The experience of attempting to become a present father: Perspectives of absent Black South African fathers

Abstract

This research investigates the experiences of Black South African fathers who have been absent from their children’s lives, who have attempted to or have reconnected with their children. It was focused on understanding what this process of reconnection entails, as well as the motivations, challenges, failures and successes these fathers experienced. The research was interested in what fathers regarded as a successful or unsuccessful reconnection according to their personal experiences. A qualitative, psychosocial approach for this study was chosen to allow for an exploration of both the social and personal psychological influences on this process of reconnection from the perspective of the seven fathers who participated in the study. These participants were recruited via social media and through purposive, snowball sampling. They were all between the ages of 30-45 years old, and all of them had previously been absent from their child/ren’s lives and had attempted to reconnect or had successfully reconnected with their child/ren. Two of the men had managed to successfully reconnect with their children, whilst the other five had tried and been unsuccessful. Hollway and Jefferson’s (2013) psychosocial approach using the Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) was used to guide the collection and analysis of data. Two semi- structured interviews that largely offered space for their narratives were conducted with each participant. The research showcased several factors that are important for research that were novel and were found to shape and influence their subjective experiences of this reconnection, such as socio-political factors, cultural influences, socio-economic factors and the intergenerational transmission of past relational patterns to their relationships with their children. This research documents the ways in which these factors intersect in this sample reconnection experiences. Experiences of both successful and unsuccessful reconnection with their children are discussed. Particular attention is given to the participants’ understandings of their fatherhood roles and how such understanding has been reconstructed within this reconnection process. Motivations for attempting to reconnect with their children are presented, alongside the meanings they made of unsuccessful attempts at reconnection. The findings suggest that a combination of both personal and contextual factors influence which fathers manage to form positive fatherhood identities and forge successful reconnections, and which do not.