Fatherhood and Family Policy

M. E. Lamb, A. Sagi, Micheal. E. Lamb, Abraham Sagi, M. E. Lamb, A. Sagi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780898591903
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317769545
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1984. In the last two decades, countries throughout the Western world have witnessed dramatic changes in social attitudes concerning sex roles. The aim of this book is to review the evidence concerning: a) the factors that limit or constrain male involvement in child care; b) the ways in which some of these factors are being or might be changed; and c) the effects of traditional and increased paternal involvement on men, women, and children.

1	Fatherhood and Social Policy in International Perspective: An Introduction

Michael E. Lamb

University of Utah

Social policy is not a novel concept, for societies have implemented one or another form of family policy since before the introduction of income tax. Systematic family policies, however, were first developed by some European countries during the first half of the present century; less systematic policies designed in haphazard fashion to address specific problems as they arose were introduced by governments in other Western industrialized countries during the same period. Regardless of their comprehensiveness and systematic nature, however, family policies have (with a few notable exceptions) been concerned primarily with women and children. True, many legislative and administrative mandates assumed that males should take primary responsibility for the economic support of women and dependent children, but women and children were generally considered the groups to be protected. As a result, family policy is typically viewed as a “women’s issue.” The Conference on Fatherhood, Social Policy, and the Law took issue with this basic assumption. The participants in that conference, and the contributors to this volume, propose that effective family policies must consider the family and parental roles of men as well as women if these policies are to be equitable and if they are to achieve the goals intended by their architects. The purpose of this volume is to: a) discuss the ways in which official family policies in Western industrialized countries have dealt with fathers and male roles in the family in general; and b) articulate the likely consequences of changes in family policies designed to accord greater significance to male roles within the family. The present chapter reviews the principal issues that must be addressed in analyzing male roles in the family and sociopolitical supports for them.

The conference participants and the contributors to this volume adopted an unusually broad definition of family social policy. Whereas the term social policy commonly refers to legislatively derived policies, we are concerned here with all policies and practices relating to family responsibilities, opportunities, and rights, whether they result from legislative action or inaction, patterns of judicial implementation and interpretation, or institutional practices in both the private and public sectors. In other words, we are concerned with all practices, whatever their basis, that limit or enhance paternal involvement in the care, supervision, support, and socialization of children.

Why, the reader may ask, devote such single-minded attention to fatherhood and social policies pertaining to male roles in child care? Are not the rights of women, of children, and of society at large worthy of attention? Indeed they are, and although our focus is on fathers, readers will repeatedly find us referring to the responsibilities and rights of these other groups too. We believe, however, that one particularly crucial issue in the area of contemporary social and family policy concerns the rights, opportunities, and responsibilities of fathers.

The rationale for our focus is perhaps best illustrated by an examination of historical trends in the family social sciences. Although under common law, fathers were considered the heads of their households and thus the proprietors of all property and individuals in the household, social scientists have usually viewed fathers as nominal heads of their families only—authoritative, to be sure, but somewhat distantly involved in family relationships and household tasks. The primary role accorded to fathers was that of economic provider (Parsons & Bales, 1955). Over the last century, the assumptions of social scientists and their popular correlates have seen expression in the development of a variety of family policies. In the legal arena, for example, fathers’ rights as the owners of wives and children were superceded around the turn of the century. It was argued that young children need the tender care of their mothers, and hence that they should be placed in the custody of their mothers rather than their fathers in the case of divorce. Only recently has this “tender years doctrine” been challenged successfully in the courts. In the vast majority of cases, however, judicial decisions, which ostensibly consider the “best interests of the child” without regard for the parent’s gender, actually follow the dictates of the tender years doctrine in fact, if not by law.

Similar presumptions regarding the preeminence of mothers pervade other areas of social policy. The welfare system in the United States, for example, pays special attention to the needs of mothers with dependent children. One consequence of this concern is the well-known fact that it is financially advantageous to mothers and children for unemployed fathers to leave home, rather than remain with their families while searching for employment. Underlying practices like this lies the assumption that women and children are entitled to support by men, and that when men fail (for whatever reason) to provide this support, the state accepts responsibility in their stead. This assumption has translated into legislative edict and administrative policy the notion that men’s family roles are primarily economic, and that (by implication) their roles as socializing agents and as emotional supports for mothers and children are either insignificant or not in the state’s interest to defend.

In another arena, consider the attitudes of employers (in both the private and public sector) when the demands of family and employment roles conflict. As far as women are concerned, this is an area in which considerable progress has been achieved. Over the last few years, for example, employed women have fought for and in many cases won the right to maternity leave. The need for supplementary out-of-home care for young children has led to the development and subsidization of various forms of day care for the children of employed mothers. Many employers have come to recognize the responsibilities of parenthood by allowing female employees to use their sick leave to stay home with sick children. Other employers have increased the flexibility of work roles by introducing practices such as flexitime and shared jobs. In each case, however, the concern, either explicit or implicit, has been with female employees. With few exceptions, employers have consistently assumed that work and family role conflicts are salient only in the case of wives and mothers; rarely is there concern for what employment demands may be doing to the family involvement and responsibilities of husbands and fathers. Preoccupations of this sort have thus dominated the analysis of “women’s issues” such as child care, support in the form of Aid for Families with Dependent Children, maternity leave, and equal employment opportunities in most of the Western industrialized nations.

