Om barns fadersbild : [On childrens conceptions of the father]

The aim of this study is to describe and to interpret how fathers are perceived by their children. Various aspects of the male parent and the relationship between the child and his or her father are being investigated from the child's point of view. Forming an understanding of the fathers significance from the child's perspective is of particular importance for the study. This perspective is being formulated from a position that looks upon the child's socialization and the identity shaping processes as primarily a matter of "what children do with what is done to children".The empirical data in the study was obtained by interviewing one hundred children, seven and ten year old girls and boys, partly from Umeå and partly from some small villages a few Swedish miles away from the town. The semi-structured interviews were made with children from five different schools and from eighteen different school-classes.Data show that a vast majority describe a fairly close relationship to a father with clearly anti-patriarchal characteristics. The middle-class father is seen as a more family-oriented parent, more equal to his spouse than the working-class father who is more likely of being described in traditional terms. Some gender-related patterns are shown that concerns different orientations towards the father. While the boys tend to view their fathers in direct relation to themselves - him and me - the girls are more likely to describe their male parents as family fathers and from a perspective that sees him as a partner to the mother.From the characterization the children made of their fathers from the family-drawings, four different categories, representing various perspectives on the father, were identified: The Positive, the Ambiguous, the Disappointed and the Neutral.The symbolic interactionism, based on the works of George Herbert Mead, is argued to be a fruitful theoretical framework for understanding the socialization process.