Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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explanation for poverty, crime, and welfare dependency. It also conveniently conceals how inequality and discrimination have fundamentally undermined “responsible” fathering among marginalized men like Christopher over the past half century, an issue of growing concern in the field of responsible fatherhood programming.
FATHERING FROM THE MARGINS
The empirical basis for public investment in fatherhood programs is the large and ever-growing number of studies linking fathers’ involvement and children’s academic, social, emotional, and economic outcomes.33 Although research finds that children fare better in all these ways when they receive financial and emotional support from their fathers, many issues complicate the link between fathering and children’s well-being. This is a case where correlation does not always mean causation, especially given how many factors that predict if fathers are involved—including education, employment, and income—also predict which families do better socially and economically. Most of the research on fatherhood has focused on the parenting experiences of middle-class, white, and married or divorced men. Relatively little has highlighted the parenting perspectives of poor never-married fathers of color whose lives do not easily align with dominant cultural scripts of fatherhood embedded in policy. The stereotypical image of the “deadbeat dad” presumes absence, neglect, and deliberate disengagement without accounting for the numerous obstacles marginalized fathers face.
Many social and economic trends have converged in the past several decades to make sustained involvement harder for men like Christopher, including deteriorating work conditions and mass incarceration of men of color. Although middle-class fathers tend to experience parenting as part of a “package deal” of work, marriage, home, and children, fewer low-income fathers follow this script because well-paid work, homeownership, and marriage are markers of economic stability few poor fathers accomplish.34 Men with little education especially have experienced declining earnings, rising rates of unemployment, and poor prospects in both labor and marriage markets since the 1960s.35 Poverty often comes with various kinds of instability—occupational, relational, and residential—that make it prohibitively difficult to be a father who can consistently provide money, time, and care.
Fathers who earn little struggle to support their children financially. They are also less likely to have a middle-class lifestyle, complete with a college degree, a job, and a house, that most people now associate with being marriageable; their romantic relationships also tend to have more tension related to unemployment, infidelity, and addiction. This means that poor men are less likely to marry their children’s other parents and more likely to have children with new partners. Many low-income dads are therefore expected to be providers across many families, a situation ripe for ongoing conflict with mothers, who often need all the resources any one disadvantaged father can offer.36
Fathers who get along with their children’s mothers, regardless of whether they are coupled, are more likely to be involved with children, and contentious coparenting relationships are the main barrier to involvement for many.37 For this reason, many experts advocate for a stronger focus on marriage and coparenting relationships in fatherhood programs. The problem with this approach is that many relationships between mothers and fathers are already over, troubled, or otherwise irreparably complicated by the time fathers enroll.38 Fathers often feel that mothers “gatekeep” by blocking access to children in the aftermath of adversarial breakups. Yet research on women who share children with low-income men suggests that many mothers have good reasons to limit access, as they are protecting children from fathers who struggle with addiction and aggression.39 Family complexity—when fathers share children with more than one partner—also complicates providing couple services. Promoting more involvement with one child can mean less money and time for other children, especially those who do not live with fathers.
Another concern with the focus on coupled coparenting between moms and dads in responsible fatherhood programs is the implication that all fathers parent children in heterosexual relationships. Political and cultural narratives of marriage and parenting, even those focused on marginalized families, are rarely inclusive of gay fathers, who are commonly depicted as white and middle class if they are acknowledged at all.40 The focus on marriage equality as a flagship issue for same-sex families has obscured how single economically vulnerable gay fathers deal with many challenges that access to marriage rights cannot address. Some government documents outlining responsible fatherhood initiatives mention families headed by same-sex couples and single gay parents, but do not reference the additional obstacles gay fathers often face.41 Children raised by gay and bisexual fathers of color are particularly vulnerable to poverty, with Black children raised by gay men having the highest poverty rates of any family type.42 Poor gay fathers of color are likely in even greater need of help with education, jobs, and parenting support given that they tend to face more discrimination at school and work and receive less help from extended families.43 Gay dads are unlikely to see themselves and their families represented in fatherhood programs when services reflect the assumption that children have mothers and fathers, albeit with varying levels of involvement.
Once narrowly defined by scholars as how much time men spend with their children, “father involvement” has taken on a much broader meaning to include various coparenting dynamics, along with accessibility, affection, and financial support.44 This reflects how men themselves understand fatherhood as multidimensional, context-specific, and influenced by the larger circumstances of their lives. That is, fathering is not just about direct interaction; it can include anything fathers do to develop a closer relationship with their children. Men parent within constantly shifting cultural norms and political and economic conditions of fathering. The cultural idea of the “new” or “involved” father—one who is nurturing, emotionally connected to his children, present in their lives, and responsible for some, if not an equal portion, of the childcare duties—has become dominant in recent decades as a contrast to the image of the “uninvolved father” who does not provide for or have ongoing contact with his children.45
The growing diversity of fatherhood norms and expectations means that men often forge their own understandings of good parenting to account for obstacles they face. This can be particularly challenging for marginalized men who must contend with definitions of responsible fatherhood shaped by middle-class and heteronormative assumptions. Providing financially, living with children, marriage, and caregiving all have monetary and practical costs that exceed the means of many poor fathers. This is one reason fathers with more education, stable jobs, and higher earnings are more involved with their kids, both financially and relationally.46
Nevertheless, many low-income fathers strive to meet their own and others’ fathering expectations. They emphasize broader meanings of good parenting that go beyond money, such as defining responsible fathering as “being there” with time and care.47 Highlighting the emotional and relational components of parenting allows low-income fathers who lack the economic markers associated with being a successful breadwinner to claim a good-father identity in the context of disadvantage. Stressing presence and affection allows marginalized men to bridge the gap between middle-class idealized images of fatherhood and their own experiences limited by economic constraint. That unemployed men are more likely to emphasize time and care over money as key features of good fathering points to how inequality shapes definitions of responsible fatherhood.48
Although marginalized fathers embrace these broader definitions, they still struggle to relinquish earning as central to their paternal identities and to develop a sense of themselves as parents with status and value. Part of this is because many policies, especially child support enforcement, still prioritize and mandate through punitive sanctions men’s monetary contributions to children over other aspects of their parenting. This is where fatherhood programs intervene. By stressing the importance of fathers’ presence and emotional involvement and helping men overcome financial barriers, responsible fatherhood policy is a distinct departure from how welfare policies have historically marginalized men as mere wage earners and support payers.49 It officially recognizes men’s commitments to provide care, not just money. This is crucial for men at the center of social scorn and panic over fathering, those like Christopher whom society dehumanizes by casting them as failed providers.