Stereotypically masculine men tend to adopt family roles in which they are more important symbolically, as models for power and authority, than realistically, as teachers, care takers and nurturers. For these men, nurturant-expressive involvement with their children is still the exclusive domain of women. Men who have integrated affective behavior, interdependence, and spontaneity into their personal lives are usually older than the adolescent and college age students who are frequent subjects of studies on the male sex role. The sex role standards with which many men evaluate their own behavior undergo a number of changes throughout the adult life span, occurring in response to increasingly significant discrepancies between the behaviors required by their concept of masculinity and the age norms held by others in the culture. These men can resolve this conflict either by continuing to act in accordance with their earlier male standards, or by modifying their conception of male sex role standards and adopting a fathering role within the family. Non-normative events, such as divorce or the death of a spouse, can also lead to an expansion of men's concept of masculinity and an expansion of their involvement with children. It is important for children, as well as men, that fathers not respond to the stress of divorce or the loss of the mother by adopting a more rigid adherence to traditional male sex role standards, but learn to implement a more emergent model. Men will only be able to relate to their children in an emotionally expressive, sensitive and spontaneous manner if they are able to view these behaviors as consistent with their conception of male sex role standards. (JAC)