Changing Fathers. An Investigation into the Representations of Fatherhood in Children’s Picture Books

The essay investigates the evolution of the representation of the father figure in recent publications for children, comparing it with the transformations of the fatherly role in real life. The symbolic world built by picture books offers unexpected representations of parenthood, and in particular of fatherhood, challenging the gender expectations within society that still today mark off maternal and paternal roles with rigid boundaries. The first part of the essay presents a review of the literature about so-called “new fathers”; the second part reports the results of a survey on a corpus of picture books published from the year 2000 to the present day, where fathers play the leading role.