45 Men and Masculinities Volume 12 Number 1 October 2009 45-72 © 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1097184X07306720 http://jmm.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Men’s Choices and Masculine Duties Fathers in Expert Discussions Jaana Vuori University of Tampere, Finland This article analyzes the debate among family experts about fathering in Finland from the 1980s to recent years. The controversy is whether shared parenting between women and men is good for children and for men themselves or whether a gendered division of parenting should be advocated instead. Both discourses perceive men as important as fathers but disagree on the care of babies and very young children. Irrespective of position, experts stress that the choices made by men regarding fatherhood are individ- ual and have wide-ranging consequences in their lives and the lives of their children, especially of boys. Experts view motherhood as a societal duty, and fatherhood as per- sonal and elective. If fathers’ choices are stressed as a moral issue, it is because fathers are seen as masculine actors, not as nurturers. The author argues that the radical societal ethos of shared parenting seems to have weakened, or even disappeared. Keywords: fatherhood; fathering; Finland; motherhood; shared parenting M y purpose in this article is to analyze the lively debates about fathering that have been going on among family experts in Finland from the 1980s to recent years. The basic prevailing controversy among experts is about whether shared parenting between women and men is good for children and good for men themselves or whether a clear gendered division of parenting practices should be advocated instead. These basic understandings I call the shared parenting discourse and the exclusive mothering discourse. 1 The exclusive mothering discourse emphasizes women’s innate character as primary nurturers. The shared parenting discourse denies the absolute division between female and male nurturing roles. Both discourses consider men to be impor- tant as fathers but disagree on the care of babies and very young children. On the level of everyday practices, the argument is often about practical infant care, but both dis- courses have turned to stress a “deeper” and more fundamental psychological or psy- chosocial relationship between men and children (Vuori 2001). It is not my aim in this article, however, to point out that these two discourses exist vis-à-vis each other but to argue how they both contribute to a powerful cultural figure of the father, even to the extent that it has become very difficult to raise any woman-centred issues of parenting or sometimes even to talk about mothers