The landscape of Canadian fatherhood has changed dramatically over the past several decades. Shifting family structures, policy issues, and cultural expectations affect men’s interactions with their children and influence the way they perceive their own roles as fathers. The traditional notion of fatherhood may have changed, but fathers are as important today as ever before. Father Involvement in Canada brings together more than a dozen leading scholars of fatherhood issues to examine the roles of Canadian fathers from many angles. Looking at the experiences of fathers from different ethnicities, age groups, marital statuses, gender partnering, and economic brackets, the authors examine issues such as the impact of poverty, access to paternity leave, and the availability of support from social institutions. National in scope, this is the first book of its kind to summarize and challenge current scholarship on Canadian fatherhood and offer new concepts, theoretical frameworks, and research directions.

Father Involvement in Canada brings together almost two dozen leading scholars of fatherhood issues to examine the roles of Canadian fathers. They look at the experiences of fathers from many angles, considering different ages, ethnicities, marital statuses, gender partnering, and economic brackets, and examining issues such as the impact of poverty, access to paternity leave, and the availability of support from social institutions. By co-considering these dimensions and viewpoints, the book creates a map of interlocking individual, familial, and socio-economic systems in which fathers are embedded. National in scope, Fatherhood Involvement in Canada is the first book to summarize and challenge current scholarship of Canadian fatherhood and offer new concepts, theoretical frameworks, and research directions.

Fathers with children at home account for a substantial portion of the Canadian population. In contemporary Canada, a father's role no longer consists of distant breadwinning, but rather actively engaging in a family-centered lifestyle and being more involved in child care. Extensive research has focused primarily on the experiences of mothers and given very little attention to involved fathers. This study sought out to explore how fathers understand and describe involved fatherhood. Six participants, who identified as engaged fathers, participated in conversational interviews. The findings suggest that daily interaction through child rearing and playing with children was viewed as part of the father role. As a result, fathers adjusted their paid work and leisure pursuits in order to "be there" for their children. Fathers resisted dominant gendered ideologies through completing 'feminine' domestic chores, providing emotional care, and taking full responsibility for children's care throughout the week. Fathers also reproduced gendered norms, particularly during children's play, and by not taking paid parental leave. This research found that fathers resisted and reproduced gendered roles, and negotiated numerous constraints to meet their fathering responsibilities, which did not consist of solely playing with children. Fathers' involvement level is greatly influenced by leave policies in Canada; therefore changes to leave policies and pay equity are needed to support increased father involvement.

Includes some material previously published in French under title: La paternitae au XXIe siaecle. Quaebec: Presses de l'Universitae Laval, 2009.

Similar concerns about the prevalence of single mother-led families and the failure of fathers to pay child support prompted research and new policies introduced in the 1980s and early 1990s in the U. K. (Lewis, 2002). [...] In Europe, the U. S. and Canada, there is also growing recognition of the need to understand how fathers' experiences are similar and different in different situations, and the value of appreciating the diversity of perspectives and needs that we are only beginning to hear from fathers themselves. [...] Most recently, funding has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to support the Father 2 Involvement Research Alliance (FIRA), a unique community-university research alliance (CURA) designed to examine father involvement as a diverse, multifaceted, and complex experience and to heighten awareness of the benefits of father involvement and barriers to it unde [...] The legal establishment and acknowledgment of paternity provides the basis for all of the rights that accrue to the child and the rights and obligations of the man who is the designated paternal parent of the child. [...] The importance of a child's right to birth registration is captured in Articles 7 and 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child where it is affirmed that children have the right to have their birth registered and a name.

This vital addition to Springer’s ‘Educating the Young Child’ series addresses gaps in the literature on father involvement in the lives of young children, a topic with a fast-rising profile in today’s world of female breadwinners and single-parent households. While the significant body of theoretical understanding and empirical data accumulated in recent decades has done much to characterize the fluidity of evolving notions of fatherhood, the impact of this understanding on policy and legal frameworks has been uneven at an international level. In a field where groups of fathers were until recently marginalized in research, this book adopts a refreshingly inclusive attitude, aiming to motivate researchers to capture the nuanced practices of fathers in minority groups such as those who are homeless, gay, imprisoned, raising a disabled child, or from ethnically distinct backgrounds, including Mexican- and African-American and indigenous fathers. The volume includes chapters highlighting the unique challenges and possibilities of father involvement in their children’s early years of development. Contributing authors have integrated theories, research, policies, and programs on father involvement so as to attract readers with diverse interest and expertise, and material from selected countries in Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as North America, evinces the international scope of their analysis. Their often interdisciplinary analyses draw, too, on historical and cultural legacies, even as they project a vision of the future in which fathers’ involvement in their young children’s lives develops alongside the changing political, economic and educational landscapes around the world.