Hungarian Stay-at-Home Fathers: A New Alternative for Family Wellbeing

Abstract

The two significant factors that influence subjective wellbeing are job and life satisfaction, so the work–life balance, that is, balancing between the two areas, is related to several wellbeing outcomes. This issue is of particular interest in those families, where, even if only temporarily, they have chosen the non-traditional sharing of roles, in which the father becomes the primary caregiver and the mother assumes the role of breadwinner. Very few Hungarian studies focus on families where the mother is the prime breadwinner and there has been no research specifically relating to stay-at-home father–working mother families. The qualitative gap filling research that we conducted was utilized to explore the relationship between achieving work-life balance and wellbeing in case of Hungarian stay-at-home father–working mother couples. A total of 31 families were examined through a semi-structured in-depth interview with the fathers and a short questionnaire with the mothers. All participants were white, heterosexual couples with one to four children. As a result of the analysis, four typical patterns in terms of the stay-at-home father and working mother family dynamics could be identified, including to what extent this non-traditional family format contributes to the father’s, mother’s, or both of their wellbeing.