Fatherhood Research Paper

1. Cross-Cultural Variation In Fathering

Although folk beliefs suggest that fathering and mothering entail behaviors that are fixed by reproductive biology, humans must learn how to parent much like they learn other social behaviors. In every culture and historical period, men’s family roles are shaped by social, economic, and cultural pressures, resulting in unique fatherhood ideals and practices. Although women have been the primary caretakers of young children in all cultures, the father role has varied from virtually no direct involvement to active participation in all aspects of children’s routine care, feeding, and protection.

Anthropologists have identified two general patterns of male involvement in domestic life across the world’s societies—one intimate and the other aloof. In the intimate pattern, men eat and sleep with their wives and children, talk with them during evening meals, attend births, and participate actively in infant care. In the contrasting aloof pattern, men often eat and sleep apart from women, spend their leisure time with men, stay away during births, and seldom help with child care (Whiting and Whiting 1975).

Cross-cultural research shows that about half of the world’s known societies have exhibited close father–child relationships, with contact typically increasing as children grow older. Compared to societies with distant father–child relationships, those with involved fathers are more likely to be peaceful and include nurturing deities of both sexes in their creation stories (Sanday 1981). Distant-father societies are more likely to have stern male gods, with groups of men routinely excluding women from community decision-making, demanding deference from wives, and engaging in competitive displays of manliness (Coltrane 1996). Higher levels of father involvement with children are thus associated with more intimate husband–wife relationships and more gender equality in the society, whereas lower levels of father involvement are associated with more distant husband–wife relationships and more overt male dominance.

2. Theories Of Fatherhood And Families

To understand cross-cultural variation in fatherhood and identify the essence of family, Malinowski (1929) developed a theory based on the ‘principle of legitimacy.’ Malinowski observed that in Western societies, families were organized around the authority of fathers, with patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence assuring the position of the male household head. In matrilineal Trobriand Island society, in contrast, Malinowski observed that fathers were virtual strangers living among their wives’ relatives, making few contributions to the family household and exercising little power. The important link was not between husband and wife as in Western societies, but between sister and brother, with the latter being the symbolic and actual head of the household. These observations led Malinowski to question the universality of the father-centered household pattern and the importance of biological fatherhood, suggesting an alternative focus on the legitimacy of children. To be legitimate, a child must be socially approved through a formal marriage that has taken place between his or her parents. Malinowski thus argued that the important focus was social fatherhood, (not biological fatherhood). The purpose of social fatherhood was attaching a child to a particular man (whether father or uncle), thereby securing a place for that child in the social structure.

Subsequent theories of family and fatherhood suggest that Malinowski’s formulation may have been too narrow, as well as containing some gender-biased assumptions (Coltrane and Collins 2001). Societies have existed where the majority of children are not born to mothers married to husbands (e.g., in the Caribbean Islands), and similar patterns are becoming increasingly common in urban centers of modern industrial societies. Malinowski’s theory focuses on connecting children to social fathers because this brings them legal and social status, but it ignores the possibility that children could gain that status from mothers. Since males usually control more wealth and exercise more political power than females, it has been more important for a child’s economic fate to be connected to a man than to a woman, but it is important to see how this pattern can vary under different social and economic conditions.

According to Collins’ (1975) conflict theory, a strong emphasis on legitimacy is most common in societies with high levels of male dominance. Nonmarital birth (‘illegitimacy’) is punished most severely in societies where men have the most extreme monopoly on power. In medieval Arab societies, for example, if a woman of the harem had an illegitimate child, she was punished by death, with the sentence carried out by the woman’s husband, father, or brother. On the other hand, if the father of the illegitimate child was powerful enough, the mother could have a reasonably honorable status as a concubine or mistress, and the child could grow up with a recognized social position. This pattern has been repeated in male-dominated societies throughout the world. In medieval France, for instance, one duke’s son was known as William the Bastard; later, after he founded the English throne, he was called William the Conqueror. Considering variations in male dominance, Collins (1975) argues that illegitimacy rules do not so much say no child without an official father as they say there should be no childbearing woman who does not officially belong to a man. Collins extends Malinowski’s legitimacy theory by conceiving of the family as a property system regulating three kinds of property: rights of sexual possession, economic property rights, and intergenerational property rights. Such approaches help explain how fatherhood ideals and practices maintain men’s dominance over women in both premodern and modern societies.

