Admonished, then Excused: Portrayals of Fathers’ Low Levels of Involvement with Children Across the 20th and 21st Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined portrayals of low father involvement (LFI) in cultural discourse. In an analysis of 575 fathering articles from Parents magazine from 1926 through 2006, we found that LFI was discussed often, in over half (56 percent) of the articles across the period. Our analysis focused on five of the most frequently discussed causes for LFI: father’s work, character, and leisure pursuits, traditional social norms, and maternal gatekeeping. Father’s character and leisure, admonished in the earlier years, were discussed less frequently and less critically over time, especially in the 1960s through 1980s, when mothers and norms were more likely to be blamed for LFI. We theorize that such timing may represent a cultural initiative to protect men and their time during an era of dramatic family change when their position of power was comparatively vulnerable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".