Unique Influence of Mothers and Fathers on Their Children's Antisocial Behavior

The social development model ( Catalano & Hawkins, 1996 ) was adapted to examine the unique influence of mothers and fathers on their children's antisocial behavior. Analyses examined 325 families with sixth‐grade children. Structural equation modeling was used to assess unique influences of constructs specific to mothers or fathers. Multiple‐group comparisons were conducted to identify differences in the relationships between constructs for daughters versus sons. Results suggested that, although the relationships were often similar for both parents and for both daughters and sons, mothers and fathers uniquely influenced their child's antisocial behavior depending on the child's gender. Overall, cross‐gender influence appeared to be particularly important for fathers’ control of their daughters’ antisocial behavior. Implications for the prevention of antisocial behavior are discussed.     

'Estrogen-filled worlds': fathers as primary caregivers and embodiment

Within the wide body of scholarship on gender work and caring, sub‐strands of research have grown tremendously in the past decade, including largely separate studies on fatherhood and embodiment. Drawing on a qualitative research project with Canadian fathers who self‐identify as primary caregivers of their children, this article focuses on recovering largely invisible links between theoretical and empirical understandings of fatherhood, caring and embodiment. The article builds on the work of key sociologists of the body as well as the work of Goffman and Merleau‐Ponty. Specifically, Merleau‐Ponty's concept of ‘body subjects’ and Goffman's work on the ‘moral’ quality of bodily movements through public spaces are utilized as lenses for understanding fathers' narratives of caring, particularly how men speak about their movements with children through what several fathers refer to as “estrogen‐filled” worlds. As caring for others involves forming social networks and relations, embodiment can matter in the spaces between men, between male and female caregivers, and between men and the children of others. This article argues that through the changing stages of caring for children, male embodiment constantly shifts in the weight of its salience in the identities and practices of fathers and caregiving.     

Dual‐earner parent couples’ work and care during COVID‐19

COVID‐19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual‐earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work–family balance and how their partner shared the load. Overall, paid work time was slightly lower and unpaid work time was very much higher during lockdown than before it. These time changes were most for mothers, but gender gaps somewhat narrowed because the relative increase in childcare was higher for fathers. More mothers than fathers were dissatisfied with their work–family balance and partner’s share before COVID‐19. For some the pandemic improved satisfaction levels, but for most they became worse. Again, some gender differences narrowed, mainly because more fathers also felt negatively during lockdown than they had before.     

Beyond The Father Wound: Memory‐Work And The Deconstruction Of The Father–son Relationship

This article examines how profeminist men in a collaborative inquiry group used memory‐work to make sense of their experiences of discontent with their fathers. It challenges the current conceptualisation of this dissatisfaction with fathers as ‘the father wound’ and the emphasis on encouraging men to forgive their fathers unilaterally for what they have done. The article also challenges the view that boys need to identify with their fathers to establish their gender identity and suggests that sons can construct their masculine subjectivity through dis‐identification with patriarchal fathers and through empathy with the experiences of their mothers.     

Craft as work–life unity: The careers of skilled working‐class men and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization

This article focuses on the enduring significance of craft in the careers of Kent Royal Dockyard craftworkers and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization. The closure of this naval shipbuilding and repair yard together with the subsequent move to post‐industrial employment did not end men's engagement with their craft practices. Instead, this developed into a ‘craft outlook’ defined by a motivation for performing actualizing labour that interwove paid and non‐paid work. Men's careers did not become individualized projects of self as collaborative intergenerational practices gave a long‐term narrative to their careers and lives. Therefore, three contributions are proposed to the literature on working‐class male careers and craft. First, an analytical framework is advanced that empirically distinguishes a ‘craft outlook’ from traditional manual trade employment. Second, a craft outlook reflected ‘whole life careers’ that were constructed from both paid and non‐paid work. Third, the concept of ‘human imprint’ is developed to recognize the generational affirmation produced by the transmission of craft practices.     

