Introduction

The idea that children are expert informants on family life is now widely accepted within the policy and academic communities, alongside recognition of their rights (Christensen, 2004; Buckingham and De Block, 2007), but eliciting participation from young children in particular poses particular challenges (Prout and James, 1997). Research on fathers and fatherhood is still relatively new in the sociology of the family, as other contributions in this volume acknowledge (see also Dermott and Miller, 2015), and work that includes children's perspective as its primary focus or at all is relatively rare. In fact, researchers began to be interested in children's perspectives on parenting in cases of divorce and separation as long ago as the 1960s (see in particular Warshak and Santock, 1983), not least due to changes in the legal treatment of divorce cases, but children's perspectives on their everyday interactions with fathers is much less studied. Hence there appears to be a gap between the relatively abundant literature on the impact of fathering on child outcomes on the one hand, and research that elicits children's perspectives on fathering on the other. Investigating children's perspectives on fathering and fatherhood is therefore an important emerging and future area for research.

This chapter focuses on father–child interactions in early years and early childhood development, which has been the subject of intense policy interest over the past two decades (Daly, 2010; DfE, 2015), but where the challenges for researchers are heightened by the difficulties of eliciting views from very small children. Father involvement in children's social and educational development during the early years is found to have a significant impact on developmental outcomes (Sarkadi et al, 2008; Lamb, 2010; Lamb and Lewis, 2013; Roggmann et al, 2013). Children whose fathers are involved in their education ‘benefit from higher academic achievement and social and emotional well-being’ (Morgan et al, 2009, p 168). Fathers are thought to encourage early years development through play and other action-based interactions that challenge children and expose them to the wider world (see Paquette, 2004). Fathers may also be more familiar with technologies that help prepare children for contemporary socialisation and education (Roggmann et al, 2013, pp 194-5).