Abstract
Fathers play many roles in the lives of their young children, including provider, caregiver, teacher, and playmate. The effects of father figures’ play and playful interactions with young children are thought to affect child development in unique ways. We use a systematic literature review of observational studies to describe variation in the qualities of father-child play and playful interactions between the prenatal period and child age 5 years. We contrast these qualities to mothers’ play and playful interactions and examine differences between fathers’ interactions with sons and daughters. Finally, we describe the quality and quantity of current evidence and discuss gaps in the literature.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on definitions and sociocultural context. The 50 articles reviewed in depth span several decades, from 1977 (i.e., Weinraub & Frankel, 1977) to 2017 (i.e., Ahnert et al., 2017), reflecting predominant theories of the authors’ time and space. As such, sex and gender concepts (e.g., male female vs man woman vs son daughter vs boy girl) may have been used interchangeably, and sex and gender binaries may have been assumed without the context of current understandings of sex and gender diversity and interactivity. For clarity in reporting, this section also uses sex and gender binaries and assumes that these were appropriately reported in each article. However, here, “sex” refers to one’s biological sex (i.e., male, female); “gender” refers to the sociocultural representations of “man” and “woman,” “boy” and “girl,” including prescriptive symbols of masculinity and femininity across the lifespan (e.g., toy trucks as masculine, and primarily for boys; dolls as feminine, and primarily for girls).
- 2.
Using an asterisk (*) in the search terms instructs the search to include all derivations of the word as long as the initial stem of the word is included. For example, “father*” included “fathering,” “fatherhood,” “father-child,” “father-mother,” etc. Likewise, the term “infan*” includes “infant,” “infancy,” “infant-parent,” etc., and the term “play*” includes “playful,” “playing,” etc.
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Table 22.1 describes the inclusion and exclusion criteria by which inclusion in this chapter was determined, as well as the rationale.
Table 22.2 describes characteristics of the studies in each of the articles reviewed in this chapter.
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Vallotton, C.D., Foster, T., Harewood, T., Cook, J., Adekoya, A.R. (2020). Fathers and Young Children at Play: A Scoping Review of Studies of Fathers’ Play with Sons and Daughters from Birth to Preschool. In: Fitzgerald, H.E., von Klitzing, K., Cabrera, N.J., Scarano de Mendonça, J., Skjøthaug, T. (eds) Handbook of Fathers and Child Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51027-5_22
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