Masculinities and Fatherhood in Parenting Discourses : An Ethnographic Content Analysis of Polish Childcare Magazines for Fathers

The aim of this paper is to understand how orthodox masculinities relate to ideals of involved fatherhood in journals aimed for (new) fathers. With the use of Ethnographic Content Analysis, polish parenting magazines are studied. The Polish case is interesting due to its different historical context, compared to the Western Europe and North America, and it offers an opportunity to study involved fatherhood in a setting marked by a relatively conservative masculinity. The study applies a relational approach to gender, in which men and masculinities are best understood in relation to women and femininities. The findings suggest that there is a discourse of involved fatherhood, but it contains some reservations. Fathers are often depicted as uninformed and the mother is emphasized as the most important parent. There is also a discourse of dichotomy between mothers and fathers. Men and women are described as having different functions in parenting. In this discourse, it is also possible to see how these distinctions between the sexes rely on sexist stereotypes. This has caused the author of this study to conclude that the attempts of encouraging fathers to become more involved in childcare, sometimes risk reinforcing an, already, unequal gender structure.