Just published cross-national findings show that expectant parents in Finland, Japan and Portugal value parental cooperation in terms of mutual support, team spirit, sharing, and agreeing on childrearing. However, the availability of institutional support, gender and the care regime, and existing work and parenting cultures shape expectant parents’ future visions of their coparenting.

Coparenting, denoting shared parenting responsibilities and mutual support between caregivers, is an important and globally highly valued resource for families. Pregnancy is a crucial time for the development of coparenting, as it is a time when expectant couples start to imagine and plan their future caregiving roles with each other.

Coparenting forms and structures, underlying sets of values and beliefs, drivers and barriers to parental cooperation may, however, differ between countries and have an impact on future coparenting. To find out how these differences manifest in varying sociocultural contexts, the Learning to coparent (CopaGloba) study compared expectations and worries related to future coparenting among expectant parents in three countries – Finland, Japan, and Portugal.

Country differences in how parents see parental roles and how the roles are negotiated and justified

Differences were identified in how expectant parents justified their future-related decisions about sharing and agreeing on parental duties, how they expected to negotiate these issues, and how they saw the relative primacy of mothers and fathers in their future-related visions concerning childcare, parenting, and childrearing. The traditional ideal of the primacy of the mother was the most pronounced among the expectations of Japanese participants while also clearly visible in the other two countries, if somewhat differently.

In Japan, the primacy of mothers was mostly mentioned as a concern and barrier to equal sharing of responsibilities, and the central role of the mother was often reported as a feature of a family system for which there is no alternative. Japanese expectant fathers with long working hours did not expect to spend much time with their newborn, nor did their wives expect such involvement from their husbands. In Finland and Portugal where, along with an intensive motherhood culture, full-time work is almost a maternal norm, women expected childcare and household tasks to be burdensome.

Multiple cultural models were identified within the countries, with both traditional and non-traditional models coexisting in all samples despite their different family policies and gender regimes.

Team spirit important for expectant parents in all three countries

In all countries half of expectant couples expressed a wish for a strong team spirit as well as a sense of cohesion and resilience when encountering obstacles.

“Expectant parents spoke about parenting as a joint process, where cooperation and acting with one voice are keys for the couple to deal with the challenges of parenthood”, Assistant Professor Marisa Matias from the University of Porto noted.

The international team of researchers in CopaGloba suggests that parenting education programs and services could encourage expectant parents with varying sociocultural backgrounds to find positive, culturally appropriate ways of working as a team, building team spirit, supporting each other, sharing duties, communicating with each other and learning to deal with disagreements. Such programs and services could also offer expectant parents a space for discussing their wishes and worries relating to future coparenting.

Equality-related policies and awareness of coparenting crucial for enhancing gender equal parenting

To tackle barriers to father involvement and enhance gender equality in parenting, equality-related policies, such as nontransferable parental leave for fathers, are needed.

The findings reveal that an intensive work culture, especially in Japan, and an intensive motherhood culture, both of which limit father participation, are barriers to supportive and fair coparenting. Among the Japanese expectant parents, the work culture, together with traditional gender norms, and extensive leave provisions for child-care at home seemed to have created a situation for expectant Japanese women in which they were simply unable to expect anything and just accept the status quo.

“Although Japanese fathers have fully secured their right to take parental leave, the local work culture may hinder adopting it”, says Professor Chino Yabunaga from Toyo University. “It is therefore important to raise awareness of coparenting in Japan and globally.”

“Despite family policies promoting coparenting, the traditional family model remains a strong cultural ideal across these three countries”, says Professor Anna Rönkä from University of Jyväskylä. “It seems coparenting flourishes best when mothers and fathers are not required to invest heavily in either parenthood or in work but instead have the opportunity to achieve a balance between these two life domains.”

The study was based on the Learning to coparent (CopaGloba) study, funded by the Research Council of Finland. During the third trimester of pregnancy, 30 Finnish, Japanese, and Portuguese heterosexual couples (N = 180) expecting their first child participated in individual semi-structured interviews on their prospective coparenting.