'Fatherhood is a Unique Experience': Visibilizing and Contextualizing Paternal Care Work
Karthik Bhat, Neha Madhiwalla, Neha Kumar · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research on maternal and child health (MCH) has largely taken mother- or child-centric lenses to technology design for improved outcomes. An emerging body of CSCW research has called for a renewed focus on supporting caregivers through sociotechnical interventions to enable better health outcomes. Our research--with underserved communities in urban India--extends this prior work by centering fathers and their care work during pregnancy and early childhood. We examine how gender roles, religious beliefs, aspirations for social mobility, and financial responsibilities influence fathers' participation in MCH. We use qualitative inquiry in highlighting the constraints on the nature of care work fathers are able to perform given the patriarchal and societal norms they operate within, and how the care work they perform is rendered invisible by diverging from traditional notions of care. In doing so, we expand dominant notions of care work in such ecologies, and discuss implications for the design of technologies for better supporting fathers towards familial wellbeing.