Compromising Fatherhood: Expansion Versus Constriction in Fathers' Gender Identities and Role Performances

Abstract

Objective

Our study examines how fathers perceive and negotiate incongruities between their personal gender identities as men compared to their interpersonal gender role performances as fathers.

Background

Fatherhood today is shaped strongly by contradictions around gender expectations. Many fathers feel ambivalent toward traditional masculine norms that undermine their aspirations to be an involved parent. Understanding how fathers grapple with these contradictions can reveal much about the social-psychological processes underlying divisions of labor in different-gender partnerships.

Method

Our dataset consists of in-depth interviews with 36 Canadian fathers of young children. Guided by Symbolic Interactionist theory, we take a flexible coding approach to identify and analyze paradoxes around gender, work, and family in fathers' narratives.

Results

We find that fatherhood is linked simultaneously to identity expansion—by facilitating men to integrate more caring masculinities into their self-concept and role constriction—through pulls into traditionally gendered work–family arrangements. In the face of this expansion and constriction, fathers make distinct identity-behavior compromises to bridge a perceptual divide between their gender identity construction and gender role performances.

Conclusion

We define compromised fatherhood as a social-psychological manifestation of gendered conflicts at the identity-behavior nexus and a discursive frame with which fathers account for these conflicts.