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Journal Article Using data on 294 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health who live with a biological father and have both a resident stepmother and a nonresident biological mother, this study examines the prevalence, antecedents, and consequences of adolescents' closeness to each of their parents. Findings demonstrate that adolescents vary in their likelihood of having close relationships to resident fathers, resident stepmothers, and nonresident biological mothers, but when they can do so, they appear to benefit. Close relationships with both resident fathers and nonresident…
This guide is intended to assist the grantees of the Safe Havens: Supervised Visitation and Safe Exchange Grant Program (Supervised Visitation Program or SVP) that want to enhance the safety and well-being of women and children by working more deliberately with abusive fathers who use the centers to visit their children. Although fathers are not always the visiting parents and, in fact, in some centers mothers make up almost half of the visiting caseload, this document was designed to target in particular visiting fathers who have been violent with their intimate partners. (Author abstract)
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Journal Article This study examined the parenting predictors of father-child attachment security in early childhood. Results suggest that multiple dimensions of fathers' parenting quality moderated the associations between father involvement, in its original content-free sense, and father-child attachment. Specifically, father involvement was generally unrelated to attachment security when fathers engaged in high-quality parenting behavior, but associated with lower levels of attachment security when fathers' parenting was less adaptive. Findings provide further evidence for the important role of parenting…
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Journal Article This is a follow up to a study that showed that fathers who were either very close to their parents or very distant from their parents during childhood had more positive attitudes about father involvement prior to the birth of their first child. This current study focused on how family of origin relationships for new fathers are associated with their attitudes about father involvement at 6 and 12 months post-partum. Using a sample of 152 couples recruited during pregnancy, we examined the validity of the modeling and compensation hypotheses for understanding how family of origin experiences…
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Journal Article The present study examined the relationship between concurrent measures of adolescent fathers' parenting stress, social support, and fathers' care-giving involvement with the 3-month-old infant, controlling for fathers' prenatal involvement. The study sample consisted of 50 teenage father-mother dyads. Findings from multivariate regression revealed that fathers' parenting stress was significantly and negatively related to fathers' care giving as perceived by both fathers and mothers. The relationship between support for father involvement provided by the young man's parents and father…
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Journal Article The present qualitative research focuses on homeless fathers living with their children in family shelters. Data were collected through semistructured, face-to-face interviews with homeless fathers (n = 9) and shelter directors (n = 3). Findings suggest that how fathers made meaning of their experiences in a homeless shelter was related to contextual factors and constructions of masculinity. Contextual constraints deriving from unemployment, behavioral and psychological restrictions of shelters, and new parenting roles led men to reassess their parental and masculine role identities. Results…
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Journal Article Our study examined variations in adolescent adjustment as a function of maternal and paternal parenting styles. Participants included 272 students in grades 9 and 11 from a public high school in a metropolitan area of the Northeastern US. Participants completed measures of maternal and paternal parenting styles and indices of psychological adjustment. Authoritative mothering was found to relate to higher self-esteem and life-satisfaction and to lower depression. Paternal parenting styles was also related to psychological adjustment, however, although the advantage of authoritative mothering…
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Journal Article This research represents an exploration of patterns of boundary ambiguity among poor, young, unmarried men and their reproductive partners. Interviews were conducted with men and their partners during the third trimester of pregnancy. Interviews focused on patterns of men's physical and psychological presence in relationships with their partners and in activities associated with pregnancy and prenatal care. Patterns of presence among fathers-to-be are identified and factors associated with those patterns are explored. Patterns of presence reflect degrees of physical and psychological presence…
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Journal Article The degree to which fathers' motivation for involvement with their preschool children was intrinsic versus extrinsic was examined in a sample of 205 French-speaking fathers. Links between fathers' motivation and fathers' perceptions of support from partners, fathers' sense of competence in parenting, fathers' involvement in parenting, and fathers' satisfaction in their performance of the parental role were investigated. Structural equation modeling revealed a father's perceptions that his partner has confidence in his parenting ability were related to both feelings of competence in…
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Journal Article To further examine culture-specific patterns of paternal involvement in childcare, assessments were made of fathers' and mothers' perceptions of their involvement in caring for and stimulating infants in 41 urban Kadazan families in Sabah, Malaysia. Mothers exceeded fathers in the amount of time they spent in cleaning, feeding, and playing with infants and in their levels of engagement in direct care of infants. With the exception of feeding and singing, fathers and mothers reported engaging in similar amounts of care and stimulation of infant boys and girls. The results are discussed in the…