The evolution of fatherhood research offers interesting insights into academics’ assumptions about how fathers contribute to their children’s well-being. These assumptions influence research agendas and, while sometimes being helpful, can also lead to misunderstanding fathers and their contributions. For instance, the scholarly study of fathers began with the Second World War when researchers made the assumption that father absence would lead young boys to become effeminate (Bach, 1946; McCord, McCord, & Thurber, 1962) or homosexual (see Pleck, 2007), with much of this research drawing on Freudian theory (Burton & Whiting, 1961). During this time and through much of the 1970s, aside from examining their presence or absence, fathers were not included in “parenting” research, which was primarily the study of the mother’s influence.
Then, in the 1980s, feminist thought began to influence the research field, and the assumptions about the father’s role expanded to include multiple aspects of parenting (see Lamb, 2000). Scholars began to categorize general “types” of father involvement (e.g., engagement, responsibility, accessibility) and study how these types influenced children (Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, & Levine, 1985, 1987). From this research grew a wealth of information on how a father’s involvement contributed to his children’s development (Lamb, 2010). Bolstered by these findings, fatherhood researchers increasingly argued that when studying child development, it was critical to study the father’s role.
At the same time, social movements arose that began to call into question two assumptions often underlying fatherhood research: 1) that what fathers do as parents is different from what mothers do and 2) that father involvement is essential for child well-being. Regarding the first assumption, it is certainly true that there is much overlap in what fathers and mothers do. Both mothers and fathers care for their children, express love, monitor, discipline, play, teach, etc. In fact, it is difficult to name a category of parenting tasks that fathers and mothers cannot both do. Jay Fagan and colleagues (Fagan, Day, Lamb, & Cabrera, 2014) found little research justification that “mothering” and “fathering” were different. They therefore conclude that there is justification for collapsing the terms “mothering” and “fathering” into “parenting.”
