Working schedules and fathers’ time with children: A Sequence Analysis

Mothers’ labour market participation requires fathers to find new schemes for time allocation among paid work and fathering activities. This paper investigates whether typology of fathers’ engagement depends on their time availability or on other characteristics. We carry out a Sequence Analysis on data from the 2008-09 Italian Time Use Survey, allowing to identify some “fathering profiles”. Multinomial logit models are used to understand which factors influence the risk to be included in the groups identified. Five ‘fathering profiles’ are identified, strongly shaped by the father’s work schedules. A cultural threshold of “minimum compulsory childcare” emerges: even when fathers are more available to children, they spend their time in scarcely engaged activities.