Abstract:

Based on in-depth interviews and observations of 20 urban families, this paper takes fathers' participation in childrearing through sports as its empirical object and examines the practice forms and action motivations of what it conceptualizes as sport-based fathering. The study finds that fathers' sport-based childrearing practices can be divided, in terms of form, into intermittent participation and routinized participation; in terms of motivation, they are shaped by two major orientations: relationship development and social reproduction. The former emphasizes intimate companionship, emotional compensation, and the cultivation of parent-child relationships, while the latter points to child training, intergenerational expectations, paternal authority, and the reproduction of family divisions of labor. By cross-analyzing practice forms and motivational structures, the article identifies four ideal types of fatherhood: ritual-symbolic fatherhood, affective-assistive fatherhood, strategic-conservative fatherhood, and institutionalized-companionate fatherhood. These four types show that the transformation of fatherhood does not necessarily involve a simultaneous shift in both the forms of involvement and the motivations behind them; rather, there may be a decoupling between the two: occasional participation may stem from a desire for closeness, whereas regular involvement may serve to continue shaping and disciplining children and maintaining existing family roles. The study further finds that the child's gender influences a father's decision-making logic, resulting in a differentiated distributions of fathering styles between father-son and father-daughter pairs. The article thus argues that the transformation of fatherhood is not a linear process from absence to participation, but rather an internally differentiated process generated through different combinations of participation forms and action motivations. Understanding contemporary fatherhood practices therefore requires moving beyond whether fathers are present or how much they participate, and it must further examine the logic by which fathers enter the parenting arena.

Key words: fatherhood, sport-based fathering, practice forms, motivational structures, Typology