Charlie Lewis
[with Amalia Papacosta and Jo Warin]
Cohabitation, separation and fatherhood

The debate on contemporary fatherhood has intensified in recent years, but the positions held in such discussion have relied upon popular stereotypes at best and at worst simply an expression of a political imperative. In this case example I will examine a particular group of fathers - those who have cohabited with a partner and had at least one child, and then separated. Fathers' and mothers' accounts after cohabitation breakdown reveal many points of overlap with and difference from married parents. I will chart some of these issues in terms of their descriptions of the cohabitation, their parenting and commitments in order to explore several dimensions of the nature of contemporary fatherhood.