Cultural Issues In Fatherhood Research

It is true that fathers and mothers have different roles in the family when it comes to engagement with parenting. In earlier times the role of the father was often viewed as the “boss”, who had a strong influence over the family (Knibiehler, 1995). Thankfully that changed over the course of time. Although things have not changed much, still we could detect some differences between the parenting roles over the last years.

1.a. Traditional role of the father

Male parents were mainly responsible to raise their children with a proper sense of values, and supply the household with food. That was what most of people used to think about father’s job; that it was only to provide the family by bringing money into the household. It is true that this is something really important, and something which can teach to the

It has been proved that the link between them can be influenced by factors like pressure, tiredness or education (Hoffman, 2011). Even if “Fathering can be conceptualized as more contextually sensitive than mothering” (Hoffman & Mackenzie, 2011), today the the factors concentrated in the fatherhood is not the same widely known as the factors for the motherhood. Cultural issues can give us some possible factors. For example the reason for the lack of knowledge, a known factor associated with the lack of engagement which fathers often show, can be explained through social standards; society prepares and teach mostly women, and not man, from early ages for parenting. This tendency continues even during the pregnancy, where there are many social groups, or support networks for the new mothers, but almost nothing for the fathers (Cowan & Cowan, 2009; Hoffman, 2007). Even in West countries, with well-established social care like Canada, only a 27% of fathers strongly believed that government prepare them for childhood (Russell et al,