Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2004

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Child and Family Studies

Major Professor

Greer Litton Fox

Committee Members

Julia Malia, Vey M. Nordquist

Abstract

Long-haul truckers face challenges of time and distance in their attempts to be what they consider good fathers. In their quest to define themselves as fathers and as men, they are also shadowed by the challenge of a pervasive macho mythology of the trucker as an American cultural hero – a high-flying, hard-driving, highway cowboy. As were the cowboys of the Old West, the mythological trucker is a loner, complete in his freedom from the worries and demand of more pedestrian lives. Through intensive interviews with 12 men who make their living as over-the-road (OTR) truckers, I explore the interwoven identities of the trucker and father with their differing and conflicting behavioral demands. Based on analysis of the interview responses of these men, I find confirmation of three different types of truckers initially identified by Ouellet (1994): worker, trucker, and super-trucker – each with different attitudes about the work-family interface and, thus, each with a different approach to fathering. Specifically, analysis of the data revealed across all three types of OTR drivers varying degrees of despair over absence from their families and powerlessness to be a “good” father. The negotiation of the conflict of frequent absence from the family was handled differently across driver types. Finally, reliance upon the trucker mythology and on traditional gender stereotypes to give meaning to their lives and to the compromises that their occupation required them to make with their ideas of appropriate fathering differed systematically across the three types of OTR drivers. The importance of these findings for OTR drivers and their families lies in better understanding not only of the difficulties men in these jobs face in maintaining meaningful relationships with their wives and children, but also in highlighting creative and successful means of constructing family roles and relationships. Further, educators and counselors may be able to apply these findings to other categories of fathers with similar types of chronic absence.

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