Subjects Between Legacies: How Fathers Construct the Relation Between Their Childhood Past, the Present of Parenting, and Their Child(ren)’s Future

Abstract

This article brings to the discussion of change in the meaning and practice of fatherhood a consideration of fathers’ position between generations and between legacies. Conceptualisations of temporality in the work of Schütz and Mead are applied in analysing a father’s dual position, as both parent and child, as a particular instance of the subject’s position in a present from which the relation between pasts and futures is (re-)constituted. Drawing on qualitative research with a diverse sample of 31 fathers, I argue that the responsibility to lay down a positive emotional and psychological legacy for their child draws fathers into an engagement with their own experience of being parented. The resources for interpretation, and even transformation, of a father’s parenting heritage are situated in terms of contemporary discourses of fatherhood and family and of persistent inequalities in the conditions under which fatherhood is forged.