What are the links between fathering, family relationships, risk and child outcomes? Methodological and theoretical issues

Since John Nash’s (1965) clarion call for more research on fathers, there has been a flow of publications on men in families, peaking at about 1000 per year in the 1980s but also at a highly respectable 700–800 now. So large is this literature that the most prominent review has run to five editions (e.g. Lamb, 2010); there are several others that are required to fill in any gaps (e.g. Cabrera & TamisLemonda, 2013; Shwalb, Shwalb, & Lamb, 2013) and there are several specialist volumes which are required reading for those attempting to understand particular niche questions, including that of risk (Lamb, 1986; Phares, 1995). What have we learned from this outpouring of studies, therapeutic analyses and theoretical reflections, and how do the articles in this volume contribute to such a flow, or reflect its nature? To address this issue, I will dwell briefly upon the themes raised in these papers within the past 50 years of this research. The papers in this Special Issue are in many respects typical of those produced over the past 40 years. In this commentary, I will reflect upon two issues to examine how they fit into this complex and diverse literature: methodological innovation and the emergence of the dynamic family systems perspective that is the focus of Fitzgerald and Bradley’s introduction to this issue. Each of these issues from a puzzle that has been evident in the literature for many years: why do we ‘know’ so little about fathers when there is so much research on them?