How to Become a Good Father: the Sociological Analysis of Blogs

Unlike the Western countries, where the model of responsible parenthood and involved fathering has become a normative model of gender behavior, in Russia the transformation of the ideology and practices of parenting is rather slow, because of structural conditions such as gender policy and conservative public opinion about the high importance of the role of the mother for children. So, it becomes interesting and important to sociologically understand how the model of modern paternity is generated and distributed in modern Russian society, and how men not only build new practices of involved fathering in unfriendly conditions, but also represent them in the Internet space. This paper presents an analysis of fathers' blogs with the aim to identify father's practices and ways of representing them, which characterize a man as a good father. As a result of the analysis it was: firstly, practices of fathering their specifics were identified. Secondly, the practices of caring for the child, which are inherent in the models of fathering, were reconstructed. Thirdly, the analysis of empirical material has made it possible to identify the problems that fathers face, their institutional and cultural specifics in Russian society, and strategies for overcoming them.