Fathers' Narratives of Arranging and Planning: Implications for Understanding Paternal Responsibility

This study examines 40 fathers’ narratives of arranging and planning for young children from Midwest and Southwest U.S. samples. Arranging and planning is seen as an aspect of the responsibility component of Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, and Levine’s (1985) widely used three-part conceptualization of paternal involvement. Based on four themes observed, different types of paternal “responsibility identities” are distinguished: 1) deferred-responsibility identity, 2) conjoint-responsibility identity, 3) mixed deferred/conjoint-responsibility identity, and 4) contextualized solo-responsibility identity. The importance of understanding fathers’ responsibility identity and considerations for future research are discussed.