with dual-career academic couples recognises the interdependence of career decisions within the context of shared parenting responsibilities and wider institutional and cultural contexts and constraints (informing a persistent gender gap). Bailey et al. (2004) similarly explored dual-career partners’ linked lives in the context of migration decisions; what they term a ‘marital career’ reveals interdependence between care, economic considerations, intergenerational links and household networks. Both studies demonstrate how relational understandings enrich accounts of career development. However, as Kossek et al. (2021) highlight, more research is needed to integrate career and family life-course stages. Such research should illuminate how individual careers enmesh with others, and how institutions can adapt to less linear and more complex linked career pathways, thereby addressing the perceived incompatibility between careers and family.
To advance a relational and processual understanding of dual careers we draw on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998: 963) conception of agency as ‘a temporally embedded process of social engagement’. Agency, they argue, cannot be reduced to an individual capacity exercised independently of context. Rather, it unfolds ‘within nested and overlapping systems’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 969), through actors’ dynamic orientations to the past, present and future, what they term a ‘chordal triad’.
In its iterational dimension, agency is informed by prior patterns of thought and action that, through habit and repetition, sediment into stabilising schemas that sustain identities, interactions and institutions over time. This orientation carries an implicit expectation of continuity, grounded in the reassurance that prior actions can be successfully repeated and that others will behave in predictable ways. In its projective dimension, agency entails the imaginative generation of possible action through which thought and behaviour may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears and desires for the future (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Here, actors interrogate inherited schemas by hypothesising alternative courses of action in response to lived dilemmas. Finally, in its practical-evaluative dimension, agency reflects the capacity to make ‘normative judgements in the face of ambiguities among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 971).
Evolving understandings of careers suggest the need to move away from prioritising individualistic understandings of work and care decision-making (Scurry and Clarke, 2022), which overlook the shared ‘family ambitions’ identified by Kossek et al. (2021) and the marital careers described by Bailey et al. (2004). In addition, cross-sectional designs risk reifying work and care arrangements as fixed states (Beigi et al., 2017) rather than situating action ‘within the flow of time’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 963) and with respect to wider family/life contexts. Against this backdrop, we ask: How do dual-career couples’ work and care arrangements unfold in the years following fathers’ early solo caregiving, and what does this reveal about the relational nature of dual careers?
Methodology
This study forms part of a wider project examining men’s early experiences of parenthood and the implications for their work and care decisions. We adopt a qualitative, longitudinal design to explore how couples’ work and care arrangements unfold following father’s solo caregiving. Data were collected at three time points over 5 years through in-depth, conversational interviews, enabling analysis of both immediate transitions and longer-term patterns.
Research context
In the UK, policy frameworks reinforce gendered expectations: mothers are entitled to up to 12 months of maternity leave, with the first 6 weeks paid at least 90% of earnings and the next 33 weeks at a flat statutory rate, while eligible fathers receive only 2 weeks of statutory pay. This asymmetry limits opportunities for early paternal caregiving, the period most predictive of sustained involvement (Norman et al., 2024), and entrenches assumptions of maternal primacy.
SPL, introduced in 2015 to replace Additional Paternity Leave (APL), aimed to address this imbalance by allowing new parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave. In principle, SPL allows parents to divide leave more flexibly/equitably, taking it sequentially or concurrently, and combining periods of paid (typically low/statutory) and unpaid leave during a child’s first year (O’Brien and Twamley, 2017). Yet SPL’s maternal transfer model requires mothers’ agreement to relinquish a proportion of ‘their’ leave before fathers can take it. This design, alongside policy complexity, eligibility issues, uneven employer enhancement and support, affordability and persistent gendered expectations at work and home, limits uptake (Banister and Kerrane, 2024; Birkett and Forbes, 2019; Kaufman, 2018). This constrains SPL’s potential to disrupt entrenched divisions of labour (Twamley, 2024). By contrast, European well-paid ‘use it or lose it’ entitlements reserved for fathers alone have proven more effective in advancing gender equality (Moss and O’Brien, 2019).
Despite these limitations, SPL provides a valuable means to examine how dual-career couples navigate work and care under structural constraints. As couples must actively decide who takes leave, for how long and with what professional consequences, the policy potentially exposes interdependencies between partners’ career ambitions and economic resources and the institutional and cultural expectations that shape them. These negotiations could offer insight into how decisions and experiences in a child’s first year reverberate through future career and caregiving, thus underscoring the need for longitudinal research designs. While SPL uptake is low, even small-scale shifts can prove meaningful over time, as minor individual changes have the potential to accumulate, and lead to wider cultural significance (Banister and Kerrane, 2024; Dermott and Miller, 2015). Thus, SPL works not merely as a policy instrument, but as an empirical site through which to observe the unfolding of dual-career couples’ work and care arrangements.
Sample and recruitment
We purposively recruited men who had recently become (or were about to become) fathers and who planned to take a period of solo leave. Various convenience approaches were used, including appeals for participation via parenting and advocacy groups, personal contacts and social media. Our initial interviews (phase one) with 10 fathers revealed that decisions and practices around parenthood were made in tandem with partners. However, while elements of women’s stories/experiences were discussed, their voices were not included directly. Accordingly, we also invited female partners (phase two) to participate via fathers’ invitations.