Parent‐Adolescent Communication About Sex: Retrospective Reports by Latino College Students

Latina female (n= 97) and Latino male (n= 69) college students (M age = 21.4 years) completed self‐report surveys regarding family of origin experiences, including sexual communication with parents while growing up. Latino parents of this comparatively highly educated sample tended to use direct rather than indirect strategies for communicating about sexuality with their children. Young women reported higher levels of sexual communication with mothers while growing up than did young men, and respondents reported less communication with fathers than mothers. Among young women, sexual communication with mother was positively associated with non‐Mexican origin and negatively associated with having older brothers living at home. In contrast, maternal education was positively associated with mother‐son communication about sex. Paternal education and the absence of older brothers positively predicted communication with both sons and daughters. The analyses provide novel information regarding sexual communication in Latino families and suggest directions for future research.     

Ambivalence Toward Adult Children: Differences Between Mothers and Fathers

The authors examined how ambivalence toward adult children within the same family differs between mothers and fathers and whether patterns of maternal and paternal ambivalence can be explained by the same set of predictors. Using data collected in the Within‐Family Differences Study, they compared older married mothers' and fathers' (N = 129) assessments of ambivalence toward each of their adult children (N = 444). Fathers reported higher levels of ambivalence overall. Both mothers and fathers reported lower ambivalence toward children who were married, better educated, and who they perceived to hold similar values; however, the effects of marital status and education were more pronounced for fathers, whereas the effect of children's value congruence was more pronounced for mothers. Fathers reported lower ambivalence toward daughters than sons, whereas mothers reported less ambivalence toward sons than daughters.     

Narratives of Spousal Support for the Careers of Men in Managerial Posts

This article analyses the narratives of men managers to see how they perceive their wives' support in relation to their careers. Our aim is to focus on different forms of spousal support and explore how the support can evolve in the course of the men's careers. We are also interested in what kind of gender relations men produce when narrating their experiences of spousal support for their career. The research material comprises interviews with 29 managers who are fathers. In contrast to many previous studies, the results here suggest that spousal support is not a fixed or uncomplicated phenomenon but is constructed as various and flexible by men: negotiated, enriching and declining. The narrative analysis, in which we detected three different story‐lines — romance, ‘happily‐ever‐after’ and tragedy — shows that the most positive narratives in terms of life satisfaction and career success were those in which spousal support was constructed as negotiated and men were willing to be flexible and adaptable in their gender relations with their spouse. More attention to a father's work and family integration is needed in the field of management and organizations.     

Fathers' employment in a father-friendly welfare state: does fatherhood affect men's working hours?

An important aim of Norwegian work–family policies is to enhance the family role of fathers. Time-use surveys show a slight increase in fathers’ family work, but we still know little about the relationship between men's family circumstances and working hours. On the one hand, policy measures encourage the greater involvement of fathers in family life. On the other hand, men are the main providers in most couples and employment and breadwinning are still important components of men's fathering identity. In this paper, we examine the relationship between fatherhood and working time, with a particular focus on the possible effects of the number and ages of children. Utilizing the Norwegian Labour Force Survey 2005, we find that men's contractual working hours are not significantly affected by their parental status, but men do curtail their actual working hours when they have young children, and particularly if there is only one child in the household. However, men with school-aged children actually work longer hours than non-fathers and men with young children.     

Women’s Status in the Context of International Migration

International migration creates unique gendered work‐family contexts that profoundly affect individual lives in various ways. This paper examines how immigration impacts women’s status in the labor force and in the family. Immigrant women who are laborers, self‐employed entrepreneurs, and professionals experience very different changes in gender relations and work status resulting from immigration. While some become more egalitarian, others remain patriarchal; some enter the paid labor force for the first time, whereas others retreat from prominent careers to become homemakers; some are powerful in certain areas but vulnerable in others. Immigrant women’s gains and losses in their work and family domains are full of variations, contradictions, and constraints. In addition to reviewing the current state of knowledge in this area of study, this paper discusses parallels across scholarly work, inadequacies in the literature, and directions for future research.     

