Fatherhood, Time and the Perspectives of Children and Young People (with Valerie Wigfall)

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine perspectives on fatherhood from the vantage point of children, that is, the grandson generation aged between 5 and 17 (Brannen et al., 2012). Time in relation to family lives needs to be problematised as Daly suggests,

The goal of developing a theory of family time… is therefore contingent on two key conceptual shifts. The first of these is to problematise the everyday experience of family time by opening the taken for granted to scrutiny. This involves a shift from seeing time as a background feature of everyday life to seeing time as an explicit, foreground feature of everyday life. The second conceptual reorientation involves shifting attention away from cataloguing the number of hours that family members commit to various activities and to focus instead on the meanings that time has for them.

(Daly, 1996: pp. 15–16)