ROLE OF FATHERS

Role of Fathers

[Name of the Student]

[Name of the Institute]

How and to What Extent, Has the Role Of Fathers in Families Changed in the Past 30 Years?

Introduction

The role of fathers in the United Kingdom has come a long way. But, the role has changed drastically since last thirty years. The cardigan-wearing, all-wise father figure who came home from a long day at the office to a wife in a starched dress and heels, bearing a martini and slippers for her husband, while the children adoringly greeted dear old dad was, in fact, a media creation, but one that etched itself into the collective unconscious in British culture. In the 1950s, four percent of all children born in the U.K. were born to single mothers; in 2000 that figure stood at thirty-three percent. The average age of marriage for women in the 1950s was twenty; by 2000 the average age was twenty-five. Women's participation in the workforce, however, has had the greatest impact on men as fathers—in 2000 nearly eighty percent of all women of childbearing age were part of the workforce, and while only eleven percent of mothers with children under the age of six were part of the workforce in 1950, by 2002 that figure had risen to fifty-five percent. This paper discusses how and to what extent, the role of fathers in families has changed in the past 30 years.

Discussion

The role of fathers in families has changed a lot in the past 30 years. The contemporary fathers are present in a variety of categories. Modern fathers are not like the fathers of 30 years back. The fathers of 1980's were conventional married wage earners and authoritarian in the families. Now they can be married or single; stay-at home or externally employed; straight or gay; a step-parent or adoptive; and a more than competent caregiver to family having mental or physical confronts. Mental study among families from all cultural settings proposes that fathers' love and higher attachment in family facilitate children's emotional and social growth. (Stearns 2003, 44-45)

While the late 1980s and 1970's saw the emergence of a "new" woman, who could work, be a devoted partner and a loving mother, the "superwoman" image—stereotyped in a well-known 1970s television commercial for a perfume, in which a mother figure can "bring home the bacon/fry it up in a pan/and never let you forget you're a man/'cause I'm a woman," all with children happily vying for mom's attention—quickly fell apart under scrutiny. Women began to ask why they needed to be superwoman—in other words, where were the supermen?

A July 12, 1982 article in Time magazine asked "How Long Till Equality?" and examined women's political, economic, and social progress. Fatherhood and traditional two-parent nuclear families came into play: only twenty-eight percent of all families in 1982 were "traditional," and that number dropped to nine percent by 2000. The article noted the impact of staying at home on mothers' careers and examined the possibility of stay-at-home fathers: "There are not many executives ...