Influencing Factors Of Urban Involvement Of Fathers In The Upbringing Of Children

In recent years, studies on children's socialization have typically concentrated only onmother' s influence, and father' s importance have been neglected for a long period. Father's importance was not gradually realized until 1980s. After reviewing ealier research, themost important conclusion may be that : competent fathering is multiply determined andproposes three general categories of influence: (a) the parent's characteristics, (b)contextual sources of support, and (c) the child's characteristics. But researches on thesetopics are at the very outset, especially in China.At the first step in the present thesis, a comprehensive literature review was made withregard to the important empirical findings and major theoretical models. Next, the revisedfather involvement inventory, ENRICH, social support scale, NYLS and sex role scalewere administrated to 400 urban fathers, whose children were from 3-7 years old.On thebasis of the data, the characteristics of father involvement , the determinants of fatherinvolvement were examined. The main findings are as follows:1. Father involvement consisted of five main dimensions: (a) interaction andmonitoring, (b) regulation, (c) emotional expression, (d) school encouragment, (e) indirectsupport. Among the five dimensions, the most frequent activity father got involved in wasemotional expression, and then: indirect support, school encouragment, interaction andmonitoring, and the last one was regulation.2. Father's regulation whose children was in grade 1 of primary school was more thanthose whose children in grade 1 and grade 2 of kindergraden.Other dimensions of father'sinvolvement were not variated in terms of children's gender and age. Father's involvementwas not different in terms of children's gender.3. Father's emotional expression variated in terms of father's work. Emotionalexpression of blue collar' s was higer than that of fathers without job, professional father'semotional expression was also higher than those without job. Other dimensions of father'sinvolvement were not variated in terms of father's socioeconomic status.4. Androgyny and femininity had positive effect on father's involvement. fathers'androgyny sex role orientation significantly predicted all of father involvement;whilefather's femininity significantly predicted interaction and monitoring, emotional expression,school encouragment.5. Satisfactory about marriage and social support significantly predicted fatherinvolvement directly, which was also moderated by androgyny and femininity, while theother two dimensions of social support could not predict father involvement.6. There was an interaction between children's temperament and gender, whichinfluence father's emotional expression together. According to boys, who had central typetemperaments got more emotional support from their father, than those difficulttemperaments did. While the girls who had difficult temperaments got more emotionalsupport than boys of the same temperaments did.This study proved that father involvement was multidimensional rather thanunidimensional, and also analyzed the basic characteristics and determinants of fatherinvolvement , which supported Belsky's theory. The findings have some practiceimplications to improve father involvement.