Abstract
This article brings to the discussion of change in the meaning and practice of fatherhood a consideration of fathers’ position between generations and between legacies. Conceptualisations of temporality in the work of Schütz and Mead are applied in analysing a father’s dual position, as both parent and child, as a particular instance of the subject’s position in a present from which the relation between pasts and futures is (re-)constituted. Drawing on qualitative research with a diverse sample of 31 fathers, I argue that the responsibility to lay down a positive emotional and psychological legacy for their child draws fathers into an engagement with their own experience of being parented. The resources for interpretation, and even transformation, of a father’s parenting heritage are situated in terms of contemporary discourses of fatherhood and family and of persistent inequalities in the conditions under which fatherhood is forged.
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