3. Historical Development Of Fatherhood

Fatherhood has been linked to the exercise of family authority at least since Ancient Greece and Rome, but it has been fathers’ public lives—their work, political exploits, and heroic battles—that have been chronicled in most histories. Fathers have also been care providers and teachers in different cultures and eras, and recent scholarship documents such practices. Before the modern era, childrearing was a collective enterprise and most family matters, including father–child relationships, were ruled primarily by duty and obligation (Shorter 1975). Because men’s work as farmers, artisans, and tradesmen occurred in the family household, most fathers were a visible presence in their children’s lives. Men introduced sons to farming or craft work within the household economy, oversaw the work of others, and were responsible for maintaining harmonious household relations. The family home was thus a system of control, as well as a center of production, and both functions tended to reinforce the father’s authority (Griswold 1993). Though mothers provided most direct care for infants and young children, men tended to be very active in the training and tutoring of children, and most parental advice was addressed to fathers. Because they were moral teachers and family heads, fathers were thought to have far greater responsibility for, and influence on, their children than mothers (Pleck 1987).

As market economies took over from home-based production, the father’s position as head and master of the household and moral instructor of his children was transformed. Men were increasingly called upon to seek employment outside the home and their direct contact with family members declined. Although men’s physical presence in the home was diminished, most did not stop participating in family activities. In fact, the first ‘new’ fatherhood movement emerged in the nineteenth century as middle-class fathers helped their wives through childbirth, romped with their offspring, forged close emotional bonds with daughters, and worried about sons’ vocations and education (Griswold 1993). As the wage labor economy developed, however, men’s occupational achievement outside the household took on stronger moral overtones and men came to be seen as fulfilling their family and civic duty not by teaching and interacting with their children as before, but by supporting the family financially (i.e., being a ‘good provider’). The middle-class home, which was previously the normal site of production, consumption, and virtually everything else in life, was transformed slowly into a nurturant child-centered haven set apart from the impersonal world of work, politics, and other public pursuits. The ideal of separate spheres for men and women—work for him and home for her—became one of the defining features of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

4. Recent Trends

By the middle of the twentieth century, mothers had become almost solely responsible for home and children. Separate spheres ideology and the popularity of Freud’s ideas about mother–infant bonding led to widespread acceptance of concepts like ‘maternal deprivation.’ Though few researchers bothered to ask who besides mothers took care of children, some researchers focused on ‘father absence,’ worrying that single-mother families could not set firm limits nor provide adequate masculine role models for sons. These studies have been criticized for confusing father absence with poverty, and for adopting the narrow view that aggressive and unemotional masculinity was both normative and desirable.

Starting in the 1970s, psychologists and sociologists began to report that a new fatherhood ideal was gaining in popularity. Films and television shows celebrated men’s love for children, even if the men they pictured were initially shown as comically inept. Most social scientists had assumed that men were not capable of, nor interested in, actual hands-on parenting, but research showed that, at least in laboratory settings, fathers could care for infants and young children (Parke 1996). Following an individual differences research tradition in psychology, studies tended to focus on ‘sex differences’ in parenting style. Fathers typically were found to be more likely than mothers to engage in rough and tumble play, to be more directive, to give more attention to sons, and to treat boys and girls in sex-stereotyped fashion. Fathers’ unique play styles were found to enhance children’s emotional and social competence, in part because they forced children to self-regulate (Parke 1996). Other studies by sociologists and psychologists showed that men and women performed child-care in different settings and in conjunction with different activities. Women most often did child-care in the home and frequently were engaged in multiple household tasks while simultaneously attending to children’s needs. Fathers, in contrast, were more likely to watch children in public settings (e.g., parks and playgrounds) and to take care of them as a sole activity. The conventional pattern was thus for child care to be an ongoing and taken-forgranted task for mothers, but a novel and fun distraction for fathers (Coltrane 1998).

In response to the women’s movement and maternal labor force participation, many observers predicted that fathers would begin assuming responsibility for a larger share of parenting and other family work. Several decades of research, however, have shown that while men are doing more, women continue to do most of the housework, remain the child care experts, and serve as emotional managers for their families. In general, family divisions of labor become more gendersegregated upon having children, with men increasing, and women decreasing, their paid work hours, even though both tend to increase their hourly contributions to family labor after a birth. Mothers are still more likely than fathers to take time off from their jobs to provide continuous child-care, spending significantly more time than fathers feeding, dressing, cleaning, and watching young children. Studies find that mothers spend double the time of fathers in these activities, even though many men did increase the time they spent with preschool and school-aged children during the 1980s and 1990s (Parke 1996, Pleck 1997). Two-parent, dual-earner families tend to share the most, with increasing numbers working different shifts and alternating routine child care between them. Research shows that couples share more family work when they are both employed full time, their incomes are similar, they believe in gender equality, and there are fewer, older, and male children (Coltrane 2000).

