P-002 - Fathers are Parents too! Broadening Research on Parenting for Child Development

Session Type: Pre-Conference Event

Integrative Statement

Sponsored by: Brigham Young University

Despite strong evidence that fathers make important and potentially unique contributions to children’s development, fathers are still not included regularly in research that examines the effects of parenting on children’s development, and are too often dismissed by scholars as less important than mothers or unavailable and too challenging to study. This is especially true for nonresident, low-income, and minority fathers, even though these fathers also actively contribute to their children’s positive development and wellbeing in critical ways. Moreover, even as widespread popular support for fathers’ active involvement in parenting has increased, media portrayals of fathers continue to often depict them as less competent than mothers, many health and social service providers treat them as auxiliary parental figures, and social policy continues to ignore their contributions.

The focus of this pre-conference is to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology, family science, sociology, social work, public policy) and at a range of career stages (e.g., undergraduate and graduate students, early career researchers, leaders in the field) to share and discuss state-of-the-art research on fathers and fathering, and how we can best disseminate this work to influence the culture of parenting research, practice, and policy. This pre-conference will follow on the heels of a successful pre-conference to SRCD 2017 on Fathers and Families, which was well attended and received positive feedback from participants, and a recently published Child Development Perspectives article (Cabrera, Volling, & Barr, 2018) that outlines best practices in conceptualization and measurement of fathers’ parenting to further our understanding of the family contexts of children’s development. Our goal is to build successfully on the momentum created by the 2017 pre-conference and to continue to host pre-conferences on fathers and fathering at future SRCD biennial meetings.

Organizers:
Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Ohio State University
Kevin Shafer, Brigham Young University
Natasha Cabrera, University of Maryland
Brenda Volling, University of Michigan

Time: 8:00 am - 3:30 pm
Location: Hilton Baltimore - Peale ABC Meeting Room

Sub Unit

• SRCD Supported Pre-Conferences