Fatherhood Post-Separation: Practicing Fathering from a Distance and in Brief Copresent Phases.

Familial everyday life after separation and divorce is characterized by a particular social and spatio-temporal situation, which is accompanied by residential multilocality and involves specific demands on fathers and their practices. In the majority of cases, fathers and their children in Germany live only temporarily together after a separation and live spatially separated from each other for, more or less, long periods. Thus, fatherhood can obviously not continuously be performed in co-presence. Rather it must be constructed under the conditions of the periodic shuttling of children between the parental homes, in mostly brief periods of co-presence and intermittently from a distance managing periods of absence as well as the situation of limited insights into the everyday life of their children at their mothers place. This article addresses the experiences, practices and difficulties of the construction of post-separation fatherhood based on the results of ethnographic studies in Germany conducted by the Schumpeter Research Group “Multi-Local Families“. https://www.routledge.com/Family-and-Space-Rethinking-Family-Theory-and-Empirical-Approaches-1st/Halatcheva-Trapp-Montanari-Schlinzig/p/book/9781138497757