Читать книгу Essential Dads - Dr. Jennifer M. Randles - Страница 8

1 Knowing What a Father Is

“I don’t want him to grow up like I grew up. I want my son to have everything. I don’t want him to be a have-not,” explained Christopher.¹ Father to three-year-old Chris Jr., Christopher, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, was feeling unsteady but hopeful when we met. He was searching for a place to live, looking for a job, and planning how to get back together with Chris Jr.’s mother, Monique. “No matter how bad me and his mom disagree, or how bad other things get, I still try to be there for him because you’ve only got one dad. There are only two ways to keep me from being there for my son, if I’m in jail or dead.”

Christopher knew the heartache of the first and had come dangerously close to the second. A former gang member who left school after the eleventh grade, Christopher was raised by his paternal grandmother in one of the poorest neighborhoods in America. When he was born, his parents struggled with homelessness and addiction. With his mother in prison, Christopher’s father tried to care for him, but there was not enough money for both milk and diapers. He relinquished custody when Christopher was three months old, becoming less involved as his son grew older. With a sigh of resignation, Christopher praised his grandmother while expressing longing for a close relationship with his father:

She was an amazing parent, stuck it through no matter what. I got the clothes and food I needed. I might not have had the name brands, but I was never hungry. . . . I always said growing up that I will never be like my dad. I want [Chris Jr.] to know what a father is. I want him to be able to say, “My dad was there.” I feel like I’m trying to make up for my dad’s flaws in my relationship with my son, to make sure he doesn’t grow up and question, “What happened to my dad?” I’m here because I want to do better, as a father and a man in general, to get it together, to be able to support my family like a man should. Because that’s how I was raised. Grandma didn’t teach me to be a slouch.

Incarcerated the year before for selling drugs, Christopher knew he had to find a safer way to make the money needed to support his family, one that did not involve always “looking over my shoulder” and fearing the ultimate separation from his son. He confided to me, “I’m not going to lie. The thought of doing it again has crossed my mind. But every time it does, I just push it back and think of when I had to talk to my son from across the glass on his birthday.” Christopher still felt the sorrow of that isolation. “It broke my heart. I’m not an emotional person, but I cried. My son was crying, asking why he couldn’t come to the other side. I couldn’t answer. I knew right then, no more.”

That decision led him to enroll in DADS, a government-funded “responsible fatherhood” program that provided high school completion classes, paid job training, and fathering and relationship skills education. Government promotion of responsible fatherhood, which began with the 1996 U.S. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform, has targeted economically vulnerable men like Christopher whose social and financial struggles hinder their fathering aspirations. The U.S. government defines responsible fatherhood as “being present in a child’s life, actively contributing to a child’s healthy development, sharing economic responsibilities, and cooperating with a child’s mother in addressing the full range of a child’s and family’s needs.”² For fathers like Christopher—poor, homeless, unemployed, without a diploma, and bearing the stigma of a criminal record—this is a tall order. With no home and little money, Christopher could not keep Chris Jr. overnight, and he struggled to remain on good terms with Monique, who limited Christopher’s contact with Chris when they fought. Still, Christopher made it a priority to see his son every day and viewed DADS as an opportunity to “get back on [his] feet” after spending Chris Jr.’s third birthday in jail.

When I asked if DADS helped him do that, he was optimistic but ambivalent. The program offered a safe way to earn $400 a month and an opportunity to finish his diploma, as well as peers and teachers who understood his struggles and treated him with respect. He wanted to prove to his grandmother and Monique that he was committed to being a better dad than his own had been and that he was a “real man” who, despite having little money to offer, could role-model hard work, perseverance, and integrity for his son. Christopher described his time in DADS as a way of ensuring that Chris Jr. would have more, especially a father he knew and admired:

They give you the right mind frame of being able to do things. I felt good about that [DADS] certificate at the end of the day. I might not have a job, but I got up every day, I went to this class, and I attempted to do something better, to be something better. . . . I was doing something with myself instead of just running the street trying to make a couple dollars. I was actually trying to be a productive part of society. . . . We went from being on this block every day to making it to class every day. It became a priority for us, to prove our parenting.