All recruited fathers were part of a heterosexual, co-habiting, dual-career couple and were working professionals (Table 1). They were biological parents and lived across the UK, with a concentration in the South-East and North-West regions. Their professions varied, all were university-educated and identified as white-British (nine mothers were white-British and one was British-Asian). We recognise limits to diversity within our sample (e.g. education levels, ethnicity), but it is important to note that these link with established criticisms of SPL, around eligibility criteria and affordability (Twamley, 2024). For most (seven) men, this was their first child, while for two it was their second, and for another it was their third (three couples had a second child during the data collection period). Table 1 shows that, at the first interview, all men worked full-time hours, apart from two who worked reduced hours (4 and 4.5 days respectively); for these two fathers, it was also their second child. While most men took SPL, one organised leave using the prior APL scheme (owing to the timing of the birth, just before the introduction of SPL). Amounts of leave taken ranged from 1 to 8 months (Table 1).
Participant details and work and care arrangements (interviews 1–3).
FT: full-time; RH: reduced hours/anything other than FT 5 days; FTE: full-time equivalent; wfh: works from home; comp: compressed hours; SPL: shared parental leave; APL: additional paternity leave; ML: maternity leave.
Information in italics signifies the mothers’ leave and and work and care patterns.
Dylan’s leave fell under the APL regulations, with all others under SPL. Three couples (Kevin/Sarah; Peter/Sue; Steven/Sandra) had a second child between the first and third interviews. Dylan’s partner, Rachel, was not interviewed.
Data collection
During phase one, fathers were interviewed alone twice. The first interview followed their child’s birth and typically took place before their period of leave. Interviews focused on the men’s backgrounds (including employment), their experiences during their transition to fatherhood and decision-making about taking leave; we also sought to capture a reflexive account of what fatherhood meant to them. The second interview followed fathers’ return to work after leave. Discussions centred on reflections of leave, their return to work and how they sought to combine work and care (including impact on, or adjustments to, former work patterns). Points of interest from interview one were also followed up on and developed; we sought to capture reflexive accounts of whether and how their experiences differed from their expectations around fatherhood and combining work and care.
During phase two, fathers were interviewed a third time when their child was about to start school, with their partners also invited to participate. Most couples (seven) chose to be interviewed together, but in two cases, due to scheduling challenges, partners were interviewed separately. One mother chose not to participate (due to scheduling reasons and lack of time). In all cases, discussions centred on experiences and reflections of work and care patterns over the 5 years and expectations for the months/years ahead.
In total, 32 interviews were conducted (20 in phase one and 12 in phase two) and each interview lasted 60–90 minutes. The first and second authors collected the data, taking responsibility for half of the sample (maintaining consistency of interviewing to prioritise rapport). For all interviews, a schedule functioned as an aide memoire, allowing for considerable flexibility and variation. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Confidentiality and anonymity were assured, using pseudonyms at the point of transcription and omitting potentially identifiable information. The study design was approved by the institutional research ethics committees of both researchers conducting the interviews.
Data analysis
Analysis was conducted in several stages. First, following each interview, a summary was written, including points of interest and a general description. These notes informed lines of questioning for subsequent interviews. They also contributed to the development of descriptive cases for each father/couple, providing the basis for the descriptive codes and the starting point for the analysis of the overall data set. This preliminary case material enabled us to develop an overall picture of our participants’ work and care arrangements (Table 1).
Second, following completion of this overall mapping exercise, we brought together all case notes and transcripts to develop a coding scheme as the starting point for more systematic coding of the data, using Nvivo software (Lumivero). This analysis phase was akin to what Mason (2002) terms descriptive coding, focusing on ‘what is said’, attempting to get an overall sense of what was going on. Our first set of codes was therefore primarily descriptive in nature, making use of the observations that had emerged during the first stage of analysis. All codes were agreed upon within the research team before working our way through the full data set.
The next stage of coding was guided by our overarching research question and interest in the unfolding nature of dual-career couples’ work and care arrangements. At this point, we engaged in a more interpretive reading of the data, attending to similarities and differences, negative cases and alternative interpretations (Silverman, 2011). Our analytical approach thus became increasingly ‘theoretical’ (Saldaña, 2021), consistent with Mason’s (2002) approach to interpretive coding, where attention shifts from what the data ‘says’ to an understanding of what it means. As the research design evolved, from exploring fathers’ individual experiences (phase one) to couples’ joint accounts (phase two), the relational nature of career agency began to surface, emerging organically from participants’ accounts. The descriptive codes were subsumed into the three interpretive movements set out in Table 2, highlighting how our dual-career professional couples’ work and care decisions unfolded over 5 years.
Final movement, sub-movement and coding descriptions.
SPL: shared parental leave.
Findings
Our findings are structured around three interlinked processual movements that contribute to a temporal-relational understanding of careers. First, we trace how partners form shared orientations to work and care. Second, we show how early solo care embeds embodied practices, setting up continuing patterns and commitments towards coordinated and durable relational care arrangements. Third, we follow how couples enact evolving work and care patterns over a 5-year period within familial, organisational and policy contexts. Together, these movements develop a processual understanding of how work and care unfold through relational processes across interconnected lives. We draw on the full dataset throughout, while using one couple as a running illustration, which is examined in more detail in the third movement. This allows for a more detailed account of the temporal and relational dimensions of Aiden and Saira’s lived experiences and micro processes, while situating their story alongside broader patterns across the data.
