Sport, Fathers and Fathering

Abstract

There is little doubt that today’s fathers are responding to new expectations about fatherhood and fathering practices. The remote, detached, breadwinning father of the past, once lauded as a masculine ideal, has faded and men are now expected to be ‘involved’, ‘intimate’, ‘caring’ and ‘domesticated’ fathers (Dermott, 2008; Miller, 2010; Morgan, 2011, 2013; Brannen, 2015). In the UK, fatherhood and, in particular what it means to be a ‘good’ father, has been said to be in a state of flux as ideas about ‘earning as caring’ are ‘no longer enough to validate being a good father’ (O’Brien, 2005, cited in Brannen, 2015: 13). Changes in the labour market, in terms of the decline of some (male dominated sectors), growing opportunities for women and changes to legislation around parental leave and entitlements among others things have, ideologically at least, weakened the basis for the assumed male breadwinner image. Ideologies of fatherhood and motherhood now encompass both emotional and hands-on caring roles in relation to children, in addition to participation in paid work. According to Wilding (2018) this has contributed to a ‘work-life collision, in which men and women struggle to meet the expectations of their roles in both family and paid work contexts’ (p. 6). The work on gender and power within marriage suggests that, in many heterosexual relationships, men still hold the balance of power because they earn more than women (Dermott and Pomati, 2016). Indeed, in many households, women are secondary wage earners and men maintain authority by controlling and ‘withholding’ money. Gatrell (2007) discerns that often, even in ‘late modern’ heterosexual relationships, where couples are co-habiting and each partner has her/his own banking arrangements, gender inequalities are reproduced in very traditional forms. However, Gatrell also suggests that in couples where women are professionally employed it is more difficult for men to maintain the level of power previously associated with the male breadwinner role. Since the turn of the twenty first century, a much more sustained body of work has emerged which centralises the experiences and practices of fathers. This research has introduced concepts such as ‘new’ and ‘intimate’ fathering (Dermott, 2008; Miller, 2010; Jamieson, 2011) as mechanisms for explaining how men have become increasingly involved and engaged compared with earlier generations and stereotypes (Dermott and Miller, 2015).