Responsible Fathering: An Overview and Conceptual Framework

This article defines responsible fathering, summarizes the relevant research, and presents a systemic, ecological framework to organize research and programmatic work in this area. A principal finding is that fathering is influenced, even more than mothering, by contextual factors in the family and community. Key Words: coparental relationship, fathers, father-child relationship, family relations and dynamics, divorce, parenting. For more than a century, American society has engaged in a sometimes contentious debate about what it means to be a responsible parent. Whereas most of the cultural debate about mothers has focused on what, if anything, mothers should do outside the family, the debate about fathers has focused on what fathers should do inside the family. What role should fathers play in the everyday lives of their children, beyond the traditional breadwinner role? How much should they emulate the traditional nurturing activities of mothers, and how much should they represent a masculine role model to their children? Is fatherhood in a unique crisis in late twentieth century America (Blankenhorn, 1995; Doherty, 1997; Griswold, 1993; LaRossa, 1997; Popenoe, 1996)? The recent upsurge of interest in fathering has generated concern among supporters of women's and mothers' rights that the emphasis on the important role of fathers in families may feed longstanding biases against female-headed single-parent families, that services for fathers might be increased at the expense of services for single mothers, and that the profatherhood discourse might be used by the fathers' rights groups who are challenging custody, child support, and visitation arrangements after divorce. On the other hand, feminist psychologists have recently argued for more emphasis on fathering and have suggested that involved, nurturing fathers will benefit women as well as children (Phares, 1996; Silverstein, 1996). Only an ecologically sensitive approach to parenting, which views the welfare of fathers, mothers, and children as intertwined and interdependent, can avoid a zero-sum approach to parenting in which fathers' gains become mothers' losses. These cultural debates serve as a backdrop to the social science research on fathering because researchers are inevitably influenced by the cultural context within which they work (Doherty, Boss, LaRossa, Schumm, & Steinmetz, 1993). In their recent reanalysis of the historical trends of American ideals of fatherhood, Pleck and Pleck (1997) see the emerging ideal of fatherhood in the late twentieth century as father as equal coparent. (From 1900 to 1970, the dominant cultural ideal was the genial dad and sex role model, and from 1830 to 1900, the distant breadwinner.) Research on fathering, then, has attained prominence in the social sciences during an era of historically high expectations of men's involvement in the everyday lives of their children. Not surprisingly, a good deal of that research has compared levels of fathers' involvement with mothers' involvement because mothers have become the benchmark for norms for fathering (Day & Mackey, 1989). This post-1970s interest in fathering has been fueled by the reappraisal of family roles for women and by unprecedented demographic changes in the American family. In other words, scholarly, professional, and public policy interest in fathering has crystallized during the time that the foundation of traditional fathering-the physically present father who serves as the unique family breadwinner-has been eroding rapidly. With more than half of mothers in the work force, with new marriages breaking up at a rate of 50%, and with nearly one third of births to single women, the landscape of fathering has been altered substantially (Bumpass, 1990; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1994a). Sociological and historical work on fathering makes it clear that fathering (at least beyond insemination) is fundamentally a social construction. …