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As part of a larger grant-funded project, a professional development (PD) series was conducted within the framework of a school–university partnership to improve teachers’ capacity to meaningfully include fathers and father figures in the school environment, with a particular focus on fathers of children with disabilities. The authors sought to understand the extent to which a school-wide PD framed through the lens of a father of a child with a disability might inform practice with sustainable implementation. Due to the pandemic, the original format of the PD was redesigned for virtual delivery.

A three-phase data collection and analysis approach included a pre-PD survey, a post-PD survey and a one-year follow-up survey. All surveys included both quantitative and qualitative self-report data components.

Results suggest school personnel found the virtual PD valuable, gleaning several useful strategies for reflecting on their own practices, working to improve communication with families of children with disabilities and more meaningfully including fathers and father figures in future school-related activities and programing.

First, the sample size of the present study was small, and participation was variable across PD sessions. In addition, participants self-selected into the series, and therefore, they may be more likely to value father-figure involvement with or without participation in the PD series. The small sample size may minimize the generalizability of these results across other replicable settings and participants. Second, the results of the pre-PD survey could be positively skewed since the university partner’s initial delivery of PD related to this topic began in 2018. In the pre-PD survey, the majority of respondents indicated, as an example, that they believed father involvement was correlated with higher academic achievement. It is not clear if respondents held these beliefs independently at the inception of the partnership or if they perhaps learned of these connections during an earlier PD offered by the authors.

The current study offers a small glimpse into the world of a school–university partnership and its ability to actualize meaningful reflection on family engagement practices. Results also indicate a greater awareness of significant male figures/fathers and their needs. Content delivered during each PD supports capacity building in terms of teachers’ ability to see fathers and father figures as meaningful contributors within the context of the school environment. Participants mentioned that the PD taught them ways to recognize and remediate some of the insidious communication barriers that exist.

Participants stated that they grew in their understanding of intentional connections with significant male figures, noting a concerted effort to ensure communication of information pertaining to school events, conferences and, in some cases, individualized educational programs (IEPs). Staff members also felt as though the pandemic fostered greater connections with fathers who were working at home and who were simultaneously helping their children access online learning platforms. However, it is noteworthy that the latter benefit was likely a positive side effect of mandatory home-based learning as opposed to a direct result of the present study. Socially, the authors all find ourselves embarking on a bit of social uncertainty, where perhaps it is no longer appropriate or significant to mention one's gender. Nonetheless, the research highlights the unique contributions that fathers and father figures can make to children's positive trajectory, and the authors espouse that the current study suggests that virtual PD sessions can help train school personnel to recognize and foster such relationships.

The past few decades have ushered in an awareness of significant male involvement and its importance in the development of young children. Despite this surge of interest, the research on father/significant male involvement in the school context remains limited. Additionally, the implementation of virtual PD and its potential positive impacts remain largely unexplored, especially when the intersection with father engagement practices is considered. As such, the authors espouse that the present study reflects a unique combination of content and pedagogy.

The purpose of the study is to research the current state of fathers' involvement in childcare during parental leave and to assess attitudes of Russian population towards possible measures that can expand the use of parental leave by fathers in Russia.

The authors conducted a survey of Russian parents with children under the age of 18 months in 2022. The sample accounts for 1,000 people; the survey covered almost all Russian regions.

The authors found that the ideal workload of fathers is not expected to exceed a third of the total parental workload. Russian parents are not ready to admit dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of workload during parental leave. However, an egalitarian demand for greater involvement of fathers in parental responsibilities is forming, and an interest in transforming the parental leave policy is emerging.

The value of the study consists of assessing the effectiveness of measures that may have a beneficial effect on the use of parental leave by fathers, as well as identifying consequences of the possible introduction of mandatory parental leave for fathers.

