Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 117, 1 October 2017, Pages 98-108
Appetite

Dining with dad: Fathers' influences on family food practices

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2017.06.013Get rights and content

Abstract

Scholars have documented multiple influences on family food practices. This article examines an overlooked contributor to family diet: fathers. Using 109 in-depth interviews with middle and upper-middle class mothers, adolescents, and fathers in the United States, I show how fathers can undermine mothers' efforts to provision a healthy diet. While family members perceive mothers as committed to provisioning a healthy diet, many fathers are seen as, at best, detached and, at worst, a threat to mothers' dietary aspirations. Fathers not only do little foodwork; they are also viewed as less concerned about their own and other family members' dietary health. When tasked with feeding, many fathers often turn to quick, unhealthy options explicitly avoided by mothers. Mothers report efforts to limit fathers' involvement in foodwork to ensure the healthiness of adolescents' diets, with variation across families by mothers' employment status. Fathers' dietary approaches reflect and reinforce traditional gender norms and expectations within families. In highlighting how and why fathers can undermine mothers’ efforts to provision a healthy diet, this study deepens our understanding of the myriad dynamics shaping family food practices.

Section snippets

Fathers' influences on family diet

Families are the primary setting for the establishment of food choice and consumption patterns in childhood and, later, in adolescence (Dietz & Gortmaker, 2001).1

Materials and methods

Data for this project come from semi-structured, in-depth interviews among 44 families in the San Francisco Bay Area. This study was part of a larger research project that examined the food practices of working-, middle-, and upper-middle class families. Due to a scarcity of working class two-parent households in the larger sample, working class families were excluded from these analyses. Thus, all families in this study were middle- and upper-middle class, with incomes above 180% of the

Fathers' unhealthy food practices

Family members reported that mothers and fathers followed different diets. The degree of perceived difference varied across families, but in 41 out of 44 families, family members agreed that fathers' dietary behaviors were less healthy than mothers'. In 2 families, family members agreed that mothers and fathers were equally healthy, and in 1 family, a father's consumption was perceived as healthier than the mother's.3

Discussion

While most scholarship on parental influences on adolescents' diets has focused on mothers, this article brings fathers under the microscope. I show that fathers, through their distinctive involvement in domestic foodwork, influence family food practices. As much as mothers seek to structure these practices, what is consumed within families is ultimately the product of interactions and negotiations between family members (Backett-Milburn et al., 2010, Gram, 2014, Kerrane et al., 2012). As a

Conclusions

This study addresses the limited focus on fathers in the literature related to parental influences on children's diets. While mothers may continue to largely structure these practices, fathers nonetheless help shape what families eat. Fathers' personal dietary preferences and their investment in adolescents' diets are tied to the food that gets purchased, cooked, and consumed. Fathers also teach adolescents about food, diet, and health through their own food practices. Scholars should continue

Funding

This work was conducted with support from the Stanford Vice Provost for Graduate Education and the Stanford Department of Sociology. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of Stanford University.

Acknowledgements

I thank Tomás Jiménez, Michelle Jackson, Douglas McAdam, Jennifer Wang, Sandra Nakagawa, Aliya Rao, Kristine Kilanski, Melissa Abad, Marianne Cooper, Devon Magliozzi, Alison Crossley, Bethany Nichols, Anshuman Sahoo, and members of the Gender and Social Psychology Workshop at Stanford University. I also thank my collaborators at Hillview Central High School.

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      Such findings build on the work of Szabo (2013) in exploring how men's involvement in food provisioning can display elements of traditional ‘feminine’ approaches, highlighting that gendered cooking perspectives and attitudes are evolving and finding new meanings. It is also of particular interest as it contradicts previous research that proposes the mother's concerns for the father's lack of skill and regard for nutrition may operate as a barrier to the father's participation (Beagan et al., 2008; Fielding-Singh, 2017; Metcalfe et al., 2009; Tan et al., 2019; Tanner et al., 2014; Thullen et al., 2016). Most mothers and fathers placed importance on the notion of equality within the food provisioning, however, in practice both parents once again mirrored the view that this wasn't exactly the case.

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