“I Feel Like It’s a Little Bit of a Badge of Honor”: Fathers’ Leave-Taking and the Development of Caring Masculinities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the consensus that fatherhood is undergoing significant change, there is little known about how men who are deeply engaged in caregiving experience the shift away from conventional models. Examining the use of parental leave by Canadian fathers offers the opportunity to study the day-to-day reality of men’s caregiving and how time with baby may be transformative. In-depth interviews with 33 men reveal that all participants developed parenting skills and emotional bonds, yet only fathers who parented without a mother’s oversight articulated a sense of ownership and accountability over their child’s care. Those personally moved by the leave experience were most likely to integrate caregiving into their identities, provided they felt ‘accomplished’ in their employment. Leave-taking thus represented an important liminal period in which fathers could ‘test the waters’ of hands-on childcare without threatening their sense of self, ultimately increasing the visibility of men as caregivers and reshaping cultural configurations of acceptable masculinity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".