Dining with dad: Fathers' influences on 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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Sharing the load: A qualitative exploration of what mothers and fathers believe the father's role should be in food provisioning
2022, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :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.