This chapter examines the life histories of selected teenage Filipino fathers relative to their experiences of dating, courtship, and the discovery, engagement, and experimentation with risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, and premarital sex. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study conducts family genogram and in-depth semi-structured interviews among eight teenage fathers. In so doing, it interrogates the consequences of sexual behaviors to the well-being of their respective families of orientation as well as the future of their expected family of procreation. The chapter argues how the risks of teenage fatherhood in the Philippines are relatively mitigated by the general conservative culture of Filipino families and the Catholic sense of religious orientation that seems to provide resilience captured in three themed experiences of “natauhan” (realization), “pinangatawanan” (accountability), and “pinanindigan” (owning responsibility). Thus, this chapter unravels the voices of young Filipino teenage fathers who straddles, on the one hand, the risk of premarital sex and pregnancy, and on the other hand, the challenges of responsible parenthood. In conclusion, the chapter provides policy insights on sex education and gender equality training for the vulnerable Filipino youth in the country.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how professional men in dual-career relationships craft and enact their fatherhood role ideologies during the transition to fatherhood. In particular, the authors focus on the impact that the development of a more involved approach to fatherhood has on the mother's ability to combine career and family.

This study utilizes a longitudinal, qualitative methodology. Pre- and post-natal interviews were conducted with 18 professional men in dual-career heterosexual relationships.

Although the traditional mode of fatherhood that is rooted in breadwinning continues to be the dominant approach among working fathers in the US, new modes of more involved fathering are emerging. The results of the study indicate that a general shift away from a strict, gendered division of household labor is taking place in today's dual career couples, and this is leading to an increase in men's involvement in childcare. Further, although much of the extant research conceptualizes fatherhood as a role typology, the results reveal that all fathers are involved in caring for their babies, though to varying degrees. Thus the authors propose a continuum of involvement. Finally, the authors discovered how men are finding creative ways to use official and unofficial workplace flexibility to be more involved at home.

The findings offer novel insights into the factors that encourage involved fathering. The authors encourage organizations to create more supportive environments that foster involved fathering by extending paid parental leave benefits to men and providing more access to flexibility.

Child malnutrition is a grave concern for Pakistan, as the country has one of the highest incidences of child stunting in the developing world. The present study examines the relative significance of parents' education on a child's nutritional status in Pakistan.

For analysis, the study has used data from Phase 7 of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) (2017–2018). Since the dependent variable ranges from 0 to 1 (1 indicates not a stunted child, while 0 represents a stunted child), binary logistic regressions are used for the analysis.

The results show that mothers' and fathers' education positively contributes to a child's nutrition. However, mothers' education is considered more significant, especially in the long run. The mother's education categories are positive and significant in the long run, while only their higher education is positive and significant for the father's. Moreover, the magnitude of the effect also shows that the probability of stunting is less if the mothers are educated. The long-run coefficient for mothers' higher education is 0.752, while that of fathers' higher education is only 0.232.

The present study compares the importance of mothers' and fathers' education in child nutrition and concludes that the role of the mother is more crucial for child upbringing. There are rarely any studies that focus on the role of fathers' education in child nutrition and compare whose role, mothers' or fathers,' is more important for child well-being.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2023-0483

The main aim of this study is to investigate the role of fathers and mothers in the intergenerational educational persistence for sons and daughters under two dimensions that characterize the clusters of countries: redistributive policy and governance.

Data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components and panel regression are used in this study to estimate intergenerational educational correlation and to investigate its determinants related to the parents’ and descendants’ education variables in 93 countries grouped in four clusters. The empirical analysis is differentiated by gender combinations of parents and descendants.

In the clusters of countries characterized by high inequalities and poor governance, our findings show that the role of the fathers is stronger than that of the mothers in educational transmission; fathers and mothers are more influential for the daughters rather than for the sons; parental educational privilege is the main driver of intergenerational educational persistence; there is an inverse U-curve in the association between educational inequality of the parents and educational correlation for the sons. Differently, in the countries characterized by high income, low redistributive conflict and better governance, the role of the mothers is stronger and education mobility for the daughters is higher than that for the sons.

The authors’ results remark on the importance of social welfare policies aimed to expand a meritocratic public education system including schooling transfers for lower social class students and narrowing the gender gap in educational mobility between daughters and sons. Social welfare policies should also be oriented to spread high quality child care systems that help to foster greater women equality in the labor market, because the strength of educational persistence depends on the position of the mother in the economic hierarchy.

The distinctiveness of the paper can be found in the fact that this study investigates the parental role differentiating by gender and coupling hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components with panel regression models. This allows us to have a sample of 93 countries aggregated in four groups defined in two dimensions: redistributive policy and governance. Amongst the determinants of educational transmission, we consider not only education’s years of the parents but also other determinants, such as educational inequality and privilege of the parents. We also identify the effects of investment in human capital and educational inequalities for the descendants on education mobility.

