During the last fifteen years much state intervention across Latin America has been aimed at women and mothers. Whether reinforcing or altering gender inequality, policy developments increased the proportion of women with own income (through Conditional Cash Transfers or CCTs, and extended pension coverage), improved women’s access to old age benefits on their own terms (as compared to benefits obtained as dependent from their husbands), increased the length and coverage of maternity leaves and timidly moved towards a reorganization of care beyond families and unpaid female, motherly work (through high profile national services of Early Child Education and Care or ECEC). Together with larger labor market participation, these developments have had a positive transformative effect on women’s lives (Arza and Martínez Franzoni, 2017).
But how about fathers? Except for a few examples of paternity and parental leaves, men and fathers remained absent from social policy intervention (Blofield & Martínez Franzoni, 2015; Blofield, 2016). We know little about how the law and state policy currently address fathers and fatherhood. This is a problematic neglect in the literature. While the absence of studies around fatherhood and paternity should always be considered a deficit in the gender literature, it becomes all the more glaring when family arrangements are undergoing a silent revolution.
Latin American families undergo deep transformations. Conjugal relations have become more gender-egalitarian and flexible, with broader entry and exit options and a better distribution of rights regarding asset control, lineage recognition power. This is true of the western and most non-western world. They have also become more rare, unstable and prone to breakdown limiting the potential that cooperating adults in households can bring to nurturing and protection of offspring and each other by defending a system of allocation of resources, power and recognition not subsumed in the logics of state and markets (Filgueira, 2018).
Partly due to changed conjugal relations, the nuclear family as the prevailing family arrangement has been eroded, giving room to single-headed families, cohabitation, same sex conjugal couples and other family forms. Legal recognition of this different family forms still lags behind the pace of change and negatively affects their viability and stability (Filgueira, 2018). Overall, the probability of children permanently living with their fathers has dropped and the proportion fathers exercising (or not) parental roles and support from outside the household has considerable increased. The proportion of biparental households with a male head of household is almost the same as the proportion of female-headed households. Children produce no income for themselves and yet, they demand considerable material provision. They demand a great deal of resources, both in terms of income and care. In this context, how states go about fathers/fatherhood is indeed crucial for children´s wellbeing and for the life chances of their mothers.
To overview what we know about fathers and fatherhood in law and state policy, we must look into family policy which includes maternity and parental leave, childcare provision, and family allowances, all administered through the welfare state (Htun and Weldon, 2017). It is the realm of the comparative literature on social policy and welfare regimes. In addition we must overview family law as the legal norms that govern the formation and internal relations of these units, including rules about marriage, and dissolution, as well as the rights, obligations and capacities of spouses and generational relationships (Htun and Weldon, 2017).
In this paper I first explain why the role of fathers aside from conjugal relations is so important to children´s wellbeing. Secondly, I examine the literature and propose conceptual lenses to explore state expectations regarding fathers/fatherhood. In the third place, I look into the law and state policy in three selected Latin American countries to explore cross-national similarities and variations. The last section concludes and discusses implications.
Findings are twofold. On the one hand, the evidence examined suggests that the breadwinner father still prevails in family law and to a large degree, in family policy. Changes towards active or caring fatherhood are scarce. On the other hand, there seems to be relevant cross-national variations. Costa Rica embodies a strong male breadwinner model while Ecuador and to a large degree, Uruguay, have taken steps towards promoting care-giving fathers. Most efforts, however, continue to be placed on fathers as breadwinners. To this aim, jail prevails over jobs and active labor policy and the criminalization of the “unfit“ fathers prevails over efforts to enable fathers to take on old and new roles.