Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda and Natasha Cabrera. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002, 658 pp.Fathering research has moved from a rather inchoate state to a position of some prominence upon the stage of social science research. From its early beginnings only 20 or 30 years ago, the study of father involvement in families has become something of a small cottage industry for a hardy handful of researchers. The Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives represents another stage in the emergence of this important topical area. One of the reasons this topic has grown "legs" in recent years is that an increasingly aware and sophisticated audience has begun to realize that the study of men in the lives of children is more than just a "gee-wouldn't-it-be-nice-if. " type of topic. Instead, many policymakers, researchers, and educators have begun to understand that men's activity behind closed doors is a "money" issue. That is, real policy decisions and state and federal expenditures can be affected by men's participation in the lives of children (or their lack of it). This realization (more than any other factor, I believe) has spawned this unprecedented surge of research about fathers. Another indication that this topic will continue to expand and flourish is the wide multidisciplinary attention it is receiving. Hence, this volume is a powerful first effort to bring those disciplines together and get the principle players speaking.The book is divided into six sections and has a total of 22 chapters. For the most part, these chapters are very well written, dense with information, insight, and integration. The book was developed by asking leading scholars to oversee sections having two to four chapters each.Section I covers the demography of fathers and is an excellent overview of what is known numerically. In addition, the chapter by Hoffreth, Pleck, Stueve, Bianchi, and Sayer is particularly helpful in navigating the research efforts of scholars who have attempted to examine what fathers do within a family context. Section II in the book contains two chapters written by Michael Lamb, both of which are clear, precise, and helpful summaries of what we know about the influence of fathers on young children and the effects of the absent father. A particularly noteworthy chapter in this section is one written by Rob Palkovitz. This chapter tackles the very difficult problem of conceptualizing fatherhood and addressing the question, "What is `good' fathering? " This insightful chapter pushes the reader to think much more broadly about fathering. Instead of focusing on the issue of presence versus absence, the reader is asked to consider the idea that when men are present, is what they do worthy, positive, and helpful? In Section III, the authors focus on fathering within a cultural and social context. I was left wanting more in this section. There was simply not enough room to really explore the different meanings of fatherhood in the cultures that have been examined. This section is a good start, but could have been an entire book by itself. The chapter that is my personal favorite is the excellent piece by Jarrett, Roy, and Burton. The writing, qualitative examples, and discerning insight into the lives of fathers in the "hood" is one of the clear highlights of the book. My only wish for this chapter (and it is a topic that is missed throughout the book) is that there is practically nothing said of the 600,000 men (many of them African American) each year who re-enter community and family life following prison experience.To add to the richness of the interdisciplinary approach of this volume, the editors invited three authors (found in Section IV) to summarize what is known about father involvement from an anthropological view. …