Fathers in childcare services and play groups: an intercultural perspective.

In French-speaking Belgium, two research projects seek to improve the understanding of relationships between parents and professionals, specifically places given to fathers in early childhood services, and to identify strategies to enhance these relationships. While literature shows the importance of strengthening collaboration between families and professionals, field practitioners express difficulties in managing their relationship with parents (Sharmahd & Pirard, 2018), especially fathers. These difficulties can be explained by historical and sociocultural factors related to fatherhood, as well as characteristics of services mainly staffed by women practitioners and focused on a maternal approach (Peeters, 2022). Collaborative interdisciplinary research (Jacob et al., 2021), conducted within a constructivist approach to gender and culture (Bereni et al. 2020), was carried out. With the support of researchers, practitioners from childcare services and playgroups produced documentation on their daily practices. All data were analyzed collectively by practitioners and researchers from different disciplines, before self-regulating participatory assessment initiated by Cresas and IEDPE (EADAP, 2011; Pirard et al., 2021). From 2022, these results have been supplemented with an interdisciplinary collective and participative analysis of contextualized narratives. Research was approved by the ethics committees of ONE and University of Liege. Ethics were ensured through participants' informed consent and reflexivity of the collaborative process. Results underline importance of the research process and highlight levers entrusting fathers a diversity of places, validated by field experiences. The collaborative research stream exploring gender interaction in childhood services and promotes self-implemented context specific change, hence reinforcing field practitioners' agency.