Reading Passage 6

You should spend 20 minutes on questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 6.

Parental roles
One of the most enduring elements of social and behavioural science research in the last half of the 20th century was the scholarly re-examination of traditional ideas about fatherhood and motherhood. For over 200 years maternal behaviour had been considered paramount in child development (Kagan, 1978; Stearns, 1991; Stendler, 1950; Sunley, 1955), and fathers were often thought to be peripheral to the job of parenting because children throughout the world spent most of their time with their mothers (Fagot, 1995; Harris, Furstenberg and Marmer, 1998; Munroe and Munroe, 1994). Some argued that fathers contributed little to children's development except for their economic contributions (Amato, 1998), and others believed that fathers are not genetically endowed for parenting (Belsky, 1998; Benson, 1968). Indeed, even though Margaret Mead concluded that fathers were important contributors to childcare, and that '(a)nthropological evidence gives no support... to the value of such an accentuation of the tie between mother and child' (Mead, 1956, pp.642-643), Mead (1949) perceived basic differences between fathers and mothers. The mother's nurturing tie to her child is apparently so deeply rooted in the actual biological conditions of conception and gestation, birth and suckling, that only fairly complicated social arrangements can break it down entirely ... But the evidence suggests that we should phrase the matter differently for men and women - that men have to learn to want to provide for others, and this behaviour, being learnt, is fragile and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it effectively (pp.191-193).

However, many contemporary scholars now cite a growing body of empirical evidence that parental behaviours are not simply the consequence of biology and human nature, but rather are informed by cultural, historical and social values, circumstances and processes. In fact, as gender ideologies shifted in the last half of the 20th century, so too did researchers' exploration of variations in men's and women's behaviour generally, and fathering and mothering specifically (Rohner and Veneziano, 2001; Sanchez and Thomson, 1997). Moreover, contemporary perspectives on fatherhood and motherhood are in large part derived from research that concurrently studied fathers and mothers, rather than earlier research that focused almost exclusively on mothers.

Similarities and differences in fathers' and mothers' interactions with offspring
Much of the research into parent-child relations has been informed by the belief that mothers influence children's physical, emotional, psychological and social well-being through expressive and affective behaviours, including warmth and nurturance (Bowlby, 1969; Hojat, 1999; Mahler and Furer, 1968; Phares, 1992; Stern, 1995), whereas fathers have often been viewed as influencing children's development through the instrumental roles of provider and protector, and as role models for social, cognitive, psychological and gender-identity development (Bronstein, 1988; Gilmore, 1990; Lamb and Oppenheim, 1989; Mackey, 1996; Parsons and Bales, 1955; Radin, 1981b). However, contemporary research suggests that maternal behaviour is not situated exclusively in the expressive sphere any more than paternal behaviour is situated exclusively in the instrumental one. Indeed, multivariate research in the 1990s demonstrated the importance of paternal expressive and affective behaviours despite the fact that mothers are often characterized as 'superior caregivers', whereas fathers are viewed as 'less capable of, and/or less interested in, nurturant parenting' (Parents' Interactions with Offspring, Hosley and Montemayor, 1997, p.175). As discussed below, fathers' and mothers' behaviours are in fact multidimensional and multifaceted, and these behaviours often vary as a result of contextual variables including youths' age and gender.

Youths' age and gender
According to Collins and Russell (1991), research in Western societies shows that fathers and mothers interact differently with their middle childhood (i.e., preteens) to adolescent children than with younger children. For example, fathers generally interact with their adolescents through focusing on instrumental goals (e.g., school and athletic achievement, future plans) and objective issues such as political discussions. Mothers' interactions with adolescents, on the other hand, tend to be marked more by discussions of personal issues. More specifically, in their review of the literature on US families, Collins and Russell (1991) reported that 15- to 16-year-old US adolescents spent twice as much time alone with their mothers as with their fathers. Collins and Russell also reported that 14- to 18-year-olds, more than 12- to 13-year-olds, spent more time alone with their mothers than with their fathers. As for middle childhood, Collins and Russell (1991) found that mothers tend to be more involved in caregiving, whereas fathers are more involved in play activities.