JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council on Family Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Marriage and Family. This article defines responsible fathering, summarizes the relevant research, and presents a systemic, ecological framework to organize research and programmatic work in this area. A principal finding is that fathering is influenced, even more than mothering, by contextualfactors in the family and community. For more than a century, American society has engaged in a sometimes contentious debate about what it means to be a responsible parent. Whereas most of the cultural debate about mothers has focused on what, if anything, mothers should do outside the family, the debate about fathers has focused on what fathers should do inside the family. What role should fathers play in the everyday lives of their children, beyond the traditional breadwinner role? How much should they emulate the traditional nurturing activities of mothers, and how much should they represent a masculine role model to their children? Is fatherhood in a unique crisis in late twentieth century AmericaThe recent upsurge of interest in fathering has generated concern among supporters of women's and mothers' rights that the emphasis on the important role of fathers in families may feed longstanding biases against female-headed single-parent families, that services for fathers might be increased at the expense of services for single mothers, and that the profatherhood discourse might be used by the fathers' rights groups who are challenging custody, child support, and visitation arrangements after divorce. On the other hand, feminist psychologists have recently argued for more emphasis on fathering and have suggested that involved, nurturing fathers will benefit women as well as children (Phares, 1996;Silverstein, 1996). Only an ecologically sensitive approach to parenting, which views the welfare of fathers, mothers, and children as intertwined and interdependent, can avoid a zero-sum approach to parenting in which fathers' gains become mothers' losses.These cultural debates serve as a backdrop to the social science research on fathering because researchers are inevitably influenced by the cultural context within which they work (Doherty, Boss, LaRossa, Schumm, & Steinmetz, 1993). In their recent reanalysis of the historical trends of American ideals of fatherhood, Pleck and Pleck (1997) see the emerging ideal of fatherhood in the late twentieth century as father as equal coparent. (From 1900 to 1970, the dominant cultural ideal was the genial dad and sex role model, and from 1830 to 1900, the distant breadwinner.) Research on fathering, then, has attained prominence in the Jou...

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Salivary cortisol levels were assessed in 19-month-old infants following the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure. 38 infants participating in Project STEEP at the University of Minnesota served as subjects. Project STEEP is a longitudinal intervention program designed to promote healthy parent-child relationships and to prevent emotional problems among children born to mothers who are at high risk for parenting problems. Following the Strange Situation, saliva samples were collected and assayed for cortisol, a steroid hormone frequently examined in studies of stress. Behavior during the Strange Situation was coded by trained coders, and attachment classifications were determined for each infant. Cortisol concentrations did not differ between the 6 Avoidant/Resistant (A/C) and 17 Securely Attached (B) toddlers. Toddlers (n = 11) who were classified as having Disorganized/Disoriented (Type D) attachments exhibited higher cortisol concentrations than toddlers in the traditional (ABC) classifications. Results of this study were consistent with a model of stress reactivity that conceptualizes the organization of coping behaviors as a factor that mediates physiological stress responses.