When Stepfathers Claim Stepchildren: A Conceptual Analysis

Guided by social constructionist and symbolic interactionist perspectives and a grounded theory method, my conceptual analysis explores stepfathers’ experiences with claiming stepchildren as their own. Using in‐depth interviews with a diverse sample of 36 stepfathers, my analysis focuses on paternal claiming as a core category and generates 10 properties relevant to this social psychological phenomenon: timing, degree of deliberativeness, degree of identity conviction, paternal role range, solo‐shared identity, mindfulness, propriety work, naming, seeking public recognition, and biological children as benchmarks. In addition, I consider how five conditions may influence stepfathers’ perceptions of stepchildren. My analysis reveals a number of sensitizing concepts for studying stepfathers’ efforts to develop a sense of group belonging and a fatherlike identity.     

The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood

Using longitudinal time diary and survey data from a community sample of dual‐earner couples across the transition to parenthood, the authors examined change in divisions of paid and unpaid work and assessed the accuracy of survey data for time use measurement. Mothers, according to the time diaries, shouldered the majority of child care and did not decrease their paid work hours. Furthermore, the gender gap was not present prebirth but emerged postbirth with women doing more than 2 hours of additional work per day compared to an additional 40 minutes for men. Moreover, the birth of a child magnified parents' overestimations of work in the survey data, and had the authors relied only on survey data, gender work inequalities would not have been apparent. The findings have important implications for (a) the state of the gender revolution among couples well positioned to obtain balanced workloads and (b) the utility of survey data to measure parents' division of labor.     

The Changing Culture of Fatherhood in Comic‐Strip Families: A Six‐Decade Analysis

A content analysis of 490 Father's Day and Mother's Day comic strips published from 1940 to 1999 indicates that the culture of fatherhood has fluctuated since World War II. “Incompetent” fathers appeared frequently in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and late 1960s but were rarer in the late 1950s, early and late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s. Fathers who were mocked were especially common in the early and late 1960s and early 1980s but were less common in the late 1940s, early and late 1950s, and early and late 1970s. Fathers who were nurturant and supportive toward children were most evident in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and early and late 1990s, with the longitudinal pattern resembling a U‐shaped curve. Differences between fathers and mothers also oscillated from one decade to the next.     

新世纪之俄罗斯"父与子"——评近年俄罗斯"父子"题材影片

近年,俄罗斯数部“父子”题材的影片,在人伦父爱的极端表达中,展现“子”的残酷成长和对父亲新的认识与温情理解,最终则于凤凰涅槃中,“子”成为新的“父亲”,呈现出新世纪该题材的新的思想与文化趋向。     

DIFFERENT CLASSES,DIFFERENT FATHERS?

This paper discusses how social class and different economic conditions influence men's parenting. The paper is based on a qualitative study of 30 Swedish couples who live together with their biological children. The study shows that, despite the generosity of the Swedish welfare state and family subsidies, both internal and external economic conditions affect the way men construct their fatherhood. This was shown most clearly in the couples’ discussions around parental leave where parents under economic pressure often distributed the leave in a gender-traditional way. It was also apparent how traditional class patterns and structures still have a strong influence on today's parenthood. Fathers in working-class households often saw fatherhood as creating meaning in their lives and saw the process of becoming a parent as an explicit aspiration to establish something ‘natural’, well known and predictable. Fathers in middle-class households, on the other hand, considered fatherhood as something new, a reflexive project or an opportunity to develop their identity and to get to know new sides of themselves. In practice, these different ways of creating meaning in fatherhood are illustrated by the finding that working-class fathers tend to take up fewer parental leave days and uphold more traditional patterns of family life than fathers in middle-class households.     

Men at Work and at Home: Managing Emotion in Telework

Home‐based telework, as one of the flexible working options available today, is unique in its ability to blur physically and emotionally the boundaries between work and home. This article explores how men experience working from home, how they construct their identities as workers and as parents in this ambiguous location and how, as fathers, they manage the emotional work of reconciling family and career in this context. Our findings suggest that in order to manage the emotional aspects of telework men will, at times, focus on either the professional or parental part of their identity in their narratives, and at times attempt to ‘have it all’. We conclude that telework can provide a space where men can adopt emotional discourses and practices traditionally associated with women and, particularly, with working mothers.     

The Long‐Term Effects of Building Strong Families: A Program for Unmarried Parents

The authors present findings from a large‐scale, random‐assignment evaluation of Building Strong Families (BSF), a program offering group sessions on relationship skills education to low‐income, unmarried parents who were expecting or had recently had a baby. Findings based on a 3‐year follow‐up survey of over 4,000 couples indicate that BSF did not succeed in its central objectives of improving the couple relationship, increasing the quality of coparenting, or enhancing father involvement. In fact, the program had modest negative effects on some of these outcomes. BSF also had little impact on child well‐being, with no effect on children's family stability or economic well‐being and only a modest positive effect on children's socioemotional development. Impacts varied across the 8 study sites. Although attendance at group sessions was relatively low, there is little evidence of program effects even among couples who attended sessions regularly.     

The History of Research on Father Involvement

SUMMARY

Both our understanding and operationalization of fatherhood and father involvement have changed over time. Fatherhood has always been a multifaceted concept, although over time the dominant or defining motif has shifted in turn from moral guidance to breadwinning to sex-role modeling, marital support, and finally nurturance. As a result of these changing concepts, the extent of father involvement has been viewed and indexed in different ways at different times. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when societal concerns about the effects of fatherlessness were coming to the fore, social scientists also became much more interested in quantification of concepts such as father involvement, motivated in part by the emergence and popularity of time-use methodologies. This prompted a shift from a focus on qualitative dimensions (such as masculinity and dominance) to quantifiable dimensions (the amount of time spent by fathers with their children). This led to a restricted focus on paternal nurturance with little if any attention paid to the other functions or aspects of fatherhood. The narrowly focused view of fatherhood that resulted, ignored subcultural variation in the definition and understanding of fatherhood. Social scientists are only now beginning to seek a broader and more inclusive understanding of fatherhood-efforts that should permit more insightful research on the effects of variations in performance of the relevant roles.     

From the Margins to the Center

Abstract

How can research data about gender role strain in gay fathers improve clinical work with all men? This article describes a qualitative research study of 25 primarily White, middle to upper middle class gay fathers who had children in the context of a heterosexual marriage, and later established a gay identity. The fathers were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire in a focus group format. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory methodology. The narrative data chronicles the men's efforts to integrate their fathering identity and their gay identity. The findings are discussed using the theoretical framework of gender role strain. The authors propose that research on gay fathers has the potential both to challenge stereotypes about gay men and also to expand the fathering role for all men. The authors use clinical examples to illustrate how research findings from minority groups can expand knowledge about mainstream populations.     

Visitation Orders,Family Courts,and Fragile Families

Despite proposals to make parenting time a part of all new child support orders, limited research has examined why some unmarried are more likely than others to establish legal visitation agreements. This mixed‐methods study draws on qualitative data collected from unmarried mothers and fathers living in New York (N = 70) to develop hypotheses about the contexts in which parents set up visitation orders, which are then tested in a large sample of unmarried parents living apart (N = 1,392). Both qualitative and quantitative findings show that disengagement, cooperation, and conflict in the coparenting relationship postseparation influence unmarried parents' decisions about whether to establish a legal visitation agreement. The qualitative data further illustrate how parents' distrust of the court system, preference for informal agreements, and uncertainty about the custody of nonmarital children inform their decisions. The article concludes by considering approaches for helping low‐conflict coparents set up visitation agreements outside of family court.