A Study of father's care giving in infancy

아버지의 영아 돌봄에 관한 문헌연구

These days social and economical changes have influence on the structure of family and the role of family members. Working mothers and widowers with children are increasing because of economical difficulties. Support from relatives are decreasing because of the conspicuous trend toward nuclear families. According to these reasons androgynous fathers are required. Today's fathers in Korea socially and culturally have learned about traditional parenting, but they are changing their fathering styles to meet the demands of the times. However they don't have their own fathering models. Therefore nurses who hold an advantageous position to teach and support from clinic have to encourage them to care their infants. The purposes of this study were to define father's care giving in infancy, understand influencing factors on fathering, and the differences between fathering and mothering, then contribute to nursing implementation for supporting fathers. This study was designed to review references about father's care giving. The results were follows: Six aspects of parent participation were direct care. indirect care, play, decision-making concerning the child, amount of time of sole responsibility for the child and overall availability to the child. Direct care involved feeding, bathing, going to child if child awakens. dressing, putting child to bed, taking child to doctor, nurse, or dentist, transporting child to and from sitter, day care, or school, washing child's hair. Indirect care involved cleaning up after child, preparing child's food, fixing child's broken playthings, washing child's clothes, arranging baby-sitting, shopping for child's toys and clothes, transporting baby-sitter to and from your home. Young fathers were gradually participating in direct care like feeding, taking child to doctor. Father's care giving stimulated mothering and promoted parent-infant relationship. Influencing factors of fathering would be divided into father characteristics, surrounding factors, infant attributes. Father characteristics were age, role perception, relationship with parent. Surrounding factors were the opportunity of early contact, support system, spouse's expectation, marital adjustment, feeding type, past experience of care giving. Infant attributes were temperament, behavior, age, sex. The differences between fathering and mothering were reviewed. Fathers were poor at care giving. but their caring was similar to mother's. This subtle difference positively worked upon infant's growth and development. On the basis of these theoretical data, nurses can empower fathers to cooperate with mothers in caring infants.