Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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a bind for many men and therefore for any policy aimed at men’s parenting. How to masculinize domesticity has been one of the key tensions in the responsible fatherhood movement.59 That is, how can policy and programs make childcare, long associated with mothering and femininity, seem “manly”? If fatherlessness is part of a larger crisis of masculinity, as many have claimed, what specific ideas of manhood do responsible fatherhood programs promote to encourage fathers’ emotional involvement?
A broader issue is whether promoting care-focused ideas of responsible fathering actually makes families more egalitarian. Ironically, policies that underscore men’s caregiving abilities can reinforce gender inequality if they maintain that parental roles are gendered and distinct. Emphasizing fathers’ nurturance, affection, and emotional expressiveness is not the same as encouraging equal responsibility for all aspects of parenting. In fact, as sociologist Michael Messner argued, it is more about changing fathering styles than fatherhood’s substance. This stylistic change is reflected in the dominant view that there are two types of masculinity that in turn shape two primary ways of being a father: the emotionally expressive “New Man” who is a highly involved and nurturing father and the stoic, hyper-masculine “Traditional Man” who is emotionally and/or physically absent from his children’s lives.60
Alas, caregiving ideas of fatherhood labeled “new” have been associated with white, married, straight, middle-class men for decades, while the view of fathers as one of children’s primary custodians, caregivers, and teachers goes back to at least the seventeenth century.61 Sociologist Michael Kimmel explained how it was only after industrialization that “marketplace masculinity” came to define successful fathering as emotionally distant breadwinning.62 This had the effect of marking poor men and men of color who struggled to be successful financial providers as failed fathers—and failed men. Even for many privileged men, calls for fathers to participate in the direct care of children have resulted in little more than men’s symbolic attachment to a caregiver identity, specifically the “new” fatherhood ideal.
This ideal sustains parenting inequalities. Sociologists Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael Messner showed how the cultural image of the “new man”—a white, college-educated, professional who is also a highly involved and nurturant father—assumes race, class, and gender privileges.63 Qualities associated with the softening of masculinity connected to the “new father” only exist in contrast to characteristics of traditional masculinity projected onto less privileged men, including aggression, emotional stoicism, and “uninvolved” fathering. As a marker of class privilege, “new fatherhood” is not really new at all, nor has it ever questioned the gendered division of parenting labor. Instead, it has redefined patriarchy—a system of power that privileges men and masculinity—at critical junctures to be softer, more emotional, and more focused on care when men’s breadwinning abilities falter.64
This explains why fathers have anchored their gender identities in nurturing forms of masculinity mostly during downturns in men’s economic standing.65 The actual conduct of fatherhood has lagged far behind these cultural changes. Dominant understandings of fathering now focus on what sociologist Ralph LaRossa called the “culture of daddyhood,” the growing tendency for fathers to spend time and play with children.66 Although fathers’ overall contributions to childcare and housework have increased in recent decades, women—mothers and hired caregivers, mostly women of color—still perform the bulk of family labor, with men being viewed as discretionary, part-time secondary “helpers.”67 Ideas of “new fathers” and “new men” therefore tend to serve as cover for gender asymmetry in parenting that perpetuates patriarchy.
Patriarchy has always shaped policy through the prioritization of men’s perspectives and needs, but this takes different forms when intersecting with race and class. Although child support laws hold fathers accountable for financial providing, they do not require them to provide unpaid care. Responsible fatherhood provisions reflect yet another way patriarchy has infused family policy. Breadwinning and marriage are the foundation of patriarchal fatherhood. By pathologizing single motherhood, social problems such as poverty, joblessness, and incarceration are seen, not as effects of economic inequality and racism, but as the outcomes of insufficient fathering—specifically insufficiently masculine fathering. Black and Latinx families are more likely to be headed by single mothers and live in poverty, but employment and educational disparities, more than family structure, account for these trends.68
The research is clear that, on average, children who live apart from their biological fathers have worse outcomes, including higher poverty rates and poorer school and job prospects. It is easy to assume, as many do, that missing fathers are to blame. Yet doing so oversimplifies the complex reasons families are poor, and political narratives of father absence are quick to conflate missing fathers with insufficient resources and opportunities. The claim that children raised in homes without fathers are lacking because they do not have a man parent—what I call the “essential father” discourse—rests on a questionable and ideologically motivated empirical basis. Experts tend to agree that women and men exhibit some overall differences in parenting behaviors, but there is not consensus about how much these distinctions matter for children’s success. Few studies claiming that fathers are uniquely valuable have examined if the missing parents’ sex or gender is responsible for the different outcomes between one- and two-parent families.69
This means that we do not know how much parents’ gender matters independently of related issues, such as number of parents, lack of a second income, and experiences of family disconnection. Missing fathers tend to mean missing resources—both money and time—and it is difficult to parse out how much hinges on having less of both when a father does not live with his child. The average worse outcomes of kids raised in single-parent homes tend to have much more to do with the effects of growing up poor than growing up without a male parent who identifies as a man.
This suggests that fathers are indeed very important, but not because they are male or men. All who identify as fathers are not male, men, and/or masculine, and many parents who are male, men, and/or masculine do not identify as fathers. The slippage between terms used to describe paternal identity, gender identity, biological sex, and gender expression is part of the problem obscured by narratives about fathering and its gendered influence on children.
Psychologists Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach famously challenged the assumption that children need both mothers and fathers to thrive.70 Those who insist on the importance of fathers tend to believe that men and women parent differently as a result of natural (essential) differences, and that men are necessary (essential) for proper child development due to their ability to model masculine behavior. Essentialist ideas of masculinity as a core feature of responsible fatherhood have their roots in religious ideologies of patriarchal family headship and other biblical metaphors. Evidence for this lies in religiously motivated calls for gender-differentiated parenting roles among many leading advocates of the responsible fatherhood movement.71 Silverstein and Auerbach’s challenge to essentialism grew out of their research on coupled gay fathers, which found that the stability and predictability of parenting relationships matter far more than parents’ gender, sexual orientation, or biological relationships to children. The ideology of essentialism, specifically the belief that a child is best off having a mother and father, has contributed to less stability and predictability among many families. Non-married mothers, single gay fathers, and same-sex couples raising children have higher poverty rates than families with married heterosexual couples,72 in part because discriminatory laws and policies have given the latter more benefits and official recognition of their coparenting and parent-child ties.
The political appeal of the essentialist position, Silverstein and Auerbach concluded, reflects social anxiety about changes in family life and gender norms; it is also a backlash against gay rights and feminist social movements that have challenged the power and privilege of heterosexual men within the nuclear family. Research bears out this explanation, as there is little support for the belief that fathers are valuable because of maleness, masculinity, or heterosexuality. As mothers, fathers, and non-binary parents become more similar in how and how much they interact with children, gender is even less salient for how parents influence child development.73