role of father

• A strength of research into the role of the father is that it can be used to offer advice to parents. Parents can sometimes agonise over who should take on the primary caregiver role. For example, mothers may feel pressured to stay at home and fathers may be pressured to focus on work rather than parenting due to stereotypical views of gender roles.
• And so, research into the role of the father can be offered to, for example, heterosexual parents to inform them that fathers are capable of becoming primary attachment figures or to lesbian parent and single mother families to inform them that not having a father around does not affect a child's development.

  This is a strength as parental anxiety about the role of fathers can be reduced.
• However, the claim that children without fathers are no different from those with fathers suggests that the father's role is secondary.

  This poses huge ethical issues as it is socially sensitive research.

  This could suggest that fathers don't play a significant role in their children's lives which could create distress for fathers and may even lead to reduced rights for fathers in legal proceedings and wider society.
• Freeman et al. found that male children are more likely to prefer their father as an attachment figure than female children. This seems to suggest that fathers play a more distinct role in some attachments than others and so it is difficult to determine the exact role of the father.