(Re)forming shared orientations to work and care
Like most fathers in the study, Aiden articulated, in his first interview, a coherent set of values and orientations that framed how he and his partner, Saira, approached early parenthood. These values underpinned decisions surrounding parental leave, the division of domestic labour and care, and their wider approach to life: ‘there are two people in this relationship, it’s a fifty–fifty split’ (Aiden 1 1 ). They viewed parenting as ‘one of equal and shared responsibility’ (Aiden, 2), reflecting an extension of an already collaborative domestic arrangement: ‘we’ve kind of always shared those things out between us before [son] came along’ (Aiden, 1). Such alignment was not simply ideological, but enacted relationally through conversation, compromise, joint planning and care practices over time, indicating that couples realised that shared values alone were insufficient as a basis for equality (Miller, 2011).
Egalitarian attitudes and approaches were often informed by temporal anchors, including biographical memories of upbringing and fathers’ involvement (past) and comparisons with, often contrasting, approaches of peers (present), which shaped how parenthood was enacted as a co-constructed endeavour. Dylan (1) contrasts his aspirations with his father’s absence, recalling: ‘I wanted to be around a bit more than my dad who worked long hours . . . we had decided quite a long time ago that if we did have kids, we’d want to take time off work and not drop them in nursery all the time’. Dylan’s account reflects a projective commitment to being a different kind of (involved) father, signalling the disruption of generational biographies (Banister and Kerrane, 2024) and illustrating how past experiences inform alternative possibilities of action (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).
For Sam and Leanne, intergenerational scripts shaped a different, but still relationally negotiated, approach. Both had mothers who provided full-time care, and while this model was valorised, the identity of the caregiver was treated as potentially interchangeable: ‘we’ve not really thought about our gender roles, we’ve just thought about where the money needs to come from . . . but if Sam earned more, then we would have completely made a different decision’ (Leanne, 3). While the couple’s approach demonstrates attention to their particular economic realities, it is also embedded within negotiated moral rationalities (Duncan and Irwin, 2004), in this case, their shared commitment to stay-at-home parental care. Couples’ use of ‘we’ in their accounts underlines the relational quality of agency, with decisions emerging through co-reflection and joint planning, embedded in shared memories and mutual aspirations. Such reference points, whether rooted in personal histories or peer comparisons, reveal participants’ acute awareness of how parenthood reshapes relationships and responsibilities. They informed efforts to acknowledge and, at times, subvert normative expectations, signalling a commitment to ongoing relational coordination which often diverged from normative patterns established during early parenting (Garcia and Tomlinson, 2021).
Participants also recognised the importance of the evolving policy context. Michael recalled how the absence of SPL with their first child placed a heavier care burden on Maria. With their second child, Maria (3) reflected: ‘it felt almost like the law had caught up with us in a way. That we wanted to do it very evenly and then the law allowed us to, the second time around, in the way it didn’t the first’. Such accounts underscore the interplay of structure, values and agency, revealing how structural affordances enable relational values to be realised, transforming prior ideals into enacted, negotiated patterns of shared care.
However, not all participants began with clearly articulated egalitarian orientations. For some, changes to the law and experiences as parents informed the development of principles and ideals. Peter and Sue had a very difficult start to parenthood, learning during pregnancy that their baby would be born with a severe medical condition. Their early parenting experiences included hospitalisation and major surgery for their daughter. Peter initially framed leave-taking in financial and career-oriented terms, particularly given Sue’s self-employment. Leave (combined with part-time work) enabled him to support Sue’s longer-term career prospects and sustain her small company: I knew my company offered pretty decent parental leave options, because other people had taken it before and had about 3 months off. So, I looked into it and found I could get 26 weeks full pay. And obviously Sarah runs her own company, so it was quite important that she can’t really afford to be off completely. So what we have decided to do is I am off part-time at the moment, so the days I am not working, she is and vice versa. (Peter, 1)
Peter’s early leave experiences illuminated challenges for dads and the opportunities available to them. In interviews 1 and 2, he discussed being the only father in most of the parenting classes he attended: ‘it’s a bit weird because you are the only guy there . . . I went from a completely male [work] environment to respectively a completely female one’ (2). Over time, Peter’s experiences informed a different, more progressive attitude both within his workplace and domestic environment. He reported developing stronger views about the importance of fathers’ involvement in childcare, demonstrating how orientations to care are not fixed, rather (re)shaped through lived experience.
Recognition of the value and temporal significance of care gained further poignancy for Peter and Sue, as their daughter’s life was tragically cut short at 15 months. Peter reflected: ‘spending six months with her of the 15 months of her life . . . I feel so grateful’ (3). These experiences of embodied care shaped the couple’s decision to again share leave and care with their subsequent child, underscoring how past experiences can reconfigure future orientations. Peter and Sue’s narrative demonstrates how progressive policy contexts can facilitate alternative paternal arrangements, and how the significance of caregiving can reshape orientations that were not initially framed in egalitarian terms. Their experiences also demonstrate the potential limitations of understanding approaches to work and care in static terms, without allowing for processes of change. We now turn to explore how these shared orientations provide the foundations for embodied practices of care, and how (men’s) early solo care consolidates orientations into durable routines.
Embedding care through early practices
Early solo fathering experiences established patterns of care and domestic work that endured beyond participants’ period of leave. In Aiden and Saira’s case, while 6 months of solo leave enabled Aiden to build confidence and routines, it also elicited moments of vulnerability, self-doubt and anxiety – particularly during periods of reduced sleep and social isolation. These moments illuminate the emotional labour of solo caregiving. Aiden’s reflections show how doing care, not just being present, leads to a deeper understanding of its demands and the labour historically carried by mothers.