However, as our interview continued, Christopher admitted having doubts about how much his participation in DADS actually changed his life circumstances. “We got a certificate; now what? . . . How far is two hundred dollars going to go in two weeks when you’ve got to buy food and clothe yourself? Unless you just plan on going out and hustling with it, what do you expect us to do?” With his DADS certificates proudly hung on his son’s bedroom wall, Christopher was unsure about what he would do next.

Christopher’s experience points to why responsible fatherhood policy and ideas about family and poverty that motivate it are controversial. Many view fathers like Christopher as a social problem to be solved. According to this logic, without a dad’s consistent presence in the home—what many call “father absence” or “fatherlessness”—Christopher had failed to learn how to be a good father from a parent of the same gender who modeled responsible work and family behaviors. With goals to prevent poverty and to promote child well-being, programs like DADS aim to teach men about the importance of fathers and how to meet their paternal obligations. Others criticize this logic as misrepresenting the social and economic factors that shaped Christopher’s life chances. They argue that a missing paternal presence did not doom him to poverty and incarceration; rather, a society in which poor children of color face racism and other overwhelming obstacles to education and well-paid jobs did.

Nevertheless, echoing narratives of father absence, Christopher acutely felt the lack of a father in his life. Though he had received all the resources and care he needed from his grandmother, Christopher felt like a “have-not” due to not having had a father in his life. Ultimately, despite his appreciation for the “amazing” grandmother who raised him, he still believed that a father is essential. Christopher’s deep desire for a close relationship with a man parent is a critical policy concern and the crux of the debate over the social role of fathers. What is at stake in this debate—and more importantly, in actual families like Christopher’s—is how fathering both shapes and is shaped by class, race, and gender inequalities and how policy should intervene. Given that these same inequalities influence Chris Jr.’s chances of being a “have-not,” these are high stakes.

Sociological research illuminates the aspirations and challenges of marginalized fathers who struggle to be present in their children’s lives.³ Turning away from deficit understandings of fatherhood that emphasize what fathers lack and do not do for their children, this research highlights how social and economic constraints can undermine the best fathering intentions. Many poor men of color defy the stereotype of the “deadbeat dad” who deliberately neglects his parenting responsibilities. Instead, they embrace ideas of good fathering focused on time and care that seem more attainable in the context of their constraints. Responsible fatherhood policy accords with these changing meanings of men’s parenting by officially emphasizing both the financial and relational aspects of fathering.⁴ Yet how it does so in practice, and especially how men like Christopher make sense of these messages, has fallen outside the purview of much of this research.⁵

Most studies of fatherhood programs have focused on whether they helped fathers meet federal policy goals, such as more frequent father-child contact and increased earnings.⁶ Although important, these variables miss the full sociological significance of responsible fatherhood policy and programming. While they address key policy metrics, they do not fully capture why fathers who go through these programs believe they come out with a more nurturing attitude but no better able to provide for or see their children. To fill that gap, Essential Dads draws on the stories of Christopher and sixty-three of his fellow DADS participants. Rather than allowing for claims of causality or program impacts, attention to fathers’ narratives captures the interpretive aspects of fathering as shaped by men’s experiences in a fatherhood program. These stories powerfully illuminate how policy shapes marginalized men’s parenting perspectives and experiences in the context of dire economic circumstances and shifting cultural expectations of fatherhood and manhood.

The ideas men brought to and learned from DADS reveal a great deal about U.S. political understandings of how fathering is implicated in inequality, the gendered dynamics of parenting, and the importance of men as parents. From this vantage point, “responsible” fatherhood is a much more complex issue than whether or not a man financially supports and interacts with his children. It requires careful consideration of the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.

With that goal in mind, this book provides new insights into what many consider one of the most pressing social problems of our time: marginalized fathers’ tenuous connections to their children. It does so by answering key questions about this understudied aspect of U.S. social policy. How do men’s understandings of paternal responsibility shape their engagement with fatherhood program messages and services? Does responsible fatherhood programming challenge or reinforce gendered, racialized, and classist ideas of parenting? What does this reveal about the potential for policy to create more equitable conditions for fathering? Answering these questions first requires that we understand how “irresponsible” fathering came to be seen as a social problem.

