What is a good father? The meaning of a good father through sports parenting in South Korea

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to uncover the meanings that constitute a good father within the context of a sports/leisure setting and to analyse how these meanings are enacted in practice. Results showed that the ‘good father’ of today, as perceived by fathers, is a multifaceted construct that is construed through their interactions with other family members. First, fathers constructed the meanings of a good father through the memories of their own fathers during their childhood. Second, fathers constructed the meanings through their relationship with their wives. They regarded sport parenting as an important practice for them to be a good husband to their wives. Finally, fathers constructed the meanings of a good father through their relationships with their children and the time spent with their children was a particularly important requirement for them to fulfil their role as a good father.

Keywords:

• Fathering
• fatherhood
• good father
• sports parenting
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Beginning with online clubs in the 1990s, good father-related communities have been steadily increasing, such as the ‘daughter loving father group’, ‘storytelling father group’ and ‘group of fathers who think about the future of our children’. The number of members in the ‘good father’ online club has exceeded 2000.

2 The programme Daddy! Where are you going? is the first real variety entertainment programme in South Korea to use fathers and parenting as materials. It received a lot of attention from the public with a high audience rating of over 20%, and won the grand prize in the MBC Entertainment Awards in 2013. Since then, it has been exported to the Hunan Satellite Broadcasting Station in China, and became a great topic as the Chinese version was broadcast as Bàba! Nĭ yào qù nă’er? (Cai and Cho 2017).

3 The 1997 financial crisis became the momentum for the IMF and the World Bank to impose neoliberalism on South Korean society, and so South Koreans call it the ‘IMF economic crisis’ (Cho 2008).

4 The average number of household members in South Korea decreased steadily from 3.77 in 1990 to 3.4 in 1995, 3.12 in 2000, 2.88 in 2005, 2.69 in 2010 and 2.5 in 2015 (Statistics Korea 2015).

5 A city located on the outskirts of Seoul, the capital city of South Korea.