5. Measuring Father Involvement

Most researchers now agree that what fathers do with and for children is more important than simple coresidence or frequency of father-child contact (Parke 1996). The most influential approach distinguishing among various types of father involvement was offered by Lamb and his colleagues (Lamb et al. 1985) who suggested three principal components of fathering: interaction, availability, and responsibility. Interaction refers to the father’s direct contact with his child through care giving and shared activities. Recent measurement strategies in this domain pay attention to the form and content of interaction, distinguishing between play, instruction, and care-taking, and attempting to assess the quality of interaction, as well as the time spent interacting. Availability is a related concept focusing on the father’s potential availability for interaction, by virtue of being present or accessible to the child. Responsibility refers to the role the father takes in ascertaining that the child is taken care of and arranging for resources to be available for the child both inside and outside the home. This type of parental management is one of the least studied aspects of fathering, but is one of the most important (Parke 1996). Mothers remain child-care managers in the vast majority of households, but evidence indicates that at least some fathers are taking a more active role in this domain (Coltrane 1996, Pleck 1997).

6. What Difference Do Fathers Make?

As scholars pay more attention to fathers, we are beginning to understand what influence their involvement might have on child development and gender relations. We know that fathers’ resources improve children’s life chances. When fathers also share child care and housework with their wives, employed women escape total responsibility for family work, evaluate the division of labor as more fair, are less depressed, and enjoy higher levels of marital satisfaction (Coltrane 2000). When men care for young children on a regular basis, they emphasize verbal interaction, notice and use more subtle cues, and treat sons and daughters similarly (rather than focusing on play, giving orders, and sex-typing children). These differences between every-day and occasional fathering deserve further study, for they portend differential social impacts. Most studies show that children with actively involved fathers demonstrate enhanced intellectual and socio-emotional adjustment, as well as developing more balanced ego structures and gender expectations (Coltrane 1996, Parke 1996).

At the same time that many fathers are spending an increasing amount of time with their children, high levels of divorce and increasing rates of nonmarital childbirth are keeping other men away from children. In many industrialized countries, growing numbers of men rarely see their children and do not support them financially. In the US, for example, single-parent households are increasing rapidly, but only about half of children eligible for child support from nonresident parents obtain court orders for it, and only about half of those receive full payments. Both trends in fatherhood—toward more direct involvement and toward less contact and financial support—are responses to the same underlying social developments, including women’s rising labor force participation and the increasingly optional nature of marriage.

Longitudinal research shows that children from one-parent households (usually mother-headed) are at greater risk for negative adult outcomes (e.g., lower educational and occupational achievement, earlier childbirth, relationship problems) than those from two-parent families (Cherlin et al. 1995, McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). Debates continue over whether these outcomes are specifically attributable to the actions or inactions of fathers, and whether state support and community programs might ameliorate negative effects. Some commentators call for a return to tougher fault-based divorce laws and gender segregated models of fatherhood, but others label such responses a reactionary backlash against women’s increasing autonomy. Reinstating fathers as household heads and expecting only minimal direct domestic contributions from them is likely to maintain hierarchical structures both inside and outside families. Whether absent or physically present and doing little, the ability of fathers to stay aloof from daily family life is linked to patriarchal family authority and the reproduction of systemic male dominance. Fathers’ performance of everyday family work, in contrast, is associated with more intimate husband–wife relationships, more democratic family decision-making, and more gender equality in the society. The twenty-first century will undoubtedly see a continuing struggle between various intimate and aloof styles of fatherhood, with profound implications for men, women, and children.

Bibliography:

1. Cherlin A, Kiernan K E, Chase-Landsdale P L 1995 Parental divorce in childhood and demographic outcomes in young adulthood. Demography 32: 299–318
2. Collins R 1975 Conflict Sociology. Academic Press, New York
3. Coltrane S, Collins R 2001 Sociology of Marriage and the Family. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA
4. Coltrane S 1996 Family Man. Oxford University Press, New York
5. Coltrane S 1998 Gender and Families. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA
6. Coltrane S 2000 Research on household labor. Journal of Marriage and the Family 62: 363–89
7. Griswold R L 1993 Fatherhood in America. Basic Books, New York
8. Lamb M E, Pleck J H, Charnov E L, Levine J 1985 Paternal behavior in humans. American Zoologist 25: 883–94
9. McLanahan S, Sandefur G 1994 Growing Up with a Single Parent Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
10. Malinowski B 1929 The Sexual Life of Sa ages in North- Western Melanesia. H. Liveright, New York
11. Parke R D 1996 Fatherhood. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
12. Pleck J H 1987 American fathering in historical perspective. In: Kimmel M S (ed.) Changing Men. 3rd edn. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp. 83–97
13. Pleck J H 1997 Paternal involvement. In: Lamb M E (ed.) The Role of the Father in Child Development, Wiley, New York, pp. 66–103
14. Sanday P R 1981 Female Power and Male Dominance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
15. Shorter E 1975 The Making of the Modern Family. Basic Books, New York
16. Whiting J W M, Whiting B 1975 Aloofness and intimacy of husbands and wives. Ethos 3: 183–207