Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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of validating how men define, negotiate, and manage fathering expectations—is a powerful strategy for reducing the marginalization of men in family policy.23
Fathers’ stories also reinforced the importance of designing policies and programs around the cultural dimensions of parenting that most make sense in the context of marginalized men’s lives.24 We must understand how and why particular models of fathering resonate more with low-income men because they account for the inequalities that profoundly shape their lives. Without this insight, definitions of fathering embedded in policy risk reinforcing those inequalities and culture-of-poverty assumptions about marginalized men’s parenting. Fathers’ narratives specifically point to the need to rethink paternal “responsibility” in the context of deeply entrenched structural constraints. Government definitions that task fathers with addressing children’s full needs obscure how living up to one component of responsibility can jeopardize fulfilling others. Like Cayden, who quit high school to care for newborn Alisha, numerous fathers I studied experienced social and economic setbacks as the results of putting their children’s needs first. Many had to choose between higher-paying illegal and life-threatening activities and making much less to ensure that they would live long enough to see their children grow up. This suggests that marginalized fathers emphasize care and time not only because they are the components of fatherhood they can actually achieve, but because it is the most emotionally resonant way marginalized men can justify making impossible parenting choices.
“Being there” signals more than a greater focus on time and love over money in men’s descriptions of good fathering. That almost all the fathers I studied used this language indicates that it has become a common conceptual shorthand for reconciling the growing expectations of fathering and marginalized men’s inabilities to realize them. Both ubiquitous and amorphous, “being there” can refer to any level and type of involvement, even enrolling in a fatherhood program like DADS. Lest one should think this renders the phrase meaningless, I argue that the opposite is actually true. Men across lines of race and class have embraced the “new” fatherhood cultural ideal that dads should be financial providers and nurturing caregivers.25 That marginalized men equally espouse this multifaceted understanding of responsibility, despite the many more obstacles they face in fulfilling it, challenges culture-of-poverty assumptions that poor fathers of color hold different parenting values.26 I found that “being there” captured how men used a fatherhood program to perform paternal identity work, especially by aligning their challenging lived experiences with culturally ascendant ideas of being worthy men and fathers.
Ultimately, in carefully listening to these men, I discovered how DADS helped them tailor their definitions of good parenting and providing to account for the socioeconomic constraints that eroded connections to their children. The program was an opportunity to abandon lifestyles, relationships, and disadvantages that undermined their fathering capabilities. As importantly, it helped them negotiate definitions of “good” versus “bad” fathers and reconfigure dominant fatherhood scripts—especially that of the good provider—based on the experiences of white middle-class men and the implicit exclusion of men like them. Cayden and his classmates pursued the program to align their identities as responsible fathers based on a breadwinning-plus script with their behaviors. As I show in the next chapter, what they found was a group of people who validated these flexible, more inclusive meanings of “being there” and helped them access the resources they needed to live up to them.
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