ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades there has been increased interest in understanding the degree of men’s different commitments to the welfare of the family or mating union and to father-child relationships in diverse cultures around the world (see volumes by Hewlett, 1992; Lamb, 1987, 1997; Parke, 1996). Guided by theoretical principles rooted in the functions of the family (Popenoe, 1988), hierarchical parental goals (LeVine, 1974), the developmental niche (Harkness & Super, 1996), reciprocal altruism (Alexrod & Hamilton, 1981), evolutionary biology (Trivers, 1972), the social organization of work (Johnson & Johnson, 1975), and the culture’s “maintenance systems” (Whiting, 1977) among others, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have begun to document men’s investment in biological and nonbiological offspring in different cultural systems. Collectively, this body of work has pointed to the extreme variations in male investment in children across societies (Hewlett, 1992) and to the wide range of economic, social, and cultural factors that may account for such variations. Yet, in the face of such data, there has been the practice of labeling fatherhood in some developing areas of the world as being in “crisis.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of the roles and responsibilities of fathers in the Caribbean (Roopnarine & Brown, 1997). This is not to say that all Caribbean fathers are exemplars of good parents, but they are not uniformly uninvolved with children either.