Early into his leave, Aiden describes calling Saira while experiencing ‘a wobble moment’ within the very public context of a shopping centre: ‘I’m stuck, like kind of needy, [he] won’t stop crying if I put him down in the pram, and she told me exactly the same thing that I’d told her, only a few weeks ago, but I haven’t obviously listened to my own advice “just put him in the pram and get walking”’ (1). This example demonstrates Saira’s confidence in his capabilities, the importance of within-couple reassurance and support, and also (with reference to his second interview) how competencies are built over time: ‘you get in to the routine of, well, I know exactly how to look after him, I know what I’m doing most of the time’ (2). Aiden, alongside the wider narratives, demonstrates how solo caring, mental load and domestic labour form a tightly woven set of practices through which fathers build relational intimacy, competence and equity within the family. These activities illustrate a processual, lived form of gender equality, enacted through the everyday doing of care, rather than facilitated through formal policy and values alone.
For many fathers, the physical and emotional intensity of solo parenting contrasted with expectations. Kevin described it as ‘really hard work, looking after a child. I don’t think you could understand how difficult it is until you’ve done it full-time’ (2). The immersion in full-time solo care, which Sandra described as ‘being left on your own and being allowed to just do it’ (3), was foreground across accounts, regardless of leave duration. It exposed fathers to everyday domestic labour often shouldered by mothers, reconstituting parenting as shared work and cultivating empathy, as couples could ‘understand much more what each other’s been going through’ (Kevin, 2). Sarah explained: ‘I think you get in your own little bubble, in your own little head, and think whatever you’re doing [e.g., paid work/care] is harder’ (3).
The interviews point to the importance of lived experiences and how micro-processes contribute to relational understandings. Aiden described their early night-time routine and how it supported Saira’s transition back to work following maternity leave: ‘between four and six months . . . any time [son] woke in the night I would be the only, it would just be me getting up. Saira was struggling with that side of it, she had to be getting up and then going to work, and I said, “Well, look, that’s kind of what I’m here for, so don’t worry about it”’ (2). The intricate and inherent labour of caring reshaped gender norms, as shared values became embedded in practices and patterns, signalling commitment towards durable relational care arrangements.
A dimension of care often overlooked is its cognitive and planning aspects. Michael illustrates his high involvement and understanding of these complexities when discussing meal planning: ‘so weaning then becomes not just how are we going to get through this meal, but do we have enough food in for all the meals that week?’ (2). Immersion in full-time caregiving exposed participants to the expansive, everyday aspects of domestic labour, again promoting a more equitable distribution of responsibilities traditionally shouldered by mothers. Michael’s account of meal preparation exemplifies not only practical caregiving but also the cognitive and emotional labour of anticipating, organising and coordinating family needs – demonstrative of the mental load (Dean et al., 2022).
A crucial element in embedding care was the development of habitual practices. Early immersion produced a form of embodied agency, described by Brian as ‘muscle memory’ (3), consisting of enduring routines that, once established, became habitual and relationally anchored. These habitual understandings provide a counterpoint to findings suggesting that equitable shifts in caregiving post-birth are often temporary (Miller, 2011).
Steven spoke of operating on ‘fairly autopilot’ (2). Considered in isolation, this could suggest inattention. However, he instead describes developing an intimate feel for his child’s ‘daily rhythm’ (3), illustrating how solo caregiving embeds not only competencies but also enduring relational dispositions: ‘every day you feel like you are doing a lot of careful planning almost of everything that you’re going to do in the day and sorting meals out the night before and really thinking through your timings . . . you kind of need two or three weeks to get your head around some of that stuff’ (3). While Steven returned to work full-time, he worked from home 2 days a week and incorporated domestic labour into his routine: ‘it’s ten minutes having lunch and 50 minutes sorting the dishwasher, putting laundry and drying in, putting clothes away, changing the boys’ bed . . . Whatever the job de jour is’ (3). His partner, Sandra, acknowledged the cognitive aspects as key elements of care, often omitted by other fathers: ‘he does a lot . . . I am really, really fortunate in having Ste, and I count my blessings every day that he does take on that mental load’ (3). Steven attributes this directly to his ‘three months of solo dadding’ (3).
Like Ranson’s (2015) grunt work, this second movement highlights the transformational potential of immersive caregiving. Through (often dull, exhausting) routines, fathers became embedded in their child’s life, bonding through embodied care. This care was not fixed but continually (re)negotiated in response to changing family needs. Solo caregiving forged embedded memories that guided later decisions to sustain egalitarian aspirations, challenging assumptions that paternal engagement is masculine, individualistic and fleeting (Miller, 2011).
These experiences helped fathers develop parenting skills that fostered more collaborative approaches to care (Chesley, 2011) while also nurturing identities grounded in caring masculinities (Elliott, 2016). While longer leave inevitably provides greater opportunity to embed these practices and involvement in domestic labour (Petts et al., 2025), not all fathers took extended leave. Kevin, for example, took 1 month, yet sustained involvement through shift work, suggesting that quality (e.g. solo, full-time parenting), commitment and timing (rather than simply duration) may be influential.
These accounts illustrate the unfolding of relational agency during leave, whereby daily care practices and shared experiences challenge gender norms. Unlike fathers who engage in domestic tasks only when work allows (Madrid, 2017), those in our study demonstrated sustained involvement in all aspects of domestic labour during and after leave. Having demonstrated how these embodied practices take hold, we now turn to explore how careers and caregiving practices are mobilised and sustained as couples navigate shifting personal, organisational and institutional contexts over time.
