Negotiating Fatherhood: Sport and Family Practices

Winner of the Leisure Studies Association's Outstanding Book Prize 

This book examines the tensions and ambivalences which men encounter as they negotiate contemporary expectations of fatherhood and fulfill their own expectations of what it means to be a ‘good’ father. There is little doubt that today’s fathers are responding to new expectations about fatherhood and fathering practices. The remote, detached, breadwinning father of the past, once lauded as a masculine ideal, has faded, and men are now expected to be ‘involved’, ‘intimate’, ‘caring’ and ‘domesticated’ fathers. Using a family practices lens and a case study of sport, Fletcher elucidates the changes and continuities in family and fathering practices in different historical periods and contexts. Negotiating Fatherhood will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in family and fathering practices, sport, leisure, and gender.