Article
Новые меры поддержки материнства и детства: стимулирование рождаемости или рост уровня жизни семей с детьми?
The aim of this article is to analyze strategies of combining motherhood and employment. For this purpose the notion of work-family balance will be conceptualized. The author suggests that strategies of mixed professional and family duties is being constructed at the level of household and depends on available personal and family resources as well as individual choices of working adults. Because contemporary Russian family policy does not provide institutional supports for working parents to combine motherhood and employment. Working mothers are in search of family-work balance, because child care is the main women responsibilities. Motherhood is still a crucial part of life project for Russian women.
The article deals with comparative analysis of family policies towards fatherhood. The author analyzes how family policy in different countries is a mens friendly. Contemporary family policies in different Western European countries include a specific set of support, addressed to father after the child birth. A leave to care for the child is an example which shows that the family policy creates different models of fatherhood. In conclusion the author argues that gender-based analysis of family policy, along with the study of the position of women with children should include fathers who have certain rights and responsibilities.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.