Doing Fatherhood Online: Men's Parental Identities, Experiences, and Ideologies on Social Media

Online discourse about parenting has grown with the expansion of social media technologies. With a community of “dad bloggers” developing in North America, further investigation into how men write about fatherhood on the Internet is needed. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of 201 blog posts written by 40 dad bloggers. Adopting a social psychological perspective, I examine how fatherhood is constructed across lines of identity, experience, and ideology. My findings illustrate how dad bloggers reinforce and reshape family discourses in their writing about parental role models, becoming a father, work–family balance, generativity, and “good” and “bad” dads. Social media use is discussed as a part of fathering in everyday life and as a tool to display, promote, and normalize involved fatherhood.