Peer-reviewed article
Paradoxes of gender: Women declining motherhood and fathers claiming their children’s care and nurturance
Paloma Fernández Rasines, Mercedes Bogino Larrambebere ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed article examines gender roles and cultural expectations around motherhood and fatherhood in Spain. It explores women who choose not to have children and men who actively engage in childcare and nurturing roles. The study uses literature review and in-depth interviews to understand how these choices challenge traditional gender norms and create new models of family life.
Key points
- The study investigates women declining motherhood and men claiming active roles in children's care and nurturance
- It explores how these choices challenge normative sex/gender patterns in relation to child upbringing
- The research combines literature review with qualitative fieldwork using in-depth interviews
- The focus is on individual experiences and standpoints of women and men making non-traditional choices regarding parenthood roles
Limitations
This document is a brief abstract/overview rather than a full report, so it does not provide sufficient detail on the actual findings, sample characteristics, methodology, or implications for child well-being. The article appears focused on gender sociology and adult choice-making rather than on outcomes or interventions related to children's well-being specifically.
Abstract
In this article our aim is to reveal an apparently paradoxical situation for normative sex/ gender patterns in relation to upbringing.The discussion focuses on to what extend women discharging from the cultural mandate of motherhood, and men meeting as fathers the process of day-to-day care, would raise the appearance of new models who travel with greater freedom and autonomy, beyond gender roles forced limits.In the first part, a review of specialized literature has provided us with the conceptual developments around women without offspring and/or free from it, as well as the construction of paternity by men who assume and claim their children's care and nurturance.In the second part, we show the results of our field work performed through in-depth interviews revealing the experiences of women and men from their standpoint as subjects declining motherhood and vindicating fatherhood respectively.