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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Hungarian stay-at-home father—working-mother families from a point of view of how the distribution of unpaid domestic work develops during the period when the father stays at home with his child(ren). It answers the question of what principles and implemented practices govern the division of household labour in these families. According to the perception of the traditional parental role, unpaid domestic work, such as family duties, routine housework, and care work are the responsibility of mothers, while fathers are responsible for the financial stability of the family. In addition to the once prevailing breadwinner father role, nowadays the egalitarian model is becoming increasingly prominent. In parallel, a new father type appears according to which a good father wants to be more involved in the everyday life of the child. An extreme case of this type of involvement is when the father stays at home with his child(ren) and becomes the primary caregiver, and the mother assumes the role of breadwinner. The ratio of such families is growing around the world, but we still know relatively little about them. Our gap-filling, qualitative research is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 31 Hungarian stay-at-home fathers supplemented by a short questionnaire with their partners. The data were analyzed by thematic analysis method. As a main conclusion we could identify two clearly distinguishable groups among the examined couples: families with a rather traditional approach, and families having more egalitarian values concerning gender roles. However, the findings suggest that all of these families can be characterised by egalitarian sharing practices of duties, and at the same time by undoing gender. The distribution of routine housework and care work is based on a time availability perspective, which does not specify any masculine or feminine family duty or work. Full article

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. Full article