Journal of Personality and Social Psychology !986, Vol. 51, No. 5,983-992 Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-35I4/86/S00.75 Consequences of Fathers' Participation in Family Work: Parents' Role Strain and Well-Being Grace K. Baruch and Rosalind C. Barnett Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women The relation of fathers' participation in family work (child care and home chores) to parents' role strain and well-being was examined in an interview study of 160 Caucasian middle-class fathers and mothers of kindergarten and fourth-grade children. In half of the families, mothers were employed. Four forms of paternal participation were examined. Role-strain items referred to immediate and specific problems such as time and energy constraints and role conflicts. Well-being measures as- sessed self-esteem, life satisfaction, and quality of experience in the parental and marital roles. Re- gression analyses, carried out separately for fathers and for mothers, indicated that, contrary to expectation, when the level of fathers' participation was controlled maternal employment did not condition the relation between participation and the outcome variables. Findings varied for the different forms of participation. For fathers, higher levels of participation were associated with feeling more involved and competent as a parent and with being more critical of wives' patterns and parent- ing. For mothers, those whose husbands were more participant praised their husbands' parenting, but they were lower in life satisfaction and were more self-critical about their balance of work and family responsibilities. Issues relating to the father's role in the family are of growing general concern and reflect current re-examination of the male role, catalyzed in large part by the women's movement and by the increased participation in the labor force of married women with children. Many fathers want to participate more directly infamily work, that is, child care and home chores, and in many families their increased involvement is needed. The impact of paternal participation in family work on fathers and their wives, however, is not yet well understood (Pleck, 1983). There is increasing evidence that fathers' participation has important, diverse, and complex effects on parents (Bell, 1983; Kessler&McRae, 1982; Ross, Mirowsky, & Huber, 1983;Yogev & Brett, 1985). Recent reviews of the literature point to both costs and benefits of new patterns of fathers' involvement in the family (Gilbert, 1985; Lamb, Pleck, & Levine, 1985). Men's increased participation in family work typically reflects a trans- The research reported here was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH 34225 and received additional funding from the Henry A. Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College. The authors extend their appreciation to research colleague Jane Traupmann, project secretary Kathie DeMarco, and Brooke Cheston, Patricia Gagnon, Barbara Kraft, Eliot Kraft, Pat McLaughlin, Elena Perrello, Jim Pfeiffer, Thalia Price, Russ Quaglia, and Diana Taylor. Zick Rubin and Joseph Pleck repeatedly provided invaluable com- ments on previous drafts of this article; Joseph Pleck also provided im- portant methodological suggestions. We are also grateful to Erin Phelps, Valerie Lee, and Nancy Marshall for statistical advice and computing assistance and to Nathalie Dana Thompson for manuscript prepara- tion. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace K. Baruch, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College, Welles- ley, Massachusetts 02181. fer of work from wife to husband (Pleck, 1981); thus fathers' and mothers' concerns and reactions will differ. Costs and bene- fits are also thought to depend on whether the wife is employed, the particular effect being examined (e.g., parental versus mari- tal satisfaction), and the type of paternal participation (e.g., child care or home chores). The study reported here was de- signed to address these complexities, that is, to assess within one study several important components of paternal participa- tion and a variety of outcomes for both fathers and mothers. Although a cross-sectional study cannot disentangle cause and effect relations, the correlates of participation we focus on here were conceptualized as effects—in contrast to determi- nants—of paternal participation. (Correlates of participation that were conceptualized as determinants are discussed in Bar- nett & Baruch, in press-a). In examining the relation of fathers' participation to such variables as self-esteem, however, only a longitudinal study can address such issues as the extent to which the level of a father's self-esteem before the birth of a child pre- dicts the amount of child care he does versus the extent to which the level of his involvement in child care affects his self-esteem. Similarly, marital satisfaction both affects and is affected by the level of paternal involvement (Cowan & Cowan, 1985). Prior findings on the effects of paternal participation, which are briefly reviewed here, are primarily from cross-sectional studies and should be considered in the light of this constraint. Fathers Versus Mothers The issues faced by highly participant fathers tend to focus on interference with their role as economic providers. Mothers, in contrast, are often concerned about failure to fulfill their tra- ditional role obligations and about possible resentment by their husbands (Hoffman, 1983; Pleck, 1983; Robinson, Yerby, Fie- 983