Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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giant, and it too peaked in the 1950s. As noted earlier, it also had an influential race riot in 1964 that coincided with dramatic changes in the economic and racial complexion of the city.
Today Philadelphia is a largely black and white city, with only a small representation of Hispanics and Asians. The median household income stands at just under thirty-six thousand dollars, and poverty rates are much lower than Camden’s—20 percent (29 percent of families with children). A much smaller proportion claim government assistance in Philadelphia.31 Unemployment, at 13 percent, is still above the national average. Nearly eight out of ten adults (79 percent) have at least a GED, but only 56 percent of the city’s public high school students graduate within four years.32
Taken together, the metro area as a whole bears similarity to many rustbelt cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions. In 2011 its unemployment rate stood at just under 9 percent, similar to rates in the Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago metropolitan areas. Out of the forty-nine largest metro areas, it ranks twenty-second by this measure.33 Still, Camden and Philadelphia are among the nation’s poorest cities—in 2007 Philadelphia was the ninth poorest of all large cities, while Camden was narrowly edged out by Bloomington, Indiana, as the poorest city in the nation, a designation Camden has earned in most years.34 At this writing it has just earned the title again, edging out last year’s winner, Reading, Pennsylvania. It is also America’s second most dangerous city, but a recent spate of murders has put it very close on the heels of the first-place winner, Flint, Michigan.35 Given the stark economic conditions of Philadelphia and Camden and the income restrictions we imposed on our sample—which we limited to men earning less than sixteen thousand dollars in the prior year in the formal economy (roughly the poverty line for a family of four in 2000)—our results must be interpreted with some caution; not all unwed fathers live in places with so many economic challenges, nor are all unwed fathers as disadvantaged as the men in our story. But because a disproportionate number of unmarried fathers are disadvantaged across a variety of domains, many men who have a child without benefit of a marital tie do so under similar conditions.
Nationwide, poor whites rarely live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and Hispanics are also less likely than African Americans to do so. This substantial difference in neighborhood conditions sometimes leads to misleading comparisons, for while disadvantaged minorities usually come of age in communities with daunting challenges and precious few resources, poor whites are much more likely to enjoy the good schools, safe streets, plentiful jobs, and enriching social activities that are so beneficial to young people as they navigate the transition to adulthood. Philadelphia offered us an unusual advantage: the chance to study disadvantaged whites whose neighborhood contexts were somewhat more similar to those of economically challenged blacks. In selecting our neighborhoods, we took full advantage of this feature of the city.
THE FATHERS
Over the seven years we spent on street corners and front stoops, in front rooms and kitchens, at fast food restaurants, rec centers, and bars in each of these neighborhoods, we persuaded 110 low-income unwed fathers to share their stories with us, sometimes over the course of several months, or even years. We recruited roughly equal numbers of African Americans and whites, the two groups who constitute the large majority of the population in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.36 Fathers ranged in age from seventeen to sixty-four, yet we made sure that roughly half of the fathers were over thirty when we spoke with them so we could tell the story of inner-city unwed fatherhood across the life course. Their experiences were varied, but all were fathers with at least one child under the age of nineteen they did not have legal custody of, and all hailed from city tracts that were working class or poor.37
Because the men we were interested in talking with were often not stably attached to households, and some were involved in illicit activities they were eager to hide from outsiders, we did not attempt a random sample; instead, we tried for as much heterogeneity as we could.38 Within each poor and working-class neighborhood we had identified using census data, we began by trying to solicit referrals from grassroots community organizations and social service agencies. But we soon learned that few of the fathers we sought were involved in these groups, and those who were—usually drug addicts in rehab or homeless men sleeping in shelters—were far from representative. We then visited local business strips, train and trolley stops, day labor agencies, and other employers in these neighborhoods in the late afternoons, when work shifts ended and many residents were out and about. We also simply walked the streets, striking up casual conversations with men we encountered and posting fliers on telephone poles and in corner stores, check-cashing outlets, liquor stores, and bars. We also invited early participants to refer us to other fathers whom we might have missed on our own.
With these unconventional recruitment strategies, it was surprisingly easy to convince fathers to talk with us. Getting them to speak candidly about their views and experiences required more work. No researchers enter fully into the lives of their subjects, and we do not claim to have done so. In the end what won the confidence of most men was our willingness to become neighbors and our eagerness to gain some firsthand experience with the contexts in which they lived. Our own backgrounds still marked us as outsiders but also allowed us to authentically claim the role of novices seeking the fathers’ expertise in understanding the rhythm and risks of daily life.39
Our conversations with each father, usually stretching across several meetings, were wide-ranging and in-depth. We asked fathers to begin by describing their own childhoods and families of origin, and what it was like for them growing up. We tracked their paths through adolescence and early adulthood; their experiences with peers, school, and work; and the beginning and end of each romantic relationship. They described the circumstances surrounding the births of each of their children and the often shifting patterns of involvement in their children’s lives. We asked how they had come to make the choices they had, what they wished had gone differently, and what they planned for the future.
The question that originally prompted our study—is it true that these fathers simply don’t care about the children they conceive?—led to a deeper and more complex focus of inquiry: what does fatherhood mean in the lives of low-income, inner-city men? This query spurred us to chronicle the processes of courtship, conception, and the breakup of the romantic bond. We then looked at how fathers viewed both the traditional aspects of the fatherhood role—being a breadwinner and role model—and its softer side. Finally, we elicited the barriers men faced as they tried to father their children in the way that they desired, and how they responded to these challenges. Our goal was to offer honest, on-the-ground answers to the questions so many Americans ask about these men and their lives.
In this book we do not seek to portray the whole way of life in these communities. The voices of the women these men share children with only rarely enter in, for example, and this is intentional; their stories have already been told.40 Nor do we discuss men who have earned college degrees, have managed to land and keep higher-paid manufacturing or white-collar jobs, or are raising their children within marriage, though men with these characteristics also reside in these communities. This is not a book about race; though we note racial differences when they occur, they are more in degree than in kind. In this narrative, where black and white men live in more similar contexts than in most places, racial differences are far outweighed by shared social class. This is not a work of history; we do not, and cannot, present the narratives of low-income fathers at earlier points in time such as the 1950s and 1960s—what some conceive of as the golden age of family life.41 We do not offer an analysis of the individual characteristics or contexts associated with fathering a child outside of a marital bond—that question would have required a very different study design than ours. Nor do we engage with the rich literature on father involvement, though readers can find references to this literature in the notes to the book. Finally, this is not a book about the effects of fathers’ behaviors on their children’s well-being, though we do discuss the implications for children in the final chapter.
This is the story of disadvantaged fathers living in a struggling rustbelt metropolis at the turn of the twenty-first century. By examining each father’s story as it unfolds, we offer a strong corrective to the conventional wisdom regarding fatherhood