Child,Mother, Father,and Teacher Beliefs About Child Academic Competence: Predicting Math and Reading Performance in European American Adolescents

Beliefs about child competence in math and reading have important implications for academic performance in adolescence. However, it is unclear whether children's own beliefs are the most important predictor of their academic performance or whether parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about child competence influence child academic performance. We assessed mothers’, fathers’, teachers’, and children's beliefs about European American children's (N = 189) competence in math and reading at age 10 and children's math and language performance at ages 10, 13, and 18 years. Confirmatory factor models demonstrated that children's and teachers’ beliefs had lower loadings on a latent variable of child competence in math and reading than mothers’ beliefs. Children's self‐competence beliefs in math and reading were not significantly correlated, suggesting children may use dimensional comparisons when assessing their own competence. Mothers’, fathers’, and teachers’ assessments of child competence in math were strongly correlated with their assessments of child competence in reading. Controlling for stability in academic performance, family socioeconomic status, and other reporters, mothers and fathers who rated their children's math competence higher had adolescents who performed better in math, and fathers who rated their children's reading competence higher had adolescents who performed better in language tasks. However, children who rated their own competence higher in math and reading had lower math and language (for girls only) performance in adolescence. European American children may use dimensional comparisons that render them poorer judges of their math and reading competence than parents.     

Identity Transformation and Family Caregiving: Narratives of African American Teen Mothers

This article explores connections between informal caregiving and identity transformation as experienced by pregnant teens. Based on in‐depth interviews with 51 African American teen mothers, the article examines teens’ pregnancy narratives as an example of narrative repair, illuminating how attending to processes that connect one’s identity to the care of others can work to empower individuals to resist threats to a positive sense of self or a damaged identity. The authors suggest that family caregiving can provide an important context that supports identity transformation not only among pregnant teens as they strive to become good mothers but among those experiencing other types of disruptions to their lives.     

Post‐Fordist reconfigurations of gender,work and life: theory and practice

Based on an in‐depth study with 56 informants (25 women and 31 men), across the ICT (information and communication technology), creative and academic sectors in one city/regional hub in Ireland, this article investigates the so‐called revolution in work/life practices associated with the post‐Fordist labour processes of the Knowledge Economy from the perspectives of workers themselves. Recent theorizations of post‐Fordist work patterns emphasize a rearranging of work and life place boundaries; a reconfiguring of work and life time boundaries; and a dissolving of the gendered boundaries of work and life (production and social reproduction) (Adkins and Dever 2014 ; Morini and Fumagalli 2010 ; Gill and Pratt 2008 ; Weeks 2007 ; Hardt and Negri 2004 ). Our findings suggest that, instead of dissolving boundaries, workers constantly struggle to draw boundaries between what counts as work and as life, and that this varies primarily in relation to gender and stage in a gendered life trajectory. Work extensification is compensated for via a perceived freedom to shape one's own life, which is articulated in terms of individualized boundary‐drawing. While younger men embraced ‘always on’ work, they also articulated anxieties about how these work habits might interfere with family aspirations. This was also true for younger women who also struggled to make time for life in the present. For mothers, boundary drawing was articulated as a necessity but was framed more in terms of personal choice by fathers. Although all participants distinguished between paid work and life as distinct sites of value, boundaries were individually drawn and resist any easy mapping of masculinity and femininity onto the domains of work and life. Instead, we argue that it is the process of boundary drawing that reveals gendered patterns. The personalized struggles of these relatively privileged middle‐class workers centre on improving the quality of their lives, but raise important questions about the political possibilities within and beyond the world of post‐Fordist labour.     

The impact of employment on fatherhood across family generations in white British,Polish and Irish origin families

This paper draws on data from an intergenerational study of fatherhood to consider how fatherhood has changed and how employment conditions and occupational status shape fatherhood, particularly their involvement with their children and, via an analysis of four cases, continuities and discontinuities are identified across the family generations. The study involved three generational chains of men which included grandfathers, sons and grandsons from three ‘ethnicities’; those of white British origin, Polish origin and Irish origin. While most agreed that fatherhood had changed, in particular the way fathers communicate and express affection to their children, other changes were also seen as important – increased material consumption, changes in children's lives and child-focused parenting. On the other hand, employment commitment and working conditions continue to constrain men's involvement with their children in both generations. A different pattern was also evident among a minority of the fathers who modified their employment to take on some childcare responsibilities, while a handful in low-status jobs had wives who were the main earners in the household, a situation that enabled them to take on a significant role in childcare.     

