Home and Engaged Fatherhood | Barcelona

Bringing Engaged Fatherhood in from the Margins for Men, Families and Gender Equity

July 2026 | IESE Business School, Universidad de Navarra, Barcelona, Spain

This Experts Meeting is organised by Home Renaissance Foundation (HRF) in partnership with Harvard University, the International Centre for Work and Family (ICWF-IESE), the International University of Catalonia and the Social Trends Institute, which also provides the funding for the project.

The following proposal builds on expertise garnered and research published on the significant social trend recognizing the societal as well as personal need for, and benefit from, engaged fatherhood.

There is increased public commentary and political interest not only on the life-long consequences of absent fathers to their children but also on the physical and mental health of the men concerned. More widely, the generational shift in expectations of how men live, work and contribute to family and society has rendered male roles less clearly defined, and men, often unintentionally, less engaged. In simplest terms, the perception that these roles are eroded and devalued requires a strong positive revaluing of men’s contribution to both the private and public sphere, for the mutual benefit of men and women.

Engaged fatherhood is a strong and positive model of how the role of men in family and home life retains crucial value within the current social context. Further, fatherhood is seen as enriched and enhanced by newer understandings of gender complementarity rather than diminished by them. Engaged fatherhood, or the lack of it, is experienced primarily in family relationships, which function in the context of home. For this reason the home should be understood as not just a beneficiary of engaged fatherhood but an essential contributor to its nurture and development.

In the depth and breadth of what follows, it is the positive evaluation of fatherhood and the centrality of the home context that offer relevant research bearings for Home Renaissance Foundation. As will be seen, the previous research and this proposed meeting take seriously the need for, and use of, multidisciplinary expertise.

This approach underpins the work of HRF over the last twenty years, and our previous fruitful collaborations with STI and ICWF-IESE.

Main questions to be addressed:

What are the positive characteristics of engaged fatherhood in the current social
context?

How can these be supported in domestic, familial, social and work-based instruments
and structures?

Is the Care of the Home an essential contributor to Fatherhood?

Academic Leaders

Marc Grau  | Assistant Professor of Social and Family Policies, Vicedean of the Faculty of Education Sciences, Researcher of the Joaquim Molins Figueras Childcare and Family Policies Chair and Director of the Institute for Advanced Family Studies at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya

Dr Hannah Riley Bowles|  Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School

Milton Kotelchuck | Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Senior Scientist in the Maternal Child Health Center in the Center for Child and Adolescent Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital

Mireia Las Heras | Professor of Managing People in Organizations at IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Spain – where she is the Director of the International Center for Work and Family (ICWF)