"Papai no bolso e mamãe no coração"?: análise das configurações de práticas das paternidades contemporâneas

Abstract

This text expresses the result of a research on the configurations of contemporary paternity practices and the paternal identities of male parents in a private school in the city of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. The main objective of the study was to understand and analyze the models of paternity exercised by male parents in the domestic care of their offspring, as well as in the parental mobilizations related to their children's school trajectories. The central argument of the research refers to the fact that traditional family structures have undergone profound changes in the social order in the last decades. Such changes, a historical consequence of the feminist movement, led to a greater participation of women in the labor market and the consequent emergence of new modalities of family arrangements, which challenge parental social roles by reconfiguring practices and tasks both regarding the organization of domestic life and the school monitoring. The survey revealed the experiences of middle-class male parents who are facing new family organizations. The construction of new paternities, in view of more egalitarian gender social relations, and new models of masculinities are the fundamental axes for real changes in family life.