ABSTRACT
Fathers as significant day-to-day caregivers of children—an aberration in the 1960s, a curiosity in the 1970s, a subject of serious research in the 1980s, widespread, understood and accepted in the 1990s? Well, not quite. Although most analyses and social commentaries indicate that there are a substantial number of families in which fathers are the primary caregivers, our understanding of this type of family pattern is still limited by a lack of research. Pleck (1997), for example, reported a U.S. study which indicates that “… 23% of employed married mothers with a child under five years reported the father was the primary child-care source during the mother’s working hours” (p. 74). Yet, a review of the literature conducted for this chapter indicates that the curiosity and serious research have not been sustained and may even have subsided since the heightened interest in the early 1980s. This is also evident in the comprehensive analysis of father-hood literature (Lamb, 1997), where the issue of fathers as primary caregivers receives little serious analysis. There are still very few research studies and those studies that do exist have continued to be on restricted and small samples (e.g., Geiger, 1996, studied a sample of 14 families; Grbich, 1992, a sample of 25; and Russell, 1989, a sample of 20). This outcome, however, is consistent with other analyses that indicate that research into fathers is still underrepresented in both the academic literature (Russell & Radojevic, 1992) and in dissertation studies (Silverstein & Phares, 1996).
