Generative Fathering: Beyond Deficit Perspectives.(Faithful Fathering: Spiritual Narratives and Religious Meaning)

• Published in: The Journal of Men's Studies 1998, Vol.7 (1), p.157
• Main Author: Bullock, Chris J
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Child development; Human relations; Interpersonal communication; Literature; Nonfiction; Parents & parenting; Personal relationships
• ISSN: 1060-8265; 1933-0251

From the mythopoetic men's movement's emphasis on absent fathers to the popular media's exposure of "deadbeat dads," fatherhood in its present state is getting a distinctly bad press these days. Further, as the editors of Generative Fathering point out, much of the scholarship to date on fathering is also based on "deficit perspectives," the assumption that father is a "negative identity" (p. xii), a compendium of failures and avoidances. Countering this assumption is the project [Alan J. Hawkins] and [David C. Dollahite], professors in Family Sciences at Brigham Young University, commit themselves to in Generative Fathering, an edited collection of scholarly articles inspired by the work of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, most specifically by his identification of "generativity--caring for and contributing to the life of the next generation--to describe the primary developmental task of adulthood" (p. ix). If a rather one-sided ethical idealism is sometimes a problem in the editors' own articles, their editing work on the volume as a whole is exemplary and serves to counteract the limitations of the uncritically adopted Eriksonian framework. One particular strength of the editing is that, though the editors aimed to achieve an "integrated scholarly volume" (p. xiv) by circulating their own theory chapters to contributors, they nonetheless allowed voices into the collection that qualify or resist its dominant ethical orientation. Such voices include those of Robert Griswold, who argues that it is "undoubtedly a fruitless and misguided task to suggest that one mode of generative fathering is better than another" (p. 85), of [Anna Dienhart] and [Kerry Daly], who insist that generative fathering "is not fully amenable to private control" (p. 148), and of [William Doherty], who insists on balancing the good news about more effective fathering by well-to-do fathers with the bad news about the "widespread abdication of fathering by millions of fathers" (p. 220). What encourages this diversity of voices in the volume is the applied focus of the second and third sections, which encourages the contributors (if not always the editors) to move beyond lists of ethical prescriptions into the more difficult and more rewarding territory where ethical priorities have to respond to real situations and thus can acquire social specificity and intellectual complexity.