We model the conditions under which parents optimally reallocate time to childcare when an outside agent exogenously restricts the number of hours an employer can demand of a working parent. Theoretically, when the restriction binds, a parent's available time increases. We exploit a series of voluntary and mandated labor-market reforms in South Korea that regulated the statutory and maximum work hours of parents. The government implemented the laws in stages by industry and size of firms. This implementation process generates exogenous variation across families where one or both partners worked at jobs that were or were not affected by the reform. We show the reforms affected work hours and use the predicted changes to investigate the total amount they spent on paid childcare and whether or not they changed the relative use of market and parental care. When fathers get more time (work less), parents spend less money on childcare. A change in mother's work time does not affect expenditures. When parents get more time, they are more likely to spend money on paid childcare for school-age children and more likely to use private academies.

This study examines the relationships between parents' and children's occupations to determine the existence of intergenerational transmission of occupations.

To achieve the purpose of the study, four predominant occupational types based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO): agriculture and forestry; services and sales; managerial/administrative; and professional/technical are examined using data from the latest (7th) round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS). Two complementary methods involving the correlational analysis and regression-based techniques are used.

The findings indicate the presence of parental influences on children's occupational choices (same-sex and cross-sex) in the Ghanaian labour market, with maternals and same-sector effects having a more substantial influence on children's occupational choices, especially in agriculture and forestry, and services and sales sectors.

The lack of panel data in observing children's occupational choices over time makes it challenging to assume direct causation.

The study is the first to highlight the relative strengths of paternal influence (father's effect) and maternal impact (mother's effect) on sons' and daughters' occupational choices in Africa. The findings have several implications for intergenerational (im)mobility of occupations including how policymakers can make career guidance more effective.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2022-0705

Livelihood preference for children is anchored in the aspiration of parents for a better life for them with due consideration of their capacities given available resources and opportunities from inside and outside the community. Given the data from an earlier survey I conducted, this chapter examines the fisheries management issues as contexts and the time factors that may have influenced the livelihood preference for children of parents, primarily fathers. Twenty-five percent of parents or 30 out of the 120 non-probability samples of municipal fishing families surveyed in South Negros in the Philippines preferred fishing for their children. For a comparative analysis, 30 parents were also randomly drawn from the remaining samples who preferred other livelihoods for their children away from fishing. As a male-dominated industry, evident in the fishing history of families, the tradition may have already declined among most parents as non-fishing livelihoods were perceived to offer family resilience to ecological and socioeconomic changes. The projected decrease in new families engaged in fishing would also mean a pressure reduction on municipal fisheries; thus, opportunities for non-fishing livelihoods must be accessible through full scholarships for college or technical-vocational education. Meanwhile, basic education sciences should infuse lessons in responsible or right fishing practices to expose children to sustainable fisheries at a young age if they pursue fishing livelihoods when they become adults.

This study was conducted to fill gaps in the literature based on institution type, career level, and gender identity.

Faculty often struggle with achieving work-life balance. This struggle is exacerbated for faculty parents. Most academic parent research has been conducted on early-career women and at research-intensive universities. Although these groups are important, it is also important to understand experiences of academic parents at different career levels and types of institutions. The authors conducted a qualitative thematic analysis from focus groups with faculty from a mid-sized master's level university about work-life balance expectations and experiences in their roles as academics and parents. These four groups included early-career mothers (n = 5), early-career fathers (n = 4), mid-career mothers (n = 4), and mid-career fathers (n = 7).

Faculty expressed having a high workload based on an intersection of high work expectations, unclear work expectations, and lack of equity. Consequences of the high workload included lower work-life balance, dissatisfaction at not doing more, the loss of flexibility as an advantage, and lower organizational commitment.

Although results are limited in generalizability, it is useful to examine one institution, with all participants sharing the same culture and policies, in-depth. The authors discuss recommendations for educational administrators for assisting academic parents and suggest institutions work to examine informal expectations and formal policies at their institutions. Working together, faculty and staff can help enhance alignment of expectations and perceptions of work-life balance, hopefully leading to happier, more satisfied employees.