The popular presumptions underlying these trends in the social policy arena also had an impact on the theorizing and research endeavors of social scientists. Like policy makers, they constructed theories of family function and socialization that defined men as the instrumental and economic leaders of the family; expressive emotional roles, including those deemed essential to child rearing and socialization, were accorded to women. So thoroughgoing were these assumptions that social scientists came to use the terms “parents” and “mothers” interchangeably. A vast body of literature on socialization focused nearly exclusively on maternal influences (Lamb, 1975). Maternal deprivation was viewed as potentially the most disruptive event in child development; that most studies involved paternal deprivation as well went unremarked for decades (Rutter, 1972). When fathers and paternal influences were considered, they were either deemed trivial or were viewed as important only by virtue of the hostile, competitive, distant characteristics of father-child relationships.

It was only a little over a decade ago that these assumptions began to be questioned by researchers. Earlier studies of father absence or paternal deprivation were undertaken as a means of exploring the significance of paternal influences. Dissatisfied with this strategy, researchers began in the early 1970s to explore directly the formation of father-child relationships, the distinction characteristics of mother- and father-child relationships, and the various ways in which fathers directly and indirectly contribute to their children’s development (Lamb, 1976, 1981). Consideration of these diverse issues pointed toward a common conclusion, namely that whereas theorists had correctly identified mothers as the major sources of direct influence in traditional families, they had mistakenly assumed that they were exclusively important, and had thus ignored the many important ways in which fathers too affected both family functioning and child development.

The acknowledgement and recognition of paternal influences on child development occurred—probably not coincidentally—at a critical point in the lives of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. For all the legislative and economic progress that had been made in the 1960s, equality had certainly not been achieved by the beginning of the 1970s. More importantly, an increasing number of the movements’ leaders had come to realize that further progress toward the attainment of women’s rights was dependent on changes in men’s roles. First in Scandinavia and later in other countries, reformers came to realize that social and gender roles are intimately interrelated, because male and female roles are largely defined in relation to one another. Consequently, it is impossible to bring about major changes in either without complementary changes in the other. More specifically, it was recognized that women were not going to achieve equal opportunity in the employment sector, or become full participants in this sector, unless and until men assumed an increasing responsibility for family or home work. Equitable solutions were impossible so long as women who were weighed by both family and employment responsibilities had to compete with men whose primary—if not sole—responsibilities were in the workplace. To the extent that maternal and female employment were of value to women, their families, and the society at large, therefore, changing male roles—particularly changes that involved increased male participation in home and child care—were viewed as desirable from the perspectives of both women and society.

Changing male roles, however, potentially affect two other groups whose interests have to be considered—children and men. Because the raising and socialization of children is viewed as a primary responsibility of families, it is important to demonstrate that changing male roles will have beneficial effects, or at least not have harmful effects, on children. In fact, this has been a controversial issue, although the limited empirical evidence (most of which is reviewed by Hoffman in Chapter 10 and by Russell and Radin in Chapter 11) largely shows that children are not necessarily harmed either by the involvement of their mothers in the employment sector or by the unusually great involvement of their fathers in child care.

However great our collective commitment to the rights and interests of children, it is probably the case that men would not willingly choose nontraditional male roles simply because these would benefit children, women, or even society at large. Realistically, men are unlikely to relinquish social roles that accord them power and free them of time-consuming family responsibilities unless they believe that changes in these roles are likely to be advantageous to them. However, some recent surveys show that at least some young men would welcome a role change that allowed them to pursue emotional fulfillment in close family relationships (Sheehy, 1979), which would be one likely consequence of increased paternal involvement in child care. The costs and benefits of paternal participation as we know them today are evaluated in Chapter 9.

In sum, our focus on Fatherhood and Social Policy does not derive from a belief that paternal roles alone are worthy of close scrutiny. Rather, it emerges from the realization that gender roles, and social roles in general, are intimately interrelated such that any effort to equalize the lot of women cannot ignore the roles and responsibilities of men. More specifically, it is our belief that at this point in the evolution of modern, industrial, democratic societies, the major stumbling block to equal opportunity and egalitarianism are popular, legislative, administrative, and judicial attitudes and assumptions regarding male roles in the family. Hence our focus on fatherhood and social policy.

Equal employment opportunity and equal rights for men and women represent policy goals that are shared by many but by no means all citizens of the industrialized nations. For many others, the commitment to equal rights represents a frontal assault on the family and on society as they wish to preserve it. Both of these beliefs reflect controversial and deeply internalized values that democracies are bound to defend. These values are intimately related to the issues with which this volume is concerned. Although all the contributors are committed, to a greater or lesser extent, to equal opportunity and rights for men and women, these are not universal values. We need to emphasize, therefore, that ours is not an appeal for a new ideological orthodoxy or a new set of social/family policies designed to replace the traditional family with a role-sharing ideal. Because such an attempt would create new hardships for “traditional” men and women while serving the needs of the reformist nontraditionals, it would be difficult to predict a net improvement in the collective happiness.

Just as it would be unfair and undemocratic to impose nontraditional social roles on all individuals, regardless of their own values, however, it seems to us unfair and shortsighted to impose traditional social roles on those who would prefer to organize their lives and responsibilities differently. Consequently, our goal is to advocate social policies that are flexible enough to permit both traditional and nontraditional forms to exist side by side. The only reasonable and fair goal in a pluralistic democratic society is to increase the options available to men and women so that individual families can decide for themselves how best to allocate economic, household, and childcare responsibilities in accordance with their own values and preferences. One could thus improve the collective satisfaction by allowing those who are comfortable with the status quo to continue organizing their lives in accordance with traditional and well-tried roles while simultaneously increasing the satisfaction of those who are presently dissatisfied because current social policies impose a particular ideology and way of life on all men and women, regardless of their preferences and values.

By explicitly recognizing that we are dealing here with value-laden issues, the contributors hope they can keep distinct their dual roles as scientists and politically minded citizens. We try throughout to distinguish between the objective findings of social science research and our interpretation of their bearing on social policy. It is, of course, never possible to keep values out of science—any science, as either Albert Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer could attest—for scientists too are people with values and opinions. However, we hope that by explicitly acknowledging our dual roles and perspectives—scientific and political—we enhance the value and credibility of our analysis.

Besides the somewhat unusual marriage of science and public policy analysis, there are two other characteristics of this endeavor that are unusual enough to merit explicit attention. First, ours is a multicultural analysis, with a focus on the policies and practices of the Western industrialized nations. Although much of the research has been conducted in the United States, the contributors have attempted to consider the situations existing in other countries wherever possible. Even when the available evidence pertains to the U.S., therefore, the lesson learned is of broader relevance. This goal is also served by including among the contributors individuals with an expert knowledge of social policy in countries as different as Australia, Austria, Czeckoslovakia, France, Germany, Israel, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The issues of interest to the contributors demonstrated that there are major similarities among the problems facing these countries, even if the differences often serve to obscure them. Multicultural analyses are valuable even when one is interested only in the policies of an individual country because they force one to attend to issues that are so often ignored, such as the effects of economic, cultural, and ecological characteristics on societal practices and aspirations. Unfortunately, the heterogeneity within countries is often obscured by the homogenizing assumption that the dominant subculture exemplifies the entire culture.

Second, ours is an interdisciplinary focus. When one is analyzing the goals and effects of diverse social policies, a comprehensive and sensitive understanding is impossible unless one benefits from the perspectives and knowledge bases of many disciplines. Among the contributors to this volume, therefore, we find persons whose training lies in anthropology, developmental psychology, journalism, social and clinical psychology, social welfare, social work, and sociology. Although each chapter is written by people representing only one or two of these disciplines, all benefited from the exchange of views that took place in the study group from which the volume derived. Indeed, readers may have difficulty identifying the disciplinary background of many of the contributors without looking at their affiliations!

These, then, are the issues with which the contributors grapple. Our goal is to analyze contemporary family policies and evaluate the extent to which societies (as well as the men, women, and children within them) would benefit from the development of alternative policies that made it possible for some men to become more involved in child care and family responsibilities. Because ours is a multidisciplinary analysis of the interface between social science and public policy, the volume includes several comparisons of different societies’ responses to common problems, as well as cautionary statements about the need to appreciate inter- and intracultural diversity.

OUTLINE OF THE VOLUME

The chapters in this volume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. Fatherhood and Social Policy in International Perspective: An Introduction
• 2. Paternal Child Care as a Policy Relevant Social Phenomenon and Research Topic: The Question of Values
• 3. Fatherhood and Social Policy: Some Insights from a Comparative Perspective
• 4. The Swedish Parental Insurance Policy: An Experiment in Social Engineering
• 5. The Father’s Case in Child Custody Disputes: The Contributions of Psychological Research
• 6. The Fatherhood Project
• 7. The Gender Dilemma in Social Welfare: Who Cares for Children?
• 8. Fathers and Child Welfare Services: The Forgotten Clients?
• 9. Increased Paternal Participation: The Fathers’ Perspective
• 10. Increased Fathering: Effects on the Mother
• 11. Increased Father Participation and Child Development Outcomes
• 12. Costs and Benefits of Increased Paternal Involvement in Childrearing: The Societal Perspective
• 13. Cross-Cultural Uses of Research on Fathering
• 14. Summary and Recommendations for Public Policy
• Author Index
• Subject Index