Enacting linked care(ers) over time
Aiden and Saira’s approach to work and care was informed by differing career aspirations at the point they had their son. Saira sought continual challenge and progression, while Aiden preferred the stability of his role within the Civil Service, which afforded flexibility. Both openly acknowledged these complementary differences: ‘Saira has always been, out of the two of us, the one with all the potential to go to like great heights’ (Aiden, 3). Their shared understanding informed leave arrangements. Saira, eager to return 3 months after their son’s birth, described paid work as ‘a lifeline’ (3) amid the emotional intensity of early motherhood and ongoing mental health challenges. Aiden took 6 months of solo leave, enabling Saira’s return to work and demonstrating the couple’s commitment to shared decisions surrounding work and care.
Aiden’s caregiving confidence and Saira’s trust in his competence underpinned her capacity to re-engage with employment and to pursue career progression: ‘having not had the shared parental leave experience, having not had the opportunity to have gone back in so quickly and progress at pace like I did, I’m not sure I would even have been brave enough to have gone for a job of that nature . . . It was the opposite, it was child’s taken care of, what do you want to do, career’s clearly important to you’ (Saira, 3). Their accounts illustrate how paternal solo leave can disrupt traditional career asymmetries, legitimising mothers’ sustained career progression.
Like other couples, these personal experiences were nested within wider structural and organisational conditions. In general, couples were able to share leave due to the introduction of SPL and employer enhancements (institutional structures), but specific decisions were also informed by localised contexts, for example, Aiden and Saira faced uncertainty around (and competition for) nursery places. The project-based structure of Aiden’s Civil Service role underpinned the feasibility of his absence and subsequent re-entry into the workplace: ‘I’m just going to be picking up a new project’ (1). Aiden recognised this privilege compared to some fathers in other settings: ‘I’m sure the worries are around kind of what’s going to happen, who’s going to fill in for me while I’m away, what if they’re better than me at my job, and will people view me now as like somebody who’s not able to be trusted with new work or extra responsibility?’ (1). Such reflections highlight the moderating effect that organisational design and culture have on the enactment of care.
Our longitudinal analysis revealed frequent shifts in many couples’ arrangements (see Table 1), as couples drew on past, present and projective agency to adapt to changing demands (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). For example, Craig and Louise iteratively modified hours, employment and roles throughout the study. While initially they achieved a roughly equal work and care split, with both working reduced hours and flexibly post-leave, within the second interview, Craig revealed unhappiness with the informality of his work arrangements, which, despite facilitating caregiving, informed an uncertain/precarious balance of work and care. By the time of the last interview, Craig was working full-time in a non-flexible role, with Louise part-time and assuming more childcare and domestic responsibilities. Given the couple’s initial commitment to shared care, Craig’s choice of new career may have been difficult for others to understand, with Craig ‘trading flexibility for a more enjoyable job’ (Louise, 3). Louise described the situation as ‘a much more traditional setup, like every feminist bone in my body is raging’ (3). She tolerated it as a temporary arrangement based on interactional, projective and practical-evaluative elements of agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), wherein decisions were often (re)made in response to shifting demands: ‘we know that as the demands in our family change, then we can do that . . . it’s just a combination right now that’s working for us as a family. This isn’t about some form of male oppression by Craig’ (3). Craig and Louise’s experiences demonstrate Duncan and Irwin’s (2004) point about the potential ambiguity of socially negotiated outcomes and the importance of viewing these through the lens of family responsibilities and particular circumstances.
Other couples maintained more consistent arrangements. Sam’s decision to leave paid work meant childcare for Leanne and Sam required ‘less planning in terms of who’s working, who needs to be where and doing what, who’s picking them up’ (Sam, 3). Michael and Maria sustained an equal split in paid and domestic work, although this required ‘a lot of dialogue and a lot of ways of talking about stuff’ (Maria, 3). Elsewhere, arrangements fluctuated, with some adjustments being more spontaneous and everyday in nature, as Brian and Alma noted, ‘we just sort of chipped in and did bits’ (Alma, 3), deciding ‘on the day’ (Brian, 3) and providing ‘back-up for each other . . . at crunch points’ (Alma, 3). By his final interview, Brian’s employment pattern had evolved from full-time office-based work to reduced-hours freelancing from home, mirroring Alma’s work arrangements. The couple took on contracts that accommodated each other’s paid work commitments, prioritising joint childcare: ‘you can kind of work ebbs and flows a little bit . . . so, when one of us is less busy, the other one is more available to do stuff’ (Brian, 3).
For Aiden and Saira, frequent adaptations were also made during the period of data collection, reflecting wider contextual factors across careers, family and health. Following maternity and SPL periods, both parents initially worked full-time, supported by nursery provision and grandparental care 2 days a week. Saira had secured a secondment to a senior role, followed by an external promotion which was office-based but involved a longer commute and additional demands. When grandparental childcare was disrupted through ill health, Aiden reduced his hours to 4 days a week ‘to create some more space and time in our lives’ (3), aided by his employer’s flexible working culture. Aiden’s Fridays with his son revealed a temporal consciousness of the significance of time shared: ‘once he gets on the treadmill of school, this portion of life and this amount of time that I’m going to spend with him will never quite be the same again’ (3). This part-time work pattern evidenced the legacy of solo-leave, normalising ongoing caregiving and concomitant routines. Beyond domestic tasks, Aiden used this non-work time to support other elements of family ambitions (Kossek et al., 2021), referring to them as ‘life admin’, including organising events for parents and their children.
