Making Sense of Fatherhood:Gender, Caring and Work

As family and work demands become more complex, who is left holding the baby? Tina Miller explores men's experiences of fatherhood and provides unique insights into paternal caring, changing masculinities and men's relations to paid work. She focuses on the narratives of a group of men as they first anticipate and then experience fatherhood for the first time. Her original, longitudinal research contributes to contemporary theories of gender against a backdrop of societal and policy change. The men's journeys into fatherhood are both similar and varied, and they illuminate just how deeply gender permeates individual lives, everyday practices and societal assumptions around caring for young children. This book acts as a companion to Making Sense of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and, together, these innovative studies reveal how gendered practices around caring become enacted.

Tina Miller is a Reader in Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Her research on motherhood and fatherhood has led her to be engaged as an expert advisor by the World Health Organisation, to present her work at UNICEF headquarters in New York and to regularly participate in TV and radio programmes on issues related to motherhood, fatherhood and family life. She is the author of Making Sense of Motherhood (Cambridge, 2005).