Framing Fatherhood: Legal Norms and Media Narratives in Croatia

Gender roles in Croatia reflect the historical and political legacies typical of post‐socialist Europe. While women’s emancipation advanced during the Yugoslav era, the post‐Yugoslav period witnessed a retraditionalisation of family ideals, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Despite growing paternal involvement in childcare, caregiving remains unequally distributed between mothers and fathers. This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining a systematic review of Croatian parental‐rights legislation with qualitative content and critical discourse analyses of 72 Index.hr articles (2022–2025) to examine both the legal framing of fathers’ rights—particularly EU‐aligned paternity leave—and media representations of fatherhood as areas where state policy and societal norms converge. The findings illuminate how fatherhood is conceptualised in a post‐socialist context and reveal factors that shape paternal engagement. As the media analysis is limited to Index.hr, Croatia’s most widely read news portal, results cannot be taken as being representative of the broader media landscape; future research should include other outlets, social media, and fatherhood‐focused platforms in order to provide a fuller picture of paternal representations.