ABSTRACT
Questions about the role of fathers can stir up controversy. Most of us have a view about what a father should be or do. Some think that children should be raised in heterosexual marriages, others that fathers should do much more for their children, while still others think fathers are becomingly increasingly irrelevant. The role of fathers has undergone shifts in the West, alongside demographic changes such as many more babies being born outside marriage – up to 40 per cent in the US (Hamilton et al., 2013) – higher divorce rates, and more children living in ‘blended’ families, as well as more women working full or part time. This has all impacted on paternal roles. A British study looking at nearly 20,000 children (Dex and Ward, 2007) suggested that the old idea of stay-at-home mothers and working fathers was true in less than 30 per cent of families. The most common pattern in Britain (35 per cent) now is of a full-time working father and a mother working part time, whilst in 11 per cent of cases both parents work full time. In the West generally fathers have become more involved with their children in recent decades, although the bulk of childcare still falls to mothers (Lamb, 2004), and the trend towards mothers working full-time has increased, particularly since the economic downturn (Wang et al., 2013).