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF “FATHERLESSNESS”

Responsible fatherhood programs emerged in the United States in the 1970s as a response to a complex set of social, economic, and political changes in family life and welfare policy.⁷ Panics over the “decline” of fathering, however, go back much further. Beginning with mothers’ pensions in the early twentieth century, U.S. welfare policy framed poverty as the result of family disruption, specifically the loss of a father and breadwinner. Drawing on this man-as-provider family model, cash assistance policies for poor families—consisting almost exclusively of impoverished mothers and their children—were conceptualized as a husband/father substitute.⁸

As the composition of welfare rolls changed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, race and class stereotypes converged to paint white widows as deserving of public support for doing the labor of raising children and Black single mothers as lazy, promiscuous dependents on the state. Prior to the 1940s, white widows were the majority of mothers who received welfare cash aid as compensation for deceased fathers’ wages. Those who advocated for mothers’ pensions argued that mothers without income because of the father’s death, desertion, or unemployment deserved financial assistance from the state in exchange for the valuable public service they provided as guardians and caretakers of children. As never-married and divorced mothers, especially those who were not white, began to comprise a greater share of welfare recipients, many child and welfare policy advocates criticized the state for encouraging father absence by replacing men’s expected contributions to their families with public aid.⁹ Much of this concern focused on Black unmarried mothers presumed to be raising the next generation of “juvenile delinquents” without fathers who were deemed necessary to teach children mainstream family values and keep them out of poverty.¹⁰

Many were also concerned about how increasing industrialization reshaped fathers’ family responsibilities to focus on breadwinning. Fearful that time spent away from children undermined men’s family authority and that home life had become too feminized, academics emphasized that fathers were essential for children’s proper gender socialization. Among the first was Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of gender development posited that boys needed to identify with fathers to adequately separate from mothers.¹¹ This idea that fathers were important as “sex role models” was dominant from the 1940s to the 1960s when experts warned that boys could become overly identified with mothers who had become primarily responsible for childcare.¹² Assuming that insecure forms of masculinity result when boys spend too little time with fathers, these theories set the stage for a highly racialized discourse of “father absence” that attributed social problems to missing Black fathers during the mid-twentieth century.

Also during this midcentury period, American women, including mothers of young children, entered the labor market in record numbers. This challenged the dominant idea of the single-earner, man-headed household, which had never been a reality for most families of color.¹³ It also undercut many assumptions embedded in U.S. welfare policy. The 1965 publication of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of the Department of Labor, ignited further controversy about the consequences of “family breakdown” and the “tangle of pathology” in African American communities.¹⁴ Attempting to draw attention to race-based job discrimination, the report blamed African American men’s economic subjugation on centuries of exploitation, fathers’ marginal position in Black families, and an emasculating “matriarchal structure” born of slavery.

This narrative linking father absence and welfare dependency and attributing disproportionately higher poverty, crime, and dropout rates among men of color to missing fathers has been part of U.S. political discourse ever since. Just as Moynihan’s point about racism in the labor market was lost in favor of a focus on the pathologies of Black parenting, so too has contemporary inequality been characterized primarily as a result of “broken families.” This narrow and oversimplified focus on family structure as the root cause of poverty has obscured how inequality stratifies access to opportunity across lines of race, class, and gender, despite family form.

Rising rates of divorce, cohabitation, and single parenthood in the 1960s accelerated in tandem with growing costs of public aid, prompting calls for greater enforcement of private child support. Congress instituted the first major federal child support policy with bipartisan backing in 1974. Lawmakers wanted to ensure that welfare cash aid was going only to “deserving” families and not children who could receive support from fathers who lived elsewhere.¹⁵ During the 1980s, legislators started to speak of “deadbeat dads” to describe neglectful noncustodial fathers.

