Thammasat University students who are interested in allied health sciences, education, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

Engaged Fatherhood for Men, Families and Gender Equality: Healthcare, Social Policy, and Work Perspectives is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50717

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of fatherhood.

As the publisher’s website explains,

This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors—Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations—the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.

In terms of growth and development of young children, fatherhood engagement is considered significant.

Research has shown that children benefit from the involvement of an engaged father figure in their lives

Education researchers define an engaged father as one who feels responsible for and behaves responsibly toward his child, is emotionally engaged and physically accessible, provides material support to sustain the child’s needs, is involved in childcare, and exerts influence in child-raising decisions.

Some psychological effects of the absence of a father figure for children may endure for the rest of their lives.

Fathers are important for both boys and girls.

According to some studies, adults who had actively involved father figures during childhood are more likely to have ability to handle stress.

By contrast, if fathers are emotionally absent, children may find it difficult to develop appropriate emotional reactions, including stress management.

As a preface notes, this book is about

fatherhood, and how to facilitate it in organizations and countries. This book presents medical evidence of the benefits of responsible, committed fatherhood to children; to fathers; and to families, which means that is of much relevance also for society and organizations. Family values are the strong base upon which society is based. The industrial revolution installed the breadwinner-homemaker system. Ever since, the role of the father as caring educator and role model has been devaluated. In the breadwinner homemaker system, men were the sole family wage earners and women were fulltime homemakers, with no external or paid jobs. Thus, children and the home were entrusted to women, and men had no responsibility over them. Today, there are few, if any, societies in which the breadwinner-homemaker model is still prevalent. Yet, the role of the father has not yet been restored to its full essence. In practice, fatherhood receives very little recognition. Institutions, organizations, and society do not facilitate men to fully develop in their roles as fathers. In this book, we aim to help in this restoration.

An introduction observes,

The importance of engaged fatherhood is now undismissable in ways it was not in earlier decades. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the importance of residential and non-residential fathers on families’ welfare and economic wellbeing; on mothers’ prenatal health and birth outcomes; on children’s cognitive, psychosocial, and educational development and gender identity; and on adolescent behavioral risk reduction among other benefits. Of particular significance to the development of fatherhood research has been the emergence of national and cross-national longitudinal studies on children and families that explore the contributions of fathers. These social scientific studies have blossomed alongside a proliferation of medical scientific studies on the importance engaged parenting. Moreover, as discussed in the chapter on “The Impact of Fatherhood on Men’s Health and Development” by Kotelchuck, the benefits of fatherhood involvement are not limited to children’s and mothers’ wellbeing; there is growing evidence documenting the benefits of fatherhood involvement for men themselves, ranging from better psychological and physical health outcomes to the development of new capacities as employees. There are also significant strains of fatherhood for men that need to be addressed for the welfare of men and their families. In sum, it is no longer possible for evidence-based decision makers—clinicians, policy makers, or other family service providers—to responsibly ignore the significance of engaged fatherhood for the welfare of families and children and for men themselves. Another reason to elevate the importance of engaged fatherhood is to give a push forward to the revolution for gender equality—a movement that is widely perceived to have stalled… Women’s growing participation in paid labor has been a primary factor in transforming social conceptions of fathers as “caregivers” as well as “breadwinners”…

The marked gains in women’s labor-market participation and men’s contributions to childcare and household labor between 1965 and 2005 have since largely flattened out. Despite devoting more time to their children than previous generations, fathers are still not typically the primary caregiver “on call” to deal with the vicissitudes of family life (e.g., being available at short notice for the care of sick children), leaving working mothers as the primary consumers of family-friendly social and work policies…

The larger objective of this volume is not to “win more” for fathers, but rather to reap the mutual gains from engaged fatherhood for families, children, and men themselves and, in the process, to advance the ideals of gender equality…

The first section of the book is dedicated to voices of medical scholars discussing the implications of early fatherhood involvement for the health and development of children, parenting partners, and men themselves. It offers strategies for healthcare providers to support men more directly and effectively as prospective and current fathers. In spite of the growing evidence, the health community struggles to increase recognition of fathers’ roles and contributions in the care of infants and children in a sector traditionally focused on the mothers as parents. Fathers currently interact with healthcare systems, albeit to a lesser extent than mothers, during the antenatal period, the birth of the child, and after the birth. However, fathers commonly feel as if they are “secondary parents” in these healthcare interactions. The contributors to the Health and Wellbeing section advocate for engaging fathers preceding infants’ conception through reproductive health and birthing services into the pediatricians’ offices in order to enhance infant, maternal, and men’s own health. They emphasize that failure to do so reinforces traditional cultural expectations of fathers rather than leading the charge for gender role changes. It also fails to recognize that the perinatal period is a demanding developmental period for fathers, who too experience important physical, psychological, and social changes…

This survey is path breaking as there is very limited literature on the experiences of fathers during Obstetric prenatal care, especially that directly includes fathers’ voices. They find that fathers who have responded to the survey are actively and deeply engaged with the impending birth; have substantial physical and health needs including lack of primary care, depressive symptoms, and personal isolation; and have a strong desire for greater involvement in reproductive health care services. In conclusion, they make multiple practical recommendations to create a more father-friendly environment in Obstetric care…

There are multiple ways in which social policies can foster fatherhood involvement. Parenting-related leaves, the set of social policies most analyzed in this book, are perhaps the most examined reproductive health policies in the literature. A key finding from this literature is that the initial transition from “mother-specific” to more general “parenting-related” leave policies enabled the inclusion of men, but had little practical effects because mothers continued to be the primary users. In order to encourage men’s participation in parenting-related leave policies, some countries, especially in Nordic Europe, offered father-specific leaves (e.g., “daddy quotas”). Evidence now shows that father-specific quotas tend to have significantly more positive effects relative to the use of gender-neutral parental leave, particularly in terms of increased paternal involvement with childcare over time and increased solo parenting time.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)