Topic: family

has helped the research community to explain and predict the different roles performed by people in society by tracing the observable behaviour to being male or female. Personal and societal view of what it means to be a men or women has propagated peoples approach to their function in the home and society (Marfo 2011). However, little is known on this subject about the influence of structural changes and shifts in social relationships among them. This explains how researchers have relied on several and often unstable structural and normative process in deciding to act, of which participation in child care roles is one variable subject to action. Thus, concepts such as degendering’ as postulated by Lorber (2005), especially in understanding men’s motivation towards child care, become one of possible plausible explanations to the whole complexity of the drive to act. Several research works have also been done on how men and women create, experience and sustain their masculinities and feminities in their day to day living. Early work on masculinity (e.g. Connell 1985, 1987, 1995; Morgan 1992) however, acknowledges the identity of men as not static but moves with changes in social relations. The masculine concept of care is inherent in the work of Connell (1987), and like Collinson (1994) and Brandth and Kvade (1998), and in these, men’s participation in child care has been discussed in the context of negotiated power relations between men and women, basically, an interactionist perspective.A critical view of current literature also indicates that the propensity to care is built upon how men interact and relate to the structural institutions such as culture, childhood and marriage relations among others. On another level, the prevailing situational conditions such as men’s availability to care, economic relations between men and women, and characteristics of the child and its needs are also influential. Another line of research has explained the performance or non-performance of care duties in the home as function of situational factors, both social and economic. For example, changing family economic relations are considered as an important process determining the participation of men in child care. As more women enter paid work, men find it inevitable to assist with child care duties (Hauari and Hollingworth (2009). This scenario therefore leads to a shift in the immediate factors motivating men to care for children. This however, does not suggest that other explanations, are redundant, but represents an addition to the population of variables at play in motivating men’s care behaviour.In the background of knowledge generated around this subject, it is sound to accept that construction of masculinity and or fatherhood is a continuous process, never permanent and constant. Extending that, localizing knowledges is also important. Emerging philosophical foundations of child care and development in Africa as a discipline advocates for a rich within culture explanation of care practices if relevant policies around child care and development are to be developed (Pence and Marfo, 2008; Marfo, 2011). In this perspective, the research moves away from concentrating on asking who should care towards an understanding of why one (men in particular) choose to care. The presence of numerous factors influencing the decision to care has motivated this research to assume a systems thinking’ approach in understanding why men chose to participate in the care of children.