Exploring the Impact of Father Involvement on Adolescents

Abstract

Father involvement has played an essential role in the source of family being and a child's formative years. A father’s involvement in their child’s life has consequences on aspects of the child’s life, for example, their interpersonal relationships, academics, social and cultural, etc. This study focused on how children perceive their father’s involvement in their lives and how it influences emotions. Emotion regulation is an individual's ability to modulate their emotion or set of emotions. During our formative, especially in adolescence, people go through many emotions and sometimes understanding them gets overwhelming. Parental involvement plays an important part here as children learn a lot from their parents, and seeing them handle emotions well can guide them in managing their feelings. This study aims to understand how a child perceives their father's involvement in their life and how it affects their emotional regulation. A sample of 200 adolescents who were studying in different schools was raised. Perceived Father Involvement Inventory (PFII) by Fathima Bushra Saliha & Jayan (2018) was used to find data on adolescent father involvement. For the quantitative study, demographic details were explored, such as early versus middle adolescent and nuclear versus joint family type. The results indicated fathers were more involved with early adolescence than middle and adolescents belonging to the nuclear family, and more involvement of the fathers in domain guide to the outside world and providing support was seen. For the qualitative analysis, a semi-structured interview was constructed to gain a deeper knowledge of the relationship of father's involvement in adolescents.