Doing the best I can Edin, Kathryn; Nelson, Timothy J
2013., 20130601, 2013, 2013-06-01, 20130101
eBook
Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among ...inner-city men often dismissed as "deadbeat dads." Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly—without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship’s demise. They offer keen insight into a radical redefinition of family life where the father-child bond is central and parental ties are peripheral. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Doing the Best I Can shows how mammoth economic and cultural changes have transformed the meaning of fatherhood among the urban poor. Intimate interviews with more than 100 fathers make real the significant obstacles faced by low-income men at every step in the familial process: from the difficulties of romantic relationships, to decision-making dilemmas at conception, to the often celebratory moment of birth, and finally to the hardships that accompany the early years of the child's life, and beyond.
In contemporary Brazil, the number of male fathers taking care of their sons and daughters and the initiatives to produce content about fatherhood on Instagram have been significant. This article ...aims to analyze the concepts that support the digital activism of homoparenting on Instagram, based on gender studies with men. To this end, a qualitative study was conducted using the life narrative method in a digital environment. The results were analyzed and divided into the following sections: parenting project, personal experience of fatherhood, articulation with LGBT political agenda when parenthood becomes a "business", and haters, criticism, and adverse reactions. It was concluded that the reflection on the experience of fatherhood/masculinity itself is crossed by the social marker of the difference in sexual orientation and the activism for rights that sustain content production. Thus, the uniqueness of each fatherhood is highlighted since the fact of being gay constructs the fatherhood experience for each man. Despite the initiatives brought forth in this study, changes are still in progress, as rights activism coexists with the advancement of conservative forces, which limit the expressions of sexual and gender otherness.
The five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, are well-known for their extensive welfare system and gender equality which provides both parents with opportunities to earn ...and care for their children. In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, as well as UK and the US, demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in the Nordic setting through family and social policies, and how these contribute to shaping and influencing the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods. This comprehensive volume will have wide international appeal for those who look to Nordic countries and their success in creating gender equal societies.
This volume offers a variety of perspectives on contemporary fatherhood: from analyses of literature, film, drama, and popular culture, to issues tackled by psychology, gender studies, and social ...sciences. Arranged into thematic sections, the chapters cover a wide range of approaches to fatherhood, including studies and analyses based on fieldwork and interviews with participants. Each chapter discusses various culture-dependent models of masculinity in relation to the topic of fatherhood depicted in works of literary and film art, emphasizing the crucial factors and features which make all these models different from one another and using examples of such cultural contexts as Australia, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran. With the use of methodological tools provided by literature studies, film studies, culture studies, psychology, gender and queer studies, and sociology, the book is a comprehensive insight into current research on both real-life and fictional realizations of fatherhood.
Fathers in the fifties tend to be portrayed as wise and genial pipe-smokers or distant, emotionless patriarchs. This common but limited stereotype obscures the remarkable diversity of their ...experiences and those of their children. To uncover the real story of fatherhood during this transformative era, Ralph LaRossa takes the long view—from the attack on Pearl Harbor up to the election of John F. Kennedy—revealing the myriad ways that World War II and its aftermath shaped men.Offering compelling accounts of people both ordinary and extraordinary, Of War and Men digs deep into the terrain of fatherhood. LaRossa explores the nature and aftereffects of combat, the culture of fear during the Cold War, the ways that fear altered the lives of racial and sexual minorities, and how the civil rights movement affected families both black and white. Overturning some calcified myths, LaRossa also analyzes the impact of suburbanization on fathers and their kids, discovering that living in the suburbs often strengthened their bond. And finally, looking beyond the idealized dad enshrined in TV sitcoms, Of War and Men explores the brutal side of family life in the postwar years. LaRossa's richly researched book dismantles stereotypes while offering up a fascinating and incisive chronicle of fatherhood in all its complexity.
In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported "responsible" ...fatherhood program. Dads' experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state's role in shaping men's parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men's abilities to be involved in their children's lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.
Fathers tend to achieve higher earnings than childless men, but there is limited evidence on the associations between fatherhood timing and men's later earnings. Using a longitudinal census-based ...sample of Finnish men, including a subsample of brothers, we investigated fatherhood timing and men's midlife earnings using both between- and within-family models. Earnings around age 50 were lower among adolescent and young fathers than for men who became fathers at ages 25-29 or later, but these associations became negligible after accounting for measured confounders and unobserved familial confounding. Overall, our findings highlight the important roles of selection into early childbearing and into childlessness. At the population level, early fatherhood was associated with clear negative distributional shifts in fathers' midlife earnings. However, among all men, any influence of fatherhood timing on men's midlife earnings distribution paled in comparison with that of childlessness.
Contemporary research on fatherhood describes fatherhood as a multifaceted, dynamic social, and cultural construction, deeply affected by class, race, and gender inequalities. However, critics claim ...that dominant theories on fatherhood have been mostly elaborated based on middle‐class, Anglo‐centered, dominant, and mainstream fatherhood, whereas non‐hegemonic, marginalized father groups have remained undertheorized. This article echoes this shortfall and proposes to theorize non‐hegemonic fatherhood through a more inclusive theoretical framework capable of describing the social contexts that shape fathers' identities, behaviors, and cultures. Based on intersectional theories, the article argues for a theoretical revision of the ways in which these groups of non‐hegemonic fathers are represented in research. To illustrate this, we provide some examples of studies based on case studies of marginalized fathers in Israel. Israel is rich ground for such research since it is characterized by traditional models of fatherhood, expressed through hegemonic models of masculinity, as well as normative family models in the context of high levels of ethnic and class inequality.
PDF