Through such adaptations, Aiden and Saira, like other couples in our study, demonstrate the temporal layering of relational agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Decisions were not static or individual, but iterative and shared, shaped by past experiences, present conditions and imagined futures. Structural enablers such as SPL and organisational flexibility created the conditions for these ‘choices’, yet agency lay in how couples (re)acted as relational units within them. For example, Aiden’s reduced hours were not solely in response to childcare gaps but also reflected his commitment to involved fatherhood and shared household decision-making; while Saira’s career advancement drew confidence from their shared caregiving experiences (Norman, 2019). Craig and Louise’s more recent uneasy work and care arrangements similarly reflected a joint response to workplace strain and mental health considerations.
When Saira returned to work following maternity leave, she requested to be treated ‘like I am a dad coming back, you would expect them to be there, expect me to be there’ (3). While this invokes the masculine template of commitment associated with ideal worker norms, Aiden sought to re-signify fatherhood at work, advocating for parental leave and blogging about his experiences. Aiden’s commitment to encouraging supportive organisational structures highlights how nested layers shape opportunities for action (Tomlinson et al., 2018). Other fathers in our study challenged resistance to, or stigma associated with, fatherhood at work (Kelland et al., 2022), with Steve noting: ‘I’m not ashamed of saying I’m not going to do stuff in the evenings because of children or because I’ve finished work. I’m okay with that, and if that were to mean that I was not promoted in the organisation because they just felt that somebody else was going to give it just a bit more welly, I can live with that’ (3). These examples of men parenting ‘out loud’ contrast with research suggesting men conceal caregiving at work (Bradley et al., 2026), revealing how caring masculinities (Elliott, 2016) develop and are confidently performed. By the final interview, Aiden and Saira’s dynamic had evolved again. Saira had secured a permanent, flexible role closer to home, bringing stability after a period of career transitions. This allowed greater involvement in their son’s day-to-day care and created space for Aiden to pursue alternative career possibilities. Their evolving arrangement reflected ongoing relational responsiveness to changing circumstances, with each partner’s decisions shaped by past experiences and future aspirations. Saira (3) reflected: ‘now I’ve had some stability, I’ve now got that flexible working, which helps a lot, and this is a job that I can manage very easily and do the drop-offs and the pick-ups . . . we’ve been talking about it for the last six months, if something comes up for him [Aiden], please go for it . . . if I was in a chaotic place, excessively flooded with work, I don’t think we could balance it’. Saira’s reflection highlights the dynamic reciprocity within their partnership, with career decisions (re)negotiated in relation to each other’s circumstances and capacity.
The stories told by our participants exemplify the temporal and recursive nature of relational agency, where adjustments in one partner’s career or care triggers further negotiation over time. On the day of his final interview with us, Aiden was interviewed for and subsequently offered a new role in a different organisation – marking the next phase in the couple’s biography. Like many parents in our study, Aiden and Saira adopted a responsive approach to balancing work and care, adapting to shifting ambitions, family circumstances and institutional contexts (Tomlinson et al., 2018).
Our data also illustrate the need for flexible understandings of career success, shaped by childcare and domestic responsibilities and changing priorities. Participants’ approaches resonate with Kossek et al.’s (2021) concept of family ambition, emphasising relational rather than individualistic career orientations. Steven (3) captures this perspective: ‘There’s no need to try and reach the top of Everest by the time you’re 40, because you’ve still got 20 plus years [working] . . . when I’m old and grey, I’d rather be able to look back . . . well brought up children, enjoyed the time that I had with the family. Rather than saying didn’t I earn a bucket load of money?’ Temporal understandings of the interrelationship between careers and caring responsibilities are central to interpreting the varied and fluid arrangements in our data and accounting for shifting institutional and organisational contexts. While our findings extend to early childhood, there are clear indications that, for most couples, these arrangements will continue to be iteratively re-made, with work and care practices adapting over time within nested contexts in which these decisions are made (Tomlinson et al., 2018).
Discussion and concluding remarks
This article set out to explore the potential for fathers’ early solo caregiving to inform dual-career couples’ work and care trajectories, and what that reveals about the relational nature of dual careers. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data spanning 5 years, our three movements demonstrate how solo caregiving generates enduring competencies, reshapes relational expectations surrounding care and contributes to the reconfiguration of careers within couples.
Our first contribution lies in theorising careers and agency as relational and temporally unfolding processes emerging through the ongoing coordination of work and care within dual-career, professional couples. We capture this through our dynamic linked care(ers) framework. While existing scholarship recognises relational influences on careers (Lee et al., 2011; Tomlinson et al., 2018), they continue to be predominantly theorised as individual projects shaped by constraints (Kossek et al., 2021). Even relational career perspectives have largely retained an individualised ontology in which careers are understood as belonging to individuals navigating relational contexts (Lee et al., 2011; Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005). By contrast, our findings demonstrate that career decisions are enacted through iterative negotiation and mutual responsiveness, with partners’ careers mutually constituted and co-produced.
