The Concept of Fatherhood

For this blog post, I decided to explore the concept of fatherhood through an article written by Stephen Williams called “What is Fatherhood?.” This article mainly explores the concept of fatherhood through a sociological lens. When talking about families, I believe most of us tend to be more focused on the role that mothers play in their families, such as being nurturers for their children. As a result, we barely talk about the concept of fatherhood.  This article makes some interesting comments about this concept and how it has evolved throughout the years. I found this fact very important because knowing what fatherhood implied years ago will help us understand more current roles or how its viewed today.

The role of fathers started as being one that focused on being responsible for their children’s moral and educational needs. This is mainly tied to Christian values that fathers had to teach children. Then, fathers were mostly expected to be focused on the role of breadwinning. This was when roles were mainly separated by gender. It was called the gendered division of labor. Mothers were the nurturers, and fathers the providers. I believe this is the most commonly known division of roles even until today. Following this, the concept of the sex-role model appeared. This consisted of the belief that fathers were only necessary for reproduction. Now, the most recent idea is that of a good father. This is focused and evaluated based on fathers’ involvement with their children and continuing on keeping old roles or activities. I believe the breadwinning concept is the one that is more prevalently known since it was the model for fathers not long ago. In fact, it is still a model for some countries or cultures. In fact, I believe this is the role that my grandparents both had during their times and that they have passed on to my parents. Of course, these expectations can be dismissed by new generations.

This article explored how the traditional roles of fathers are now less likely to occur especially taking into account the changes in the labor market. My father, for example, was not the primary provider of our family. Both of my parents worked and are still working. In fact, my mother earned more money than my father, which would technically make her the family’s main provider. I remember this time when my mother had a job as a teacher for night school, and that meant my brother, and I would barely see her all day. My father was the one who picked us up from school and cooked us dinner, for example. This can be tied to the fact that fathers are starting to be more involved in their families. Although the article mentions that some are not exactly voluntarily doing this, some are forced because of certain circumstances. I guess, in a way, my father was forced to be more involved with us when we were kids because of my mother’s job. However, even though my father tended to be by our side more than our mother when we were kids, he was still the one that managed most of our finances. This is something the article mentions. Fathers tend to still value a lot the breadwinning role. At some point, some examples were given by fathers. They mentioned how despite being more nurturing or more involved with their children, they still couldn’t let go of old roles because of a feeling of security.

One important claim by the author is how fatherhood is now created. Thinking of my father, I think he created his own role of being a provider as well as a nurturing figure. Something that I believe is very important that the article mentions is how most fathers consciously reject the role that their fathers had, especially bad parenting roles. Thankfully, my father didn’t reject my grandfather’s role since he was not a bad parent. The article refers to bad fathers as those who have left the house, meaning they were absent or sexist. I believed my father continued to embrace in a way the traditional role of a parent. I personally like that my father embraced a traditional role as well as embracing the role he was sort of forced to take. His involvement in our lives made our childhood even better.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038038508088837?casa_token=n8xpCQRw3sYAAAAA:L_b3Y_wj0WRCkPu_ecWHGuIVJjXkavbG0LWGRiQmpIuu0LHD7oQyHjDxbepgKYtWcR9MpYtD5GpZ_Jk