My job will be...: New fathers and mothers reflect on fatherhood.

This project explores the question, What does it mean to be a good father? Much of the research on fatherhood deals with fathers in the abstract. That is, it fails to take into account the culturally, historically, and site-specific ways in which fatherhood is understood by everyday men and women. I argue that the context of fatherhood is important to its meaning---even when considering fatherhood within the American middle class. To conduct this research, I created a new research design that I call narrative interviewing, and I supplemented that with ethnographic observations of suburban life in metropolitan St. Louis. The seventy-nine men and women interviewed in the course of this research were all just becoming parents for the first time. The decision to interview men and women at this temporal juncture in the life course was to emphasize my interest in fatherhood as a cultural construct; fatherhood as understood, rather than as what fathers do. I assert that the meaning of being a good provider (the intersection between fatherhood and work) needs to be reworked, as evidence from these middle-class informants suggests that at a certain point, a man's economic performance becomes less important than his involvement with his family. I conclude that fatherhood among this group---situated within their circumstances and expressed through narratives that they tell about fatherhood---centers on three key concepts: union, improvement, and sentimentality. Thus, this culture favors what I call a continuous family trajectory for fathers---a pattern of continuing, progressive involvement of men at home.PhDIndividual and family studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124410/2/3138157.pd