Browsing by Subject "Father"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    African American fathers’ social support and relationship quality with daughters’ physical activity beliefs and behaviors.
    (2022-08) Harris, Tony
    Across childhood and adolescence, physical activity (PA) levels decline more frequently for African American (AA) females. Parents are important socializing agents of childhood PA motivation through supportive and encouraging behaviors. Littleinformation, however, exists on parental influence of AA girls, especially related to fathers' beliefs and behaviors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between AA fathers' social support and daughter PA self-efficacy, enjoyment, and PA behavior. Eleven father-daughter dyads participated based on in-person and online recruiting. Daughters responded to survey items related to father-daughter relationship quality, paternal support for PA, PA enjoyment, self-efficacy, and weekly PA levels. Due to the small sample size, descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations were calculated between variables of parental influence and daughters' PA beliefs and behavior. Mean age was 43.8±4.6 and 11±0.8 years for fathers and daughters. Fathers' mean BMI was 30.8±4.8 kg/m2. Daughters' mean BMI-for-age percentile was 52.5±38.3 with almost half (46%) having healthy weight. Households were >80% dual parent, 73% included both biological parents, and 91% of fathers lived with daughters full-time. Mean paternal social support was 3.5 ± 0.5 out of 5, indicating moderate to high support. Mean fatherdaughter relationship quality was strong, 4.03± 0.6 out of 5. Daughters reported a mean of 7±3.9 hours/ week of total PA, mean PA enjoyment 4.5 ± 0.7 out of 5 and PA selfefficacy as 4.2 ± 0.6 out of 5, both indicating high levels. Most correlations among perceived paternal support and daughter psychosocial and PA outcomes were low to moderate: father-daughter relationship quality (r=.54), daughter total PA (r=.31), PA enjoyment (r=.39), and PA self-efficacy (r=.26). Father-daughter relationship quality was not correlated with any of the daughter PA outcomes. The findings of this study provide preliminary evidence of the relationship among AA paternal support and daughters' psychosocial and PA outcomes. The small sample size is a limitation and suggestions are provided for recruitment strategies with this population.
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    "Teeter-tottering between hope and despair": fathers' resilience in the face of advanced cancer
    (2013-12) Lundquist, Melissa Ann
    Currently in the United States there are more than 13 million individuals living with cancer. Nearly one quarter of these survivors are parents to one or more minor children. Though the literature examining the experience of parents diagnosed with cancer while raising young children has grown over the last two decades, little attention has been paid to parents living with advanced cancer moreover the voice of fathers from this body of work is nearly absent. This paper presents a grounded theory study that explores how men diagnosed with advanced cancer understand and navigate their roles as fathers of young children. In-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 11 fathers diagnosed with advanced cancer and currently raising children under 18 years of age. The analysis revealed that when these fathers were diagnosed with advanced cancer their roles changed and the financial pressures mounted. Concerns for their children permeated their cancer experience and influenced their treatment decisions as well as their motivation to survive. Change, uncertainty and loss were woven throughout their experiences as these fathers described the challenge of "teeter-tottering between hope and despair" while striving to live and parent in that place of hope. Their desire and eventual ability to live in and parent from that place of hope exemplified resilience. A theoretical model of the protective strategies utilized by these fathers as pathways toward resilience was constructed. This model identifies the primary variables that are a part of fathering through advanced cancer and provides a framework for understanding the dynamic and complex process of resilience experienced by these participants.Understanding both the risk and protective factors that shaped these fathers' resilience can inform the development and implementation of supportive resources for these families as well as guide future research. In addition, this study addressed a gap in the literature by including facing cancer currently living in the United States and thus sheds some light on this country's social and institutional policies that may impact a father's resilience.
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    Vagal flexibility and parenting behaviors in post-deployed military fathers
    (2018-05) Zhang, Na
    The lives of about two million American children have been affected by the military deployment of a parent. A parent's deployment influences children's adjustment through compromised parenting. While an emerging body of literature suggests that effective parenting requires parental emotion regulation, few studies have focused on fathers. In addition, limited knowledge exists about whether or how fathers' emotion regulation might affect their responsivity to a parent training program. With a focus on military fathers who had been deployed since 2001, the current research consisted of two studies that investigated vagal flexibility as an index of physiological emotion regulation and social engagement in relation to observed parenting behaviors. The first study, entitled "Military fathers' nurturing parenting: Psychological and physiological flexibility both matter", demonstrated that vagal flexibility buffers against the negative effects of psychological inflexibility (i.e. self-reported experiential avoidance) on observed emotion-related parenting. The second study, entitled "Adapting to 'ADAPT': Vagal flexibility predicts military fathers' changes in parenting following a parent training program", tested the effect of vagal flexibility in predicting the degree of changes in observed parenting skills at 1-year follow-up in a randomized controlled trial of the After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools/ADAPT program. These two studies provided evidence for the role of cardiac vagal tone as a correlate of emotion-related parenting and a tailoring variable to inform precision-based parenting programming for military fathers.