Vol. 27 No. 2 (2025): n° 2 luglio-dicembre 2025
Dossier “La lettura ad alta voce e silenziosa nei contesti di educazione formale, informale e non formale”

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

PDF
  • Irene Biemmi
Irene Biemmi
Università di Firenze
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rief-18069

Published 2026-01-02

Keywords

  • fatherhood,
  • gender equality,
  • children’s publishing,
  • contemporary family,
  • gender imagery

How to Cite

Biemmi, I. (2026). Changing Fathers. An Investigation into the Representations of Fatherhood in Children’s Picture Books. Rivista Italiana Di Educazione Familiare, 27(2), 29–41. https://doi.org/10.36253/rief-18069

Copyright (c) 2025 Irene Biemmi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

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.

PDF