Participation of the father in the upbringing of sons and daughters. Ecuador case

Abstract

Despite the continuing drive to achieve equality between men and women, our family culture continues There is an unequal division of tasks and responsibilities, in which the care of children is distributed in a diverse way. The present study aims to determine the degree of participation of the father in the tasks of raising his sons or daughters under 3 years of age, taking as a case the program Growing with Our Children of the Pichincha canton, Manabí province, Ecuador. For this purpose, a qualitative quantitative methodology was applied by conducting a survey directed to the 160 parents of the 8 CNH care units of the Pichincha canton; An analysis was carried out of the documentation handled by the 8 Educators of the CNH program, established in the registration files of information on children's development of children, as well as working with focus groups directed to 20 mothers of families. The results showed that families in these sectors have been affected by the low participation of the father in raising his son and daughter, where there is a need for the wife to motivate her partner to have more contact with the child; The advances and changes derived from the progressive equality between men and women are not linked to childcare tasks, in which mothers barely share a little less than 10% of these with their partners; there is a cultural burden that assigns and naturalizes the tasks of care and raising of mothers.