Abstract
It is a well-established fact that fathers have a direct influence on child’s upbringing and personality, with a number of empirical evidences as proof. However bidirectional models stressing the co-occurrence of both the directions of influence – from parent to child and child to parent in a complex reciprocal system – are of a more recent origin. I attempted to explore the factors that lead to transformation in men during the course of involved fathering, through in-depth interviews with 30 involved fathers, who currently lived in the city of Vadodara. The conceptual framework proposed by Palkovitz (1996) and the principles of grounded theory guided this study. Majority of the fathers reported that their commitment to family has increased in the course of involved fathering. The fathers also reflected that commitment to fathering role is the factor that induced maximum changes in them. The theoretical processes like socialisation from child to parent, role person merger and realisation of possible self and modelling and reinforcement were also reflected by parents as a stimuli to bring alterations in their life.
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Kaur, A. (2019). My Child Transformed Me: Reflections of Involved Fathers. In: Sriram, R. (eds) Fathering in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1715-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1715-6_9
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