BC Council for Families

According to University of Calgary sociology professor Gillian Ranson, family life in Canada is changing -- slowly. In her new book, Against the Grain: Couples, Gender, and the Reframing of Parenting, Ranson profiles families who are challenging conventional parenting notions, specifically the roles of mothers and fathers.

For the book, Ranson conducted extensive interviews with 32 families across Canada that are doing things differently -- “going against the grain”. She spoke to stay-at-home dads, moms and dads who both work and who split parenting duties equally, and same-sex couples with creative approaches to family life. She found that in families where there is a genuinely equitable sharing of all the responsibilities, there also tends to be a blurring of gender boundaries.

What’s taking place, she says, is parenting rather than mothering and fathering. In these families, the couples were interchangeable as parents rather than classically “mothers” or classically “fathers”.

“It’s as if you took all the things you usually associated with mothering and all the things normally attributed to fathering, dumped them in a basket and shared them generally,” she says. “Instead of one parent mainly focused on the kids and the other one helping out, you have two parents who are really interested and involved. Over time this creates a functional interchangeability of roles between the two parents in the household.”

Ranson admits the shift to functional interchangeability isn't going to happen overnight. In fact, "Against the Grain" grew out of her observation that although much was changing on the work front, with more women contributing in dual-earner families, in the majority of households life at home was still similar to the way it was 50 years ago. Mothers were still acting as the primary decision-makers regarding the children and household chores.

"What I was wanting to do was to sort of put a picture out there of other ways of organizing family life, other ways of doing things. What those 32 couples show, in a very small way . . . is that they're probably at the front end of change that is coming," Ranson says.

For her next research project, Ranson is looking to speak with new fathers who are currently taking parental leave or who are planning to do so once their baby arrives. Interested dads can contact her directly at ranson@ucalgary.ca