Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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drugs: “Being a provider means giving emotional support, guidance, and living up to the whole statement of the difference between right and wrong. It means never being on that side of the glass ever again, to not put my kids and my loved ones through that.”
Like Tanner, almost half of the fathers had spent some time incarcerated since their children were born. Many also had histories of life-threatening gang involvement. For these fathers, being a provider meant doing anything necessary to stay alive and maintain contact with their children outside penal institutions. Maintaining sobriety, avoiding the streets, and staying alive and out of jail were all parts of “being there” as a good provider who was always present in the most literal sense. “My kid kept me off the streets,” explained Marshall, a twenty-year-old Black father of one, “and now I’m in the house daily, trying to create a better future. I play around with him, talk to him, let him know that I love him.” None of that would be possible, he concluded, if he went back to “street life” and got killed. Focusing on presence and attention as unique forms of paternal provision was a key way fathers overcame insecurities that they were not worthy of being in their children’s lives. Fathers also coped with this fear by claiming identities specifically as providers of upward mobility for their children.
PROVIDING OPPORTUNITY
Men explained how being a good provider meant offering their children very different lives than the ones they had lived. Protection was a recurring theme in fathers’ descriptions of provisioning. This meant keeping their children physically safe, but also protecting them from the hardships of poverty. Given their limited means, “responsibility” often entailed significant personal sacrifice from fathers. Caleb told me: “I wear rags, but my son has everything he needs. I save up for his presents, even if that means I only drink one cup of coffee a day and don’t eat much.” Arturo, a twenty-two-year-old Latino father of one, had struggled since he could remember, especially after his grandmother who raised him passed away when he thirteen. He had to quit school and start working in the fields to support his younger siblings. He was homeless for two years and struggled to find consistent off-season work. After he returned to school, he was expelled for gang-related fighting. Arturo found out he was a father when his daughter was three months old. This discovery, he told me, kicked his “protector-provider reflex” into high gear, a feeling he knew well since he was a teen:
I had to step up and lose that part of my life of going to high school just to work and pay bills. I was the only kid in the fields. Having [my daughter] brought back the responsibility of when I was thirteen years old, having to pay all these bills and making sure I got money to my mom. Now I have to make sure I make this money so I can provide for my daughter. I don’t want her to go through the stuff I went through. . . . I became a dad in a week. Being there for her means that I’m actually willing to protect my family at any cost no matter what danger they’re going to be in. That means that you got to be willing to sacrifice yourself to make sure they’re safe and in a good place, which means making sure she has a better life than I grew up having.
Fathers’ emphasis on giving children a better life was in part about giving them money and things. More than this, though, for fathers like Arturo, providing meant protecting their children from similar lives characterized by danger and deprivation.
Being a provider in this sense involved becoming a barrier between their children and the hunger, homelessness, gangs, drugs, jail, and early work they themselves knew all too well. To be this kind of bulwark, fathers believed they needed to forge different life paths, which entailed cutting off ties to family members and friends they believed kept them anchored to disadvantage. Ricardo, a twenty-two-year-old Latino father of two, enrolled in the program for this very reason. He was there to get “on the right track for my kids, to start going forward. Being there and being a good dad is not giving up on them for things like drugs and addiction. . . . In trying to move forward, I have to get away from family members that are involved in gangs. Staying on the right path means I got to cut off some of these connections. I can choose to be in their lives or my kids’ lives.” This was not an easy choice. To cope with homelessness, hunger, and the constant threat of violence that cast a pall over their young lives, many fathers turned to the gangs that made up a large part of their communities—and their families. Many of their own fathers, brothers, and cousins, the men they trusted and often the only men they really knew, initiated them when they were barely teenagers. “Going forward” for fathers like Arturo and Ricardo meant turning away from these support networks that at earlier points in their lives had protected them from worse fates.
Being there and protecting children in these ways would involve, as Ricardo concluded, “making two lives right” out of the only “wrong” one he had ever known. More than providing opportunities for upward mobility, it was about protecting children from disadvantage by providing a barrier between them and the poverty, gangs, and incarceration that hindered fathers’ own life chances. As with Ricardo, this goal often compelled fathers to make difficult choices about long-standing social connections and lucrative, yet illegal, activities. To Keegan, a twenty-one-year-old Black father of three, being there meant his “kids knowing that I’m coming back at night,” a sense of security he did not experience due to his own father’s perilous gang involvement and frequent incarceration. He risked this security for his children by writing bad checks that led to a three-month stint in jail. Keegan blamed this, in part, on his own pride: “A couple of checks were just to have money, but I got caught the last time because we didn’t have no diapers. We couldn’t afford both diapers and formula, and we needed both. I told myself, ‘I’m going to do this one last time.’ I didn’t want to borrow money, so I wouldn’t have to owe nobody.” Reliving what he saw as a child, Keegan was arrested in front of his son, the one who needed those diapers. From that point on, being there was about never going through that again, even if that meant having to ask for help when money ran out.
When fathers talked about being providers of protection, they meant keeping children away from physical harm, but even more so, from material hardship and fears of losing their parents. Enrique, an eighteen-year-old Latino father of one, told me: “To be a good dad is to make sure she doesn’t go where I’ve been, to provide her a different life. I wouldn’t want my daughter to go through what I did. I want her to graduate, to be successful, to not struggle, not worry about bills. I want her to be happy, to not live in homeless shelters like I have.”
Elias, a twenty-one-year-old Latino father of one with another on the way, also described how paternal responsibility was primarily about radically changing his life and safeguarding his children from the anxiety and deprivation of his own childhood. A gang member since the age of ten after being “jumped in” by brothers and cousins, Elias had been shot three times and dropped out of school with the hopes of becoming a Marine and leaving gang life and poverty behind. Although that did not work out as he had planned, he acknowledged his “luck” that he was still alive. He wanted most of all to provide his children with more options, ones not limited to “choices” between gangs, prison, poverty, or death. He explained:
I don’t want my kids raised around this neighborhood, the place where I was from, to sit here and see that it would be OK to be a gang member. I didn’t want to fail as a father. I was scared of getting locked up or getting shot again, and my son’s father getting ripped from him without him even finding out who I am. . . . I want them to be in a good, stable environment where his parents ain’t fighting or beating each other up. . . . On top of supporting them financially, I want to make sure they can get into a good school, start a little savings fund, something just so that they don’t have to struggle in life like I did.
As Elias proudly showed me a sonogram image of his unborn child on his cell phone, he pointed to his heart and said: “I want this child to just fly through life, go to college, do something, pursue a dream. This child will be and have more than me.”
Likewise, for his classmate Rodrigo, a nineteen-year-old multiracial expectant father, being there and providing more for his unborn daughter meant being in a position to provide the security he was not able to offer during his girlfriend’s first pregnancy, which they chose to terminate:
I was with the wrong people, selling drugs, and got in trouble. Some guys tried to rob me, I got kicked out of school for fighting, and we aborted