The paper focuses on a special type of conflict that emerges from the contradictory demands of work and family life, assuming that the gap between the ideal manager and the involved father might serve as significant conflict source in men's life. In order to test the assumption an interview-based case study was made at the Hungarian subsidiary of a Scandinavian multinational service sector company, where 43 faceto-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with manager fathers. The interviews were analysed with the use of NVivo10 on the principle of qualitative content analysis. According to the findings behaviour-based work-family conflict is not the major source of conflict between work and family responsibilities, rather the contrary, managerial and father roles often enhance each other. In those cases when manager fathers have experienced conflict it appeared in two forms: as a double pressure that fathers are expected to be both traditional breadwinners and available involved fathers and as the difficulty to switch from managerial role into father role. The low level of behaviour-based conflict can be explained by the traditional division of labour and gender attitude in Hungary that conforms to the workplace's expectations about ideal employees.

This article analyses the agency freedom of manager fathers in Hungary to claim work–family balance through corporate flexible working arrangements. Hobson’s interpretation of Sen’s capability approach (Hobson, Fahlén, & Takács, 2011) is applied to appraise the effect of individual resources and organizational and national context on managers’ work–family balance, as well as their influence on organizational culture. An interview-based case study was undertaken at the Hungarian subsidiary of a Scandinavian multinational company, wherein 43 personal interviews were conducted with fathers in managerial positions. The interviews were analysed according to structuring qualitative content analysis. Managers benefitted from corporate flexibility (home office and flexible schedule), but experienced power asymmetries in terms of access to and use of the former according to hierarchy and department. Even though the men in these positions are assumed to be change agents, the majority of them perceived limited agency freedom to convert flexible working into work–family balance, or to influence organizational culture. The privileged position of managers was detected at the level of their individual agency. Most managers could economically afford to maintain a male breadwinner model. Therefore, limitations related to securing parental and flexibility rights were due to traditional gender norms, and the strong sense of entitlement to work. Consequently, the extent and means of use of flexibility did not challenge deeply rooted assumptions about ideal employee norms.

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A squeezed feeling of time might influence the quality of parental time and thus parental engagement. Using recent Hungarian quantitative data on representative parent–child dyads ( n = 1000) based on subjective estimations and evaluations of parental time, this study aims to grasp the often used notion of quality time. We concentrate on the aspect of focus in parental attention and compare parents’ and adolescents’ perspectives to reveal the impact of the former on teenagers’ subjective wellbeing. Results indicate that quality time matters; in addition, teenagers’ perceptions about focused parental time is a more significant factor in relation to wellbeing than parents’ perceptions, and the latter has a greater impact on life satisfaction than enrichment activities. However, when there is a lack of shared time, enrichment activities might compensate for this shortage. Finally, we propose that class inequalities are further enhanced and reproduced by unequal access to quality time and intensive parenting practices.