U.S. Fathering

Abstract

As enthusiasm for evaluating the U.S. father figure built momentum in the 1980s one generalized interest of several researchers has been to track the father’s amount and type of nurturing—caretaking behaviors and the scope and intensity of attitudes toward his children. As was described earlier, a typical research method has been to (1) survey fathers, (2) survey mothers, and then (3) compare the surveyed parent’s profiles. The results of these studies suggested that fathers, even though quite capable of exhibiting an egalitarian parenting quotient parallel to mothers, had nurturing quotients that were lower than the mothers.

... mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: in that they suffer more in giving them birth, and are more certain that they are their own.

Aristotle

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular.

Robert Frost