ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to look forward – expansively! The research reported in this book has shown us how central sport and leisure can be to the fathering process. Through sport and leisure men can connect to their children, spend time with them and nurture them while fulfilling their own expectations of what is required of them as a father. Researchers who focus on sport and leisure home in on the micro-level of men’s interactions with their children and begin to unpick further dimensions of their fathering ideology and practice. By making sport and leisure visible as a productive research focus, we therefore hope to have signalled the relevance of our work to the broader community of fatherhood and family researchers. But this is a two-way dialogue and the intention here is to consider how much there is to gain in the other direction – how sport and leisure research can be enriched by building on the extant body of fatherhood research.
