Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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that parenting is a gendered experience. Despite the lack of significant behavioral differences between mothers and fathers, adults and children are taught to recognize, anticipate, and respond to gender distinctions, especially among their closest caregivers. That is, we learn to think of mothering and fathering as distinct. This conceptual difference, rather than any innate biological distinctions, shapes children’s understanding of gendered behavioral expectations. Women’s and men’s overall different social, political, and economic positions also contribute to gender differences in parenting meanings, processes, and resources. Structural gender inequalities and ideologies, such as the gender pay gap and expectations that women should be primarily responsible for caregiving, shape parenting capacities and patterned differences between “fathering” and “mothering.”74 The ubiquity and taken-for-granted quality of these patterns make them seem like natural expressions of essential differences between men and women. That fathers overall tend to benefit children more economically and educationally does not reflect biologically based parenting abilities. It reflects gender inequality, specifically that men have more authority, earn more money for equal work, and face less discrimination in the workplace. This is likely why there is less evidence for the link between father-child interaction and better childhood outcomes among low-income families in which fathers have fewer economic and social resources.75
The view that fathers’ masculinity is an important factor in families reflects these socially constructed differences between the meanings and experiences of mothering and fathering. Consequently, many children and parents believe that having male, masculine, or men’s parental guidance is crucial. Lesbian and single mothers deliberately recruit men as role models for their children through extended family and support networks.76 Boys themselves turn to other influential men in their lives, including grandfathers and coaches, as positive masculine role models of good parenting.77 Participants in fathering programs who grew up without positive paternal role models often enroll to develop the parenting skills they believe they lack.78
This all raises key questions regarding political claims about the importance of fathers. Are fathers important because they alone teach boys how to be good men and dads? Research would say no. Adolescents with and without men as parenting role models have similar gender traits, suggesting that gendered behaviors are not imparted only from mothers to daughters and fathers to sons.79 Moreover, there are no differences in child development and well-being outcomes, such as self-esteem and academic achievement, between children raised in two-parent lesbian families and those in two-parent families with a resident father.80
We must therefore consider another angle. How much are men important as parents because our society teaches us that children and families without fathers are inadequate? Beyond grief over a missing parent, how much does the social narrative that “fatherless” children are fundamentally lacking worsen men’s sense of “father hunger”? In a society that tasks individual parents with providing for all of children’s needs with little social support, is it any wonder that children grow to experience a deep sense of deprivation when a large piece of their small private safety net frays? Finally, how much do claims about men’s importance as parents resonate for marginalized fathers because they live in a racist, classist, and sexist society that teaches them they have little else than masculinity to offer their children?
I will show throughout this book why it is crucial to think about these questions in terms of Collins’s concept of controlling images. By teaching them to develop self-images as fathers essential for their children’s well-being, DADS allowed the men I studied to draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and the controlling image of the “deadbeat dad.” This message about the “essential father” is what I call a valorizing image. As a cultural idea that assigns unique value to poor fathers, the “essential father” is paradoxical. Unlike controlling images that stigmatize marginalized groups, valorizing images characterize them as centrally important. However, as with controlling images, the intent of a valorizing image is to shape the behaviors of those who experience marginalization, in this case by providing a compelling rationale for poor fathers’ non-financial involvement as parents.
Both the “deadbeat dad” and the “essential father” are deeply tied to power relations of race, class, and gender. They blame marginalized men for their disadvantage and provide a compelling cultural narrative that explains inequalities as results of individual pathologies, rather than structural inequities. Understanding this paradox built into the image of the essential father is imperative for grasping the social and political implications of fatherhood policy. This requires an in-depth look at how messages about men’s parenting unfold on the ground in responsible fatherhood programming.
STUDYING “DADS”: ON THE GROUND OF RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD POLITICS
In 2012, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families funded fifty-nine programs through the Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood Grants. Over two years, I studied men’s experiences in one of these programs as a unique way of intervening in controversies about the importance of fathers. Men’s relationships with their children are influenced by what scholars call “paternal identity,” or how invested they are in seeing themselves as parents and how satisfied they are with their parenting abilities.81 Yet most of the previous research on fatherhood policies and programs has focused more on what men do as fathers and less on how men think about themselves as fathers.82 Drawing primarily on the voices of sixty-four men who participated in DADS, I reveal what being a responsible parent meant to marginalized fathers often typecast as “deadbeats” and how they managed identities as good parents amid significant economic and social constraints.
DADS served low-income fathers and expectant fathers between the ages of sixteen and forty-five. Located in a midsize city in the Western United States, DADS was part of a community agency I call the Workforce and Education Program (WEP), which provided education, employment, and job training for the county’s low-income residents. Participants had access to an on-site charter high school, paid vocational training, resumé workshops, job search assistance, financial literacy workshops, and relationship and parenting classes. The fathering skills classes offered by the program used the 24/7 Dad curriculum, the most commonly used fathering skills program among federal responsible fatherhood grantees. Services were also available at three additional program sites: a former gang member assistance program, a homeless shelter, and a residential addiction treatment facility. WEP partnered with the local housing authority, the county’s Department of Child Support Services, and a domestic violence support center to recruit participants and offer program services.
From December 2013 through November 2015, I conducted in-depth, in-person individual interviews with fifty participating fathers and four focus groups with twenty-one total fathers, including seven who were prior interviewees. All identified as heterosexual cisgender men of color (thirty-two as Black/African American; twenty-three as Latino/Hispanic; eight as multiracial; and one as Native American). They were eighteen to forty-four years old (average twenty-six). The thirty-eight fathers who worked through the DADS paid vocational training program earned between $200 and $600 a month, and another twenty were unemployed. Thus, almost all the fathers I studied qualified as poor—most as living in deep poverty—according to government poverty line measures. Most (forty-seven) did not have high school diplomas. One had an associate degree, and another sixteen were high school graduates. All but three of the forty-seven men who stopped school before graduating were pursuing their high school diplomas through the WEP charter school.83 Most men had one (twenty-six), two (nineteen), or three (ten) children, and seven had four or more. Two were expecting their first child. Twenty-one fathers lived at least part-time with all their children, and twelve lived with some of their children. Almost half (thirty-one) did not reside with any of their children. All fathers shared children with coparents they identified as women. About a third (twenty-two) of the fathers were single. Thirty-two were romantically involved with women, almost all (twenty-eight) with mothers of at least one of their children. Eight were currently married—seven to children’s mothers—and two of these were legally separated.
Fathers who found their way to DADS therefore had unusually dire financial and family situations that drove them to the program. All were experiencing one or more of the following challenges with which