In this sense, agency is understood not as an individual capacity to act, but as a relational accomplishment that unfolds through interaction between actors whose lives and commitments are fundamentally intertwined. While Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998: 963) conceptualisation of agency as ‘a temporally embedded process of social engagement’ provided an important starting point, our contribution builds on critiques that it fails ‘to create a truly relational view of agency’ (Burkitt, 2016: 334), through occasional lapses which foreground agency ‘at the level of self-dynamics’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 964). Our findings provide concrete examples of this more encompassing relational view, demonstrating how agency unfolds in coordination with interdependent others.
This relational account of agency is inherently temporal. Couples’ actions were shaped by accumulated caregiving experiences, present organisational and institutional conditions, and anticipated future possibilities. Early solo caregiving experiences informed fathers’ willingness and capacity to assume ongoing caregiving responsibilities, which, in turn, enabled new relational configurations of work and care across time. These evolving arrangements illustrate how agency unfolds through temporally layered processes, linking past experience, present action and future orientation, extending Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) conceptualisation beyond individual actors to more fully recognise interconnected lives. By the end of data collection, it was evident that patterns of work and care would continue to be re-made as couples responded to changing family needs, career opportunities and organisational conditions. This reinforces the importance of research designs capable of capturing such temporal dynamics, particularly longitudinal approaches that can trace how relational career arrangements are continuously (re)configured over time.
Couples’ decisions were anchored in relational negotiations that incorporated both economic and value-based considerations (Duncan and Irwin, 2004), thereby supporting shared family ambitions rather than solely individual career aspirations. Career decisions were approached through a collective lens in which employment choices, caregiving arrangements and future aspirations were evaluated in relation to broader family goals. In this sense, ambition was not confined to individual advancement but extended to the organisation of family life, encompassing considerations such as time with children, household stability and partners’ respective career opportunities. Such orientations illustrate how career aspirations become embedded within relational life projects, with couples approaching parenting as a dynamic and iterative process, grounded in mutual compromise and long-term family ambitions.
To capture this relational and temporal constitution of careers and agency, we introduce the dynamic linked care(ers) framework to analyse career biographies within dual-career couples. Rather than treating careers and caregiving as separate domains that occasionally intersect, this framework foregrounds caregiving as constitutive of careers. This recognises that partners’ careers are co-produced through the ongoing coordination of caregiving practices, employment decisions and family priorities. Existing frameworks (Lee et al., 2011; Sweet and Moen, 2011) recognise that careers unfold in relation to others, yet they typically retain an individualised ontology that locates careers within discrete actors, rather than treating lives as fundamentally interconnected. Moving beyond accounts of interdependence to theorise the relational constitution of careers themselves, the dynamic linked care(ers) framework emphasises their co-evolution across couples’ shared biographies. This highlights the iterative, negotiated and temporally unfolding nature of work and care arrangements across the life course. Careers, therefore, emerge not as individual pathways occasionally shaped by caregiving demands, but as relationally produced across interconnected lives.
Building on this temporal-relational perspective, our second contribution focuses more specifically on how early solo caregiving informs the progressive reconfiguration of caregiving practices, gendered identities and careers. While existing quantitative research establishes the link between early paternal involvement and enduring caregiving patterns (Norman et al., 2014, 2024), we show how this occurs. Fathers’ sustained responsibility for daily caregiving fostered practical competence, emotional confidence and familiarity with the cognitive and emotional demands of caregiving (Twamley, 2024). These experiences generated embodied caregiving dispositions, described by participants as becoming habitual; skills and competencies that persisted well beyond the leave period. Caring masculinities became integrated into fathers’ ongoing identities and practices rather than remaining episodic or symbolic, contrasting with other accounts (Madrid, 2017). This experiential immersion transformed caregiving from an aspirational commitment into an enacted and sustained practice, reshaping how fathers understood their roles as caregivers and career actors. In doing so, solo caregiving destabilised conventional gendered assumptions regarding caregiving competence and responsibility, enabling fathers to assume interchangeable and sustained caregiving roles within couples (Hodkinson and Brooks, 2020), including sharing the traditionally feminised ‘mental load’ of parenting (Dean et al., 2022).
These transformed caregiving competencies had relational and career consequences. Fathers’ enhanced caregiving capacities expanded the range of possible work and care arrangements, enabling more flexible and adaptive coordination of employment and caregiving responsibilities within couples. Mothers’ career progression was frequently enabled through fathers’ caregiving involvement, demonstrating how caregiving competencies reshape relational career trajectories, redistributing caregiving responsibilities and expanding career possibilities traditionally constrained by gendered divisions of labour. Caregiving, therefore, operates not merely as a contextual constraint on careers but as a generative relational mechanism that reshapes how careers are enacted and sustained across interconnected lives. This extends quantitative research which recognises the link between early parental involvement and fathers’ enduring caregiving (Norman et al., 2014, 2024), by shedding light on the processes which inform change in caregiving and associated masculinities.
In turn, this contribution advances understanding of how caregiving practices reshape contemporary forms of masculinity and gender relations. Through their growing confidence as caregivers and enduring commitment to being ‘equal partners in parenting’ (Hodkinson and Brooks, 2020), fathers made their caregiving practices visible within organisational routines and workplace interactions rather than concealing them as backstage or secondary responsibilities (Bradley et al., 2026). This visibility reflects the emergence of more relational and care-oriented masculine identities (Elliott, 2016) that challenge conventional masculine career scripts privileging uninterrupted labour market participation (McDonald, 2018), contributing to the diversification of contemporary masculinities.
The visibility of fathers’ caring masculinities thus points towards the growing relevance and visibility of the ‘working father’ within organisational life. Rather than positioning caregiving as exceptional or secondary to employment, participants increasingly framed their identities as both workers and caregivers whose responsibilities required ongoing negotiation with organisational expectations. In several cases, flexible working arrangements (including remote work, adjusted hours or transitions to self-employment) enabled fathers to sustain their pronounced caregiving involvement beyond the leave period. These practices signal a gradual shift in organisational cultures in which fathers’ caring responsibilities become more openly acknowledged. However, such developments remain uneven and contingent on supportive organisational environments, managerial discretion and broader cultural acceptance of fathers organising work around family obligations. Institutional and organisational contexts therefore continue to shape fathers’ access to leave, the financial support available to them and their ability to navigate work and care thereafter. The gradual recognition of fathers’ caregiving roles within some workplaces (Burnett et al., 2013) coexists with enduring structural constraints such as the gender pay gap, limits to affordable childcare and persistent societal expectations regarding gendered parenting roles. These conditions highlight the spatial and temporal specificity of hegemonic masculinity (Hopkins and Giazitzoglu, 2025) and underscore the importance of recognising the nested institutional contexts within which couples organise their lives.
A focus on dynamic linked care(ers) has wider practical implications. It prompts reconsideration of what constitutes ambition or success in the context of careers (Tomlinson et al., 2018), recognising that ‘success’ should be treated as a flexible construct. With growing acceptance of flexible working arrangements, momentum behind the 4-day working week (Chung, 2022) and heightened attention to younger generations’ evolving expectations regarding careers and life goals (McDonald, 2018), our research offers an alternative perspective on how careers can be understood differently when the family is considered as a unit (Kossek et al., 2021), challenging traditional linear career models and assumptions. An important element of this shift towards family ambitions is the need to enhance employees’ ability to move more easily between roles or adopt flexible and/or part-time work patterns, necessitating a cultural change whereby employers recognise the caring responsibilities of all parents (Ranson, 2012).
Understanding how dual-career couples jointly navigate SPL has implications for policy and organisational practice. Uptake of the UK’s ‘shared’ parental leave scheme remains low, primarily due to issues of affordability, eligibility and its maternal-transfer design (Moss and O’Brien, 2019). This design further normalises long maternity and short paternity leave (O’Brien and Twamley, 2017), perpetuating traditionally gendered parenting practices (Twamley, 2024). A starting point for institutional reform, both within and beyond the UK, should therefore involve extending paid, designated leave for fathers (Kaufman, 2018), which has the potential to foster a more relational approach to organising work and care. Our study further emphasises the importance of the ‘quality’ of leave taken, shifting focus away from debates solely focused on duration. Contemporary parents will necessarily make practical-evaluative decisions surrounding how parental leave is shared, but we would encourage policy reform that ring-fences early solo caregiving time for fathers alone, recognising dedicated fathers’ leave as a crucial mechanism in this regard.
Drawing on examples from elsewhere, such as Portugal (Dobrotić et al., 2025), longer leave lengths for fathers, along with financial incentives, could be combined with government campaigns to encourage parents to take leave sequentially rather than concurrently. Such arrangements would facilitate early hands-on caregiving experiences and reinforce egalitarian parenting practices. Within organisations, recognising the concept of the ‘working father’ similarly requires greater acceptance of organising work around family obligations, enabling men to take advantage of workplace policies that have historically been used primarily by mothers (Ranson, 2012).
Limitations and directions for future research
This study focused on a small number of participants in coupled relationships where fathers were able to take periods of solo leave. Exploring complex issues in depth is important, and this approach enabled us to examine how fathers and their partners organised work and care, forging an understanding of the many twists and turns in their parenting journeys.
However, it remains crucial to draw on wider experiences, including those of parents facing different challenges and circumstances. Institutional limits on eligibility and affordability shaped a focus on a relatively ‘socially privileged family landscape’ (Berlato et al., 2025: 1828). Differences in organisational support for SPL and fathers’ leave taking (e.g. policies and practices) further influenced the nature of our sample, for example, participants were educated and employed in professional workplaces.
Future research should further prioritise capturing both partners’ voices in exploring career biographies, given their linked nature. Longitudinal research should examine the influence of varying patterns of parental leave on caregiving across a broader range of couples and intersecting identities (Berlato et al., 2025). Further quantitative research could complement in-depth qualitative work by investigating patterns across social groups and tracking developments over time, particularly in relation to evolving work contexts (e.g. increases in hybrid working) and shifting societal expectations surrounding motherhood and fatherhood.
Future application of principles embedded in the dynamic linked care(ers) framework should also extend beyond parenting to incorporate broader definitions of care (Wilkinson et al., 2018), including responsibilities such as elder care and support for individuals with disabilities or long-term health conditions. Research could recognise how care responsibilities intersect and accumulate across the life course. There is also scope to explore such ideas beyond traditional nuclear forms, accommodating the many and diverse ways of doing family.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the AE and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback, which helped to strengthen this paper. We also thank Professor Carol Atkinson and Dr. Reece Garcia (both Manchester Metropolitan University Business School), who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: We acknowledge funding from a British Academy grant (SG142650) and financial support received from the Alliance Manchester Business School fund (P126869).
AI usage declaration
The authors acknowledge that they have followed Human Relations’ AI policy. Accordingly, AI was used only for copy editing or proofreading the manuscript.
