ABSTRACT
Father serves as an important marker event in the lives of men and significantly affects the developmental trajectories of men who choose to engage in fathering. In his four-decade study of fathering across generations, Snarey found that successful fathering followed two primary patterns: modeling and reworking. In modeling, fathers attempt to replicate the positive characteristics of fathering they received from their dads. In reworking, men strive to rectify the limitations of the fathering they received. The degree of negativity in father-son relationships in this generation of fathers was particularly striking in that the sample was skewed toward men who had made commitments to be involved fathers for their children. Fathers work through shifting balances between increased understanding and criticism of their own parents, modeling and reworking, closeness versus the need to establish independence, and being an adult parent and an adult child. These balances are interdependent and overlapping as men mature as fathers, sons, and siblings.