Disentangling Value Similarities and Transmissions in Established Marriages: A Cross‐Lagged Longitudinal Study

This study examined spousal value similarity and transmission across a 5‐year period on four value orientations: traditional family values, self‐determination, social criticism, and hedonism. Participants were 685 Dutch couples in established marriages. Structural equation modeling results indicated that spouses were moderately similar on all value orientations. Over time, spousal similarity remained for traditional family values, self‐determination, and social criticism and decreased for hedonism. Direct spousal transmission occurred on social criticism and hedonism with wives influencing their husbands. Multiple group analyses revealed that wives’ value transmission to husbands occurred only within couples with similar social positions (in education and religion) and with higher degrees of marital satisfaction. Findings confirm that experiences in one’s family of destination contribute to midlife value development.     

Adaptive Strategies,Gender Ideology,and Work‐Family Balance Among Dutch Dual Earners

Using questionnaire data on 149 Dutch dual‐earner couples with young children participating in the European Famwork study, we examine how adaptive strategies and gender ideology relate to parents’ perceived success in balancing work and family. Path analysis indicates that some adaptive strategies may harm individuals’ work‐family balance, particularly when they are made in the domain where the time budget is limited. In the need to succeed in multiple roles, however, endorsement of traits traditionally linked with the opposite gender, that is masculine traits for women and feminine traits for men, seems beneficial. We speculate that two underlying mechanisms — social pressure and time constraints — jointly operate in determining perceived success in balancing work and family.     

Adolescents With Nonresident Fathers: Are Daughters More Disadvantaged Than Sons?

This study examined sons' and daughters' involvement with nonresident fathers and associated outcomes (N = 4,663). Results indicated that sons and daughters reported equal involvement with nonresident fathers on most measures of father investment, although sons reported more overnight visits, sports, and movies and feeling closer to their fathers compared to daughters. Sons and daughters generally benefited from nonresident father involvement in the same way in internalizing and externalizing problems and grades. Feeling close to one's nonresident father, however, was associated with lower internalizing problems for daughters than sons. These findings suggest that nonresident fathers should be encouraged to be equally involved with their sons and daughters, as such involvement was associated with higher levels of well‐being for both sons and daughters.     

Does Fatherhood Matter for Men?

Ignored in the flurry of new research on fathers is that fatherhood may have consequences for men. This article explores possible effects on the lives and well‐being of men for a range of fatherhood experiences. Data are drawn from the National Survey of Families and Households. The first part of this article examines whether men's varied associations with children (no children, coresident, non‐coresident, and stepfatherhood) are associated with men's psychological health and behavior, social connections, intergenerational family relations, and work behavior. We found strong evidence that fathers differ from nonfathers in their social connections, family relationships, and work behavior. There is significant variation in effects among the father types as well. The second section of this article focuses attention only on men who are fathers and examines whether fathering behavior (e.g., the amount of time and nature of the activities that fathers are reported to be spending with their children) is associated with men's well‐being. The effects of father involvement on men was found to be most significant for those who were living with their own children.     

Keeping the Bar Low: Why Russia’s Nonresident Fathers Accept Narrow Fatherhood Ideals

Although most Russian nonresident fathers feel torn between old and new ideals of fatherhood, they end up accepting older, narrow ideals. Fathers reproduce the dominant gender discourse, which deems men irresponsible and infantile and diminishes the importance of fathers. On the basis of extensive fieldwork, including in‐depth interviews (N = 21) and observational data, I argue that men reproduce minimalist standards of fatherhood because, in part, keeping the bar low enables them to still consider themselves decent fathers. In addition, fathers’ beliefs about the inherent deficiencies of nonresident fatherhood and the increased socioeconomic pressures and loosened constraints surrounding fatherhood in post‐Soviet Russia converge to push fathers to settle for the status quo of detached fatherhood.     

Transition to fatherhood: New perspectives in the global context of changing men's identities

The proposed thematic session aims to highlight the main challenges that the cultural and structural changes within the families and in gender relations and the changing social expectations about men's involvement in the care of children and about fatherhood pose to men's and fathers’ identity. Fathering in contemporary society requires men to be simultaneously provider, guide, household help and nurturer. The difficulties of these roles, and the tensions they sometimes produce, challenge men's relationships with their female partners, the meaning and place of work in their lives and their sense of self as competent adults. We will also explore the relationship between transitions to fatherhoods and the challenges of balancing work and family obligations. How to balance paid work, other interests and relationships with responsibilities, anxieties and pleasures of childrearing are today concerns for both men and women.