Infant Care and Motherhood in an Urban Community by George Farkas

Author:George Farkas [Farkas, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351512633
Goodreads: 35865981
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Taking the various factors into account, for the purposes of our analysis we formed an overall impression for each father, so that each could be classified as ‘highly participant’, ‘moderately participant’ or ‘non-participant’. Since 99 per cent of fathers were said to play with their babies, this activity was excluded from the analysis. In general terms, the meaning of these categories is as follows. A highly participant father is usually described as one who will ‘do anything for the children’. At least three of the specific activities will be checked ‘often’, and the rest he will undertake ‘sometimes’. Often the mother will add other child-rearing duties which he regularly shares, such as nappy washing, toilet training, getting the baby dressed in the morning and ‘carrying him about everywhere’. Often, too, there will be at least one activity which is always carried out by the father if he is there: feeding, getting to sleep and attending to the child in the night are most usually chosen by the father as his regular job. Mr Holt, a baker’s roundsman, always does all three for his little boy :

‘He helps with everything, and that includes the housework. On Saturday mornings I do the bedrooms and he does the washing, and then I come and mop up the kitchen. We go through the house together.’

Mrs Frame has had arguments with her husband, a tailor’s presser, about who should do something for their baby, who is slightly handicapped. She would like to do everything herself, but Mr Frame insists on sharing. He regularly washes Simon’s nappies and reads and sings to him at bedtime. Mrs Piercy has three young children as well as the baby; when she was pregnant her husband, a crane repairer, twice took complete charge of them for the week-end while she went to the seaside with a friend; she says: ‘If I hadn’t got him, I don’t know what I should do. Oh, he’s a big help, he’ll do anything, any mortal thing’. And Mr Ross, a cattle factor, was paid this tribute by his wife:

‘Oh, he’ll do anything for either of them—he always has—bath, change, feed, wash for them. They’re all their Daddy. There’s a scream when he goes and a howl when he comes back in case he’s going again. We always have a tantrum when Daddy goes. Oh, they delight in their Daddy.’

A moderately participant father is one who in general is prepared to help with the children if he is asked or in an emergency, but who doesn’t do a great deal as a matter of course. Most of the items will be checked ‘sometimes’, and there will usually be at least one job that he ‘draws the line at’. To individual questions the mother will often answer ‘he would do’ or ‘he does if I’m not here’. Sometimes the father makes a principle of doing certain jobs only if the mother is quite unavailable, and in general he tends to pick and choose as to what he will do and what he won’t.

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