The article discusses fatherhood as a social phenomenon. The authors use the functional approach to research father’s role. The realization of this role is a sum of educational, domestic, economic, communicative, leisure and social control functions in the family.
Fatherhood is characterized as a complex phenomenon formed as a result of interaction between normative societal regulations and individual attitudes emerging from father and child relationship. The experiential base of the article is the data of in-depth interviews of complete and incomplete (due to divorce) families.
The authors identify fatherhood’s main characteristics, the effects of the distancing between a child and a father after the divorce, the gender diffe¬rentiation and lack of generations differentiation. In conclusion the authors summarize the main results of the study and conclude that the transformation of father’s role is slow and the “involved and caring father” is so far just the image present in the social consciousness. read in PDF>>>
