Extending the image

Representations of fathers are increasingly common and most of these show a father holding or playing with a young child or infant. The image is nearly always positive and suggesting mutual pleasure. Yet, as with all such images, what is significant is what is excluded. It edits out the range of ways of characterizing or qualifying the term “father,” a range which includes terms used quite frequently in this book: “household,” “biological” and “absent” for example. It focuses on fathering in relation to small children and therefore obscures the complexities of relationships between fathers and adolescents or between a father and his adult “children” who may also be fathers or mothers themselves. The depiction of pleasurable, close physical, interaction edits out not only some of the more complex and difficult aspects of looking after small children but also the possibilities of violence or abuse. Finally, the focus on a simple dyadic relationship between a father and child excludes the numerous and complex ways in which this dyad is linked to others and to wider social structures.

This book has been concerned centrally with these relationships beyond and outside this conventional picture. This has not been the exclusion of the relationships between a father and a child, the very practices of fathering, but rather we hope to have added to and to have rounded out this over-simple image. This process of elaborating or building upon this core dyadic image has been followed through in a variety of ways.