difficult to find and afford, and women's (but not often men's) well-being and ability to

work is affected by the quality of child care available (Steil, 1997).

 Because men have greater access to work, are not held responsible for child care,

and have the support of their partners, couples often place primary accountability for the

family's financial welfare on fathers who in turn can feel burdened by this responsibility.

Yet the more hours fathers work, the less practically and emotionally involved they are

with their infants (Cook et al., 2005). Especially among families of middle to high

socioeconomic status, these societal barriers contribute to parental arrangements where

men are responsible for financial provision and women are responsible for housework

and child care. In Fox's (2001) qualitative study of 40 couples interviewed throughout the

transition to parenthood and in Feldman's (2000) survey and observational study of 60

Israeli couples and their infants, women continued to be the primary caregivers in their

families even after they returned to full-time paid employment.

 Work-family policies, designed to ease parents' balancing of responsibilities, may

have little to no effect on the inequalities of couples' divisions of labor and in some cases

may contribute to less equal arrangements. Singley and Hynes (2005) interviewed 18

married couples with young children, where both partners had been employed prior to the

mother's pregnancy. The researchers found the couples to represent two groups, one

which was committed to "traditional" gender roles and one which was not. The

"traditional" couples largely did not make use of policies allowing greater father

involvement because it was not seen as necessary. The nontraditional couples based their

work-family choices on what was most practical; since the husbands generally had higher

incomes, almost all of these couples used the men's vacation and sick leave (which was