Competence Versus Performance
The lower level of father involvement in caregiving and other forms of interaction does not imply that fathers are less competent than mothers to care for infants and children. Competence can be measured in a variety of ways One approach is to measure the parent's sensitivity to infant cues in the feeding context. Success in caregiving, to a large degree, depends on the parent's ability to correctly read or interpret the infant's behavior so that the parent's own behavior can be regulated to...
Quantitative Assessments of Father Involvement in Intact Families
The extent to which fathers in intact families participate in childcare needs to be distinguished from the level of involvement of fathers who are not coresident with their children for a variety of reasons, including divorce or out-of-wedlock births. In fact, this conceptual distinction reflects the contradictory trends in the fathering literature that Furstenberg 1988, p. 193 has characterized as the two faces of fatherhood. On the one hand, fathers seem to be increasing their involvement and...
About the Authors in Volume
VIRGINIA D. ALLHUSEN is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, School of Social Ecology, the University of California at Irvine. She earned a B.S. at Duke University and a M.A. and Ph.D. at Cornell University. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the National Association for the Education of...
Is There a Universal Father Play Style
Some cross-cultural studies support the generality of this pattern of mother-father differences in play style. Parents in England and Australia show similar gender differences Russell and Russell, 1987 Smith and Daglish, 1977 . However, other evidence suggests that this pattern of mother-father differences in play style may be, in part, culture bound. Specifically, neither in Sweden Lamb, Frodi, Hwang, and Frodi, 1982 nor among Israeli kibbutz families Sagi et al., 1985 were there clear...