More Involved Fathering and Equal Parenting?

Children's perception of home and their views of love and care have been discussed in previous posts. Affective factors including the provision of love and care, spending time together, and mutual respect are relatively more valued by children. It could be argued that children in the aforementioned western contexts define family and their closeness with families largely based on these affective factors. From the perspective of parents, similar standards have also been found to judge 'good' parenting. After interviewing different parents, Warner's (2006) found out that clichés such as wanting one's children to be happy, safe and healthy, and independent in the narratives of parenting are not as important as children's lived experience. In other words, good parenting cannot be achieved once and for all, instead, it is experienced in the interactions between parents and children and demonstrated by the ways parents coping with ongoing challenges in the process (Warner, 2006:81). Thus, parenting is not a top-down affair because children themselves affect the meaning of good parenting (ibid.:82). As demonstrated by one of the parent Warner (2006) interviewed, what children want and parent can provide are love and support:

“Having a child really diminishes your ego in some ways. I think a lot of time people think, "Oh, I'm going to have this child and this child is going to do everything, and I'm going to do all these wonderful things, and everything is going to be wonderful." And it doesn't always turn out like that and you recognize that all you've done is that you've given another person a life. And what they choose to do in their life is really their choice. You can only hope that you've given some, enough love and support to someone that they can do whatever it is that they need to do. That's all we hope for.”

Yet, the question of whether these 'standards' are applicable to both father and mother remains ambiguous. Studies have shown that the absence of mother and of father can lead to different deficits for children and young adult (Jamieson & Milne, 2012:270), which may indicate that children demand different things from mother and from father. Additionally, gender difference of parents can also produce different experience for children and distinct challenges for parents (Warner, 2006:81). Jamieson has pointed out that 'parenting is rarely a gender-neutral activity and often exacerbates inequalities', and 'mothers typically remain much more emotionally and practically involved with their children than fathers' (Jamieson, 1999:488). Thus, the focus here will be narrowed down to inquire the role of father. Miller (2011) studied a group of seventeen middle class men living in the UK who were heterosexual and the biological fathers of their children to investigate the issue of doing gender in parenting. Miller's (2011) findings provide an insightful perspective in terms of gender difference of contemporary parenting. First, although men's caring practice are more likely demonstrated by their paid work to support family, their care giving is practiced in more emotionally and physically engaged ways than before. Second, while men are more emotionally engaged and their caring practices are similar to those mothers do, they're not doing mothering, but delivering the same care and love in a more masculine way. Third, some fathers highlight 'teamwork' and 'parenting' instead of distinguishing between mothering and fathering practices and responsibilities. In other words, gender cannot be undo but is been doing differently (Miller, 2011:176). When men are involved in fathering in equally shared ways, practice of care and love are differentiated by individual father and delivered as either 'masculine' or 'feminine' (ibid.:178). At the same time, men, who have feminine traits and qualities, are also confronted with difficulties, as emotion and emotional disclosure have been seen as a threat to male identities (Seidler, 2006:25). However, what matters, from children's perspective, is the quality but not the quantity of father's involvement (Palkovitz, 2003). It is possible that more involvement can build trust, encourage initiatives, enhance identity, and support the attainability of intimacy etc. (Snarey, 1993). Yet, these beneficial relationships are mostly grounded on an "appropriate, positive, building, developmentally facilitative, loving, warm and sensitive" involvement of father (Palkovitz, 2003:129). Nevertheless, the general qualities associated with so called 'good fathering' cannot be applied universally, ignoring unique relational characteristics and cultural and contextual differences. How fathers do fathering and how mothers do mothering are indeed personal lives and individual choices. Research (Bjornberg 1992; Brannen and O'Brien 1995; Busfield 1987; Lewis and O'Brien 1987; Russell 1983) continues to find that many men are satisfied to be providers and background figures (Jamieson, 1999:489).

Notably and unfortunately, more involvement of caring father is not sufficient to change the present condition of women's unequal autonomy. In effect, Jamieson (1999:489) argues that the idealized father involvement and equal mothering and fathering can be consequential. Neale and Smart (1997) have found out that some of the men took advantage of the 'new age men' discourse to claim custody upon divorce out of a combative sentiment towards their wives but not the love of their children. Moreover, men borrowed the idea of gender equality to argue that women should renounce any special claim to children even though they had been a full-time wife and mother (Neale & Smart, 1997). Furthermore, men have more choices and more power to choose their involvement in fathering than women due to "normative pressures, government policies, workplace practices, unequal pay levels, and breadwinner discourses" (Miller, 2011:179). It is simple for the couple to adjust together and promote equality within the house. But the economic considerations and social identities outside the home continue to be significant and remain favourable towards men even in many European contexts (ibid.:180). In this respect, mother's unequal involvement in child raising is also a social construction, which demands continuous efforts and fundamental social development to change the status quo.

References:

Jamieson, L. (1999). Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the `Pure Relationship'. Sociology, 33(3), 477-494. https://doi.org/10.1177/S0038038599000310

Jamieson, L., & Milne, S. (2012). Children and young people's relationships, relational processes and social change: Reading across worlds. Children's Geographies, 10(3), 265-278. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2012.693377

Miller, T. (2011). Making sense of fatherhood: Gender, caring and work. Cambridge University Press.

Neale, B., & Smart, C. (1997). Experiments with parenthood? Sociology, 31(2), 201-219.

Palkovitz, R. (2003). Involved fathering and child development: Advancing our understanding of good fathering. In Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives: (pp. 292-293). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://journals.lww.com/00004703-200308000-00013

Seidler, V. J. (2006). Transforming masculinities men, cultures, bodies, power, sex and love. Routledge.

Snarey, J. R. (1993). How Fathers Care for the Next Generation: A Four-Decade Study. Harvard University Press.

Warner, Rebecca. L. (Ed.). (2006). Being good parent. In Couples, Kids, and Family Life. Oxford University Press.