fatherhood

fatherhood
An apparently commonsense concept, but one which is too often used loosely by sociologists, since it could mean: a man through whom ties of filiation (‘being the child of’) are traced; a man through whom property rights are traced; a man whose acknowledged (not necessarily genetic) relationship to the child establishes its full social membership within the society; a man whose acknowledged relationship to the child establishes its social group membership within a society; or any combination of these. Different societies, with different systems of descent and transmission of rights, employ the term differently.