Lynda M. Ashbourne

Work-Life Issues for Fathers

Publisher Summary Research on fatherhood has proliferated in recent years, and much of the attention in the work-family literature is focused on challenges that women face in seeking to balance work and family responsibilities. There are a number of possible reasons for why this is the case. Much of the impetus for addressing work–life issues came from the entry of women into the paid labor force. Whereas men were called to make some adjustments to this, the predominant discourse was about dual-career heterosexual couples and their children, in which men carried on in their paid work and picked up some of the slack at home at their discretion. A second important and related factor was that women entered into the workplace out of a tradition of providing primary care to family members. In this tradition motherhood had primacy over fatherhood, and women were expected to provide care to children, as well as husbands or partners and aging parents. For men, staying in the primary provider role precipitated fewer work and family conflicts, while women struggled more intensely with achieving work–life balance. In spite of these viewpoints, research that examines the prevalence of work–life conflict among women and men indicates that both experience high levels of stress in their efforts to balance their work and family responsibilities. The starting point for this chapter observes the dominant perception of work–life as being more intensely experienced by women, as well as the conceptual understanding of work–life issues as profoundly shaped by a lens informed by womens experience, with important results in discourse and research.

Parents and Adolescents Making Time Choices: “Choosing a Relationship”

Drawing on 20 qualitative family interviews with mothers, fathers, and adolescents (aged 16 to 19 years), this study explores the time choices of parents and adolescents. Adolescents and their parents talk about having varying degrees of control over their time in response to external demands. They identify that they initiate time together and apart from each other to meet specific individual and relational needs. Time choices are made within the context of a future-orientation and shifting hierarchy in the relationship. Exercising personal agency with respect to time appears to serve as a means of enhancing individual development for both parents and adolescents, as well as influencing relationship change. A model of dialogic interaction, emergent meaning making, and a context of dialectical tensions and contradictions is demonstrated in this exploration of time choices and intention.

Fathers' Perceptions of Children's Influence: Implications for Involvement

In this article, the authors report on a qualitative analysis of how a diverse sample of fathers perceives the influence of their own children on their identity and development. The data were collected within a large partnership-based, multiyear, multisite research project carried out in Canada as a community-university collaboration. Specifically, the data were collected from interviews with 215 fathers across seven cluster sites in Canada. Fathers perceived that children influenced their orientation toward self and other, values and expectations, time, and relationship with their parenting partner. The analysis of how fathers learn from their children resulted in a focus on learning on the spot and contending with uncertainty. The article concludes with a discussion of policy implications on how to support the well-being of fathers through the learning that they have with their children.

Core Competencies in Social Constructionist Supervision

Family therapy is moving increasingly toward evidence-based practice and competency-based training. This article explores what might seem to be an unlikely link between social constructionist supervision, which is based on dialogic and fluid processes of meaning-making, and the increasing reliance on discrete core competencies in the education and training of family therapists. We propose an alternate approach to competencies for supervision with therapists in training that, among other things, invites accountability and provides evaluative props. The approach we propose is based on a set of orientations that we hope reflect the dialogic and contextual nature of social constructionist practice and supervision. These orientations consist of reflexivity and attention to power, fostering polyphony and generativity, collaborative stance, and focus on client resourcefulness. Ideas and questions for supervisors and therapists in training to address the orientations are articulated.

A Reorientation of Worldview: Children’s Influence on Fathers

We report on a Canadian partnership-based, multiyear, multisite project that examined the diverse experience of father involvement. Based on a sample of 215 fathers, an analysis team identified key themes of father involvement. Qualitative interviews were conducted within seven, geographically dispersed groups that included new fathers, young fathers, immigrant fathers, gay fathers, fathers of children with special needs, indigenous fathers, and separated and divorced fathers. A core track of questioning asked fathers about the way that children had influenced their attitudes and activities. The findings reported here indicate that fathers undergo a reorientation of values and behavior in response to the influence of their children. Specifically, they articulate redefined priorities and an altered sense of purpose, a different awareness of what it means to be a man, changed relationships and a rebalancing of the importance of self and other, and a reorientation toward time and scheduling of their everyday lives.

Changing patterns of family time in adolescence: Parents’ and teens’ reflections

Drawing on 20 qualitative family interviews with mothers, fathers, and adolescents (aged 16 to 19 years), we explore the experiences of time in parent–adolescent relationships. Changing time patterns comprised of a range of times including time spent together and apart, and more ambiguous times which incorporate elements of both being together and apart are described by participants. These descriptions highlight not only the amount of time and individual subjective experience of these times, but also the meaning that family members collectively make of these times, and how these elements of time contribute to the emergent relationship between parents and adolescents.

Family Therapy Stories: Stretching Customary Family Therapy Practices

We have created a collection of stories from our authors to provide another glimpse into ways that social injustices manifest themselves in daily interactions and events. The stories each have a different focus on transformation and/or social justice. We offer you stories of trying to explain social justice work in clinical practice, a supervisee’s emotional reaction, a student therapist’s own personal transformation through her professional preparation, the heartbreak of seeing and experiencing injustice inflicted by the helping profession, the complications and unfairnesses that occur when multiple helping systems do not coordinate, what possibilities emerge when there is a softening of the distinction between professionals and clients, and moving from seeing family problems appearing as internal to have external originations. Each story is then followed by a series of questions evoked by the story to help provide a pathway to continue to ponder issues of social justice/injustice in the therapeutic context.

Supporting the Development of Novice Therapists

In this chapter, coauthored by a supervisor and three former intern therapists, we focus on ways to support novice therapists in developing skills for observing, listening for, and inviting a range of perspectives from clients and oneself regarding the influences of social discourses, expectations, and judgements on daily life. We see foundational skills for explicitly attending to social justice issues as those that allow new therapists to engage in generative dialogue, invite and utilize multiple perspectives, reflect on shifting and various dimensions of power and position, expand therapist self-awareness, and attend to social location and intersections. We describe how these skills can be effectively introduced by supervisors and utilized by novice therapists. These descriptions include reflections from former interns about this type of supervision, as well as supervisor-generated examples of questions and possible directions for supervisory dialogues.