“Deadbeat dad” is an example of what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins called a controlling image, a gendered depiction of people of color that makes poverty appear to be a result of bad personal choices.¹⁶ Controlling images are cultural shorthands for interpreting, constructing, and stigmatizing marginalized social groups, and they inform policies designed to address social problems presumably caused by those groups. Although rhetorically race neutral, characterizations of deadbeat parents were racialized in the popular imagination, reinforcing the belief that negligent Black fathers were promiscuous, predatory, and violent, and therefore to blame for the social ills of communities of color. Increasingly punitive child support policies, including those that criminalized unpaid support, reflected the growing belief that poor non-married families of color were undeserving of public aid and that fathers who did not pay were deliberately avoiding their paternal responsibilities.¹⁷

These policies presaged the passage of the responsible fatherhood provisions of welfare reform in 1996. Noting that the “promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children,” the law cited that less than half of fathers with a child support order fully comply and that the majority of children receiving welfare benefits “now live in homes in which no father is present.”¹⁸ It listed numerous negative effects of being born “out-of-wedlock” and growing up in a “father-absent” home, including lower educational aspirations and higher rates of poverty, abuse, neglect, and school expulsion. The policy also mandated that mothers receiving cash aid establish biological paternity and that states use this information to enforce child support obligations, in part to recoup government costs of cash aid to custodial parents.

The controlling image of the deadbeat dad also played a role in the gendered implications of welfare reform.¹⁹ A major reform goal was to counteract a perceived crisis of masculinity that prevented men from assuming their roles as family breadwinners.²⁰ One commentator on this purported crisis was sociologist David Popenoe, who argued that by the turn of the twentieth century, masculinity was less about self-control and family obligation—the “family protector-provider” model—and more about competition, assertiveness, and virility. Commitments to women and children, once thought to be “a central, natural, and unproblematic aspect of being a man,” must now be encouraged and institutionalized through law, Popenoe claimed.²¹ Many within the emergent responsible fatherhood movement advocated for programs that would harness qualities associated with troubled masculinities seen as threats to family stability.²²

As this movement gained momentum during the 1990s, political and academic discourses about the importance of fathering focused more intensely on masculine role modeling. David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute of American Values, argued that many major social problems result from living in a society that views fatherhood as superfluous. Without a male parent in the home, he noted, boys look to less positive role models for the meaning of their maleness. When sons must prove their manliness without the help of fathers, they purportedly overcompensate by turning to hyper or protest forms of masculinity. Drawing a direct connection between crime, misogyny, and father absence, Blankenhorn explained: “If we want to learn the identity of the rapist, the hater of women, the occupant of jail cells, we do not look first to boys with traditionally masculine fathers. We look first to boys with no fathers.”²³ Involved fathers are presumably necessary to prevent what Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, termed “father hunger.” This refers to “longing for a man, not just a woman, who will care for you, protect you, and show you how to survive in the world . . . [and present] an image of maleness that is not at odds with love.”²⁴ The importance of fathers, and by extension responsible fatherhood policies, these authors reasoned, is grounded in men’s abilities to set limits, exercise masculine authority, and teach sons and daughters that they are worthy of male love.²⁵ Many child development experts have made similar arguments that fathers uniquely contribute to children’s well-being through qualities such as masculine play styles and self-confidence.²⁶ Unstated in this discourse are the highly questionable assumptions that any father in the home is a positive influence, that all fathers demonstrate a similar masculine parenting style, and that children in homes without fathers lack positive role models of masculinity.

Around the time of 1990s welfare reform, sociologist Anna Gavanas found that two major wings had emerged within the responsible fatherhood movement: one focused on promoting marriage as the ideal context for involved fathering and another concerned with marginalized fathers’ unemployment as a barrier to marriage and paternal involvement. The “pro-marriage” wing has drawn more on essentialist ideas of gender, while the “fragile family” arm has emphasized the impacts of racism and poverty on men’s marriageability and abilities to fulfill paternal responsibilities. Dominant messages in both have strong religious undercurrents, especially calls to promote married two-parent families that include both mothers and fathers.²⁷ Together the two wings have articulated a shared narrative of fathers’ importance to families that highlights the unique and essential contributions of men as parents.²⁸ As sociologist Philip Cohen has argued, claims that mothers and fathers play distinct and complementary parenting roles and must raise their children to replicate them are at the heart of struggles to preserve the gender binary on which patriarchy fundamentally rests.²⁹ The ideology of gender complementarity in parenting is a strong common thread that connects many of the most controversial family policy issues over the past few decades, including opposition to marriage equality and parenting rights for same-sex couples, marriage promotion for low-income families, and calