Fathering and Child Outcomesстатья из журнала
Аннотация: by Eirini Flouri Chichester : Wiley , 2005 ISBN 0470861681 , 221pp , £24.95 (pb) A stream of books on fathers has continued since Michael Lamb's first review of the field (Lamb, 1976) and shows no signs of abating. Most often the question asked of fatherhood researchers by conference audiences, journalists and parents in general, is ‘So, does fathering influence children's development?’ Given that there are now signs of increased domestic involvement by men after years of debate about the possibility, this book could have made an impact upon the continuing public discussions. The subject matter is intriguing. Eirini Flouri takes the data from the UK's longitudinal cohorts of children and a large recent cross-sectional study and teases apart the possible relationships between paternal involvement, measured in parental or child reports, and children's development across a range of key aspects of their psychological functioning — in terms of their susceptibility to mental health problems, their educational achievements and their success in relationships well into adulthood. There is also a specific chapter on aggression. The book is a description of the analyses that Dr Flouri has published in over 20 journal articles, in which she explores the relative odds of factors in the relationship with the father within a range of predictors, influencing these children's outcomes. The results of these analyses are interesting. They match what has been repeatedly found in the literature on fathers — that men tend to get involved with their children in smaller families, that there is a relationship between paternal involvement and the child's school performance and, characteristically, that children who report that their fathers are more involved in their lives also report that their mothers are more highly involved. In other words father involvement has to be understood within the perspective of the family as a complete and dynamic system. This is shown most clearly in the chapter in which Dr Flouri attempts to assess the impact of paternal input on the child's mental health problems. Here only subtle effects were found. For example, a man's early involvement with a child had more of an impact on the child's ability to stave off adjustment problems if the man was a step father. In a later chapter, a close link is reported between working-class fathers’ lower involvement with their sons at the age of seven and the latter having experienced homelessness by the age of 33. The chapter that I suspect will arouse most interest is the one on non-resident fathers. This finds that their involvement is best predicted by the relationship between the parents and that the frequency of paternal contact does not seem to correlate with a teenager's well-being, which is really best predicted by inter-parental conflict. These are not new findings but somehow we need to be reminded that children are most influenced by the relationship between their parents, even when they live apart. Although many of the findings of these analyses are noteworthy, I am not sure whether the book works. It is not clear who would read it. Fatherhood researchers would probably turn to a subset of the author's many papers which report empirical and statistical details in more comprehensive detail than is presented here. At the same time the book cannot be seen as an introduction to research and theory. The literature review is highly selective and facts are thrown at the reader with a storyline only loosely stitching these details together. I found this the least satisfying part of the book as it looks as if the author has simply selected a range of findings from the vast literature on fathers which appears to have some bearing upon those to be reported in later chapters. There is no feeling of an overview in the first chapter. There are also some problems with the very mass of findings that are reported. The empirical details of the many databases and the interviews from which they draw are repeated across chapters. While it is important to get these across to the reader, I felt that the results would be a little unpalatable for someone who wants to dip into these interesting British databases on fathers. We are confronted with a bricolage of findings, many of which are found in one data set but not replicated in other data sets that are reported. For example, one study suggests that greater paternal involvement influences educational outcomes in their children, while the later cohort does only in relation to other factors, particularly maternal involvement. We are left not knowing whether this is the result of a statistical artefact in the first study, differences in the interviews used in the two cohorts or secular shifts in the period between the two studies. Other findings are not explained by available theories. For example, why might paternal relationship at the age of 16 predict daughters’ psychological adjustment at 33 more than that of sons? Likewise, why might a poor relationship between a father and a daughter in her teenage years predict the latter's apparent rejection of materialist attitudes in adulthood? In short the chapters together read like the results of a statistical fishing expedition in which there do not appear to be principled reasons for comparing the relative influences of paternal and other factors on the child's development. To me, the book falls between the two stools of wanting to get all the necessary detail down and telling a coherent story about the data. Some lines of theoretical analysis are worthy of further exploration, like the brief attempt to distinguish ‘fathering’ from ‘good fathering’. However, I feel that this is too much of an outpouring of the bits of statistical analyses rather than a measured analysis of the influence of fathers on their children.
Год издания: 2006
Авторы: Charlie Lewis
Издательство: Wiley
Источник: Children & Society
Ключевые слова: Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics, Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 20
Выпуск: 5
Страницы: 409–410