Fathers as carers in UK law and policy: dominant ideologies and lived experience

This article explores how working fathers are conceptualised within the UK’s work-family law and policy framework and whether a dominant ideology of fatherhood can be discerned. The socio-legal literature on men and masculinities is considered alongside established feminist theory on families, paid work and unpaid care to provide a backdrop to the analysis of current policy provision in this area. Three ‘ideal’ type ideologies of fatherhood are identified (‘absent’, ‘involved’ and ‘active’) which are used to critically examine the current legal framework. Despite claims to the contrary, the current framework supports and reaffirms the gendering of care so that the intransigence on the part of men and women to rebalance related responsibilities is unsurprising. The authors argue for a more care-centric approach to work-family policy in place of gender-specific normative modelling. A legal framework which enabled and encouraged all care providers to participate regardless of gender and biological relationship would not only improve the workplace experiences of women, but also enable men to develop and fulfil their care-giving aspirations and potential.     

‘I am not Mr. Mom:’ a qualitative analysis of at-home father’s struggle for legitimacy

Although scholarship on at-home fathers explores how men negotiate their masculinity and wrestle with social stigma, research has yet to address how language and micro-level interactions are used to undermine, or contest, men’s abilities to parent as well as to reconstruct dominant forms of masculinity and fatherhood. As such, the purpose of this study is to explore the challenges at-home fathers face when gender becomes a frame for evaluating their abilities to parent. Drawing on interviews with men who are primary caregivers, the focus here is on how language situates and delegitimize men’s parenting practices. The findings suggest that gendered discourses constrain men’s ability to parent and create struggles for them as they interact with family, friends and their community. Additionally, these findings demonstrate the flaws in redefining masculinity to incorporate childcare and the implications this process has on existing gender inequalities.     

Fragmenting Fatherhood: The Regulation of Reproductive Technologies

Reproductive technologies offer the potential to break down parenthood into a number of constituent parts. These disruptive possibilities mean that the regulation of reproductive technologies holds important potential for study, providing a significant resource that has been little analysed with regard to fatherhood. This study attempts to remedy that lacuna through consideration of a range of recent developments in this area of English law. It reaches two general conclusions. First, while the law regulating reproductive technologies attributes great importance to fatherhood, this is rooted primarily (though not exclusively) in concerns for the symbolic importance of fathers, rather than in more practical considerations such as ensuring financial provision or a second hands-on carer for a child. Secondly, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) contains a clear attempt to protect and entrench the role of the father as completing the nuclear family. However, recent developments suggest that this legal preference for the nuclear family is subject to clear emerging cracks.     

Parenthood in Murder‐Suicide News. Idealized Fathers and Murderous Mums

In this article I analyse how parents' lethal violence is presented in Finnish murder‐suicide news reports. I explore how gendered ideas of parenthood and violence affect these constructions. The cases that I am interested in are those with child victims where the perpetrator is either the father or the mother. The theoretical frame of analysis is feminist ethnomethodology, and Membership Categorization Analysis is used as the method. One of the starting‐points is that parenthood is gendered in a way that mothers and fathers have different rights, responsibilities and competences in our culture. In other words, moral orders of fathering and mothering exist. Because of this, women's and men's violent actions towards their own children are understood differently. When a man kills his children and himself he can be portrayed as a caring parent. Instead, in a certain context a woman can be ‘a killer mum’, her act ‘a murder’ and her personality described in the light of the deed. The focus of this article is on gender and family categorization used in murder‐suicide news in Finnish newspapers and the moral orders created in them. I explore the differences by mainly using two case examples: 1) a man who killed his three children and himself, and 2) a woman who killed her husband, two children and herself. The consequences of these newspaper constructions are also considered.     

Chinese Fathers in the Twentieth Century: Changing Roles as Parents and as Men

ABSTRACT

Fathers and fatherhood are increasingly visible in social science scholarship and public discourse, although the father’s different roles are yet to be integrated. Moreover, most existing studies on fathers and fatherhood focus on either European or North American fathers, or contemporary non-Western fathers; little is known about the historical changes in fatherhood culture in non-Western contexts. This article explores how elite fathers in Republican, Socialist, and Reform-era China see their roles as parents and as men amidst dramatic social changes in intergenerational and gender relations. A close examination of five elite fathers’ family letters and autobiographical writings reveals that the parent–child hierarchy began to diminish as early as Republican-era China and continued to decrease during the Socialist and Reform eras, as seen in fathers’ increasing recognition of their children’s autonomy and the heightened sense of intimacy in the father–child bond. However, changes in gender relations, especially in the fathers’ generation (as opposed to the fathers’ gender beliefs and practices towards their children) followed a much less straightforward path. The asynchronized changes in different facets of Chinese fatherhood may be attributed to the unique and complicated modern history of China in the twentieth century.