A child’s personal and mental development requires both his father and his mother. No matter how good the mother is, she cannot replace the figure of a father whom a child needs. Unfortunately, we live in a time when more and more children live in families with absent fathers. In my diploma, I focus on adult men whose biological fathers were absent during their growing up. In the theoretical part, I concentrate on the image of a father, his role and a child’s needs for a present father during his childhood, adolescence and later in adulthood as well as on the influences of the father’s absence on the child’s intelligence, his formation of the gender role, his personal development and self-image, on his social involvement and on the child’s emotional perception of his father’s absence. In the empirical part, I present an analysis of qualitative research, where I conducted three interviews with adult men whose biological fathers were absent during their growing up. As a result of literature study and empirical research, I have come to a conclusion that the father has a unique significance in the life of his child because a man’s figure is of great importance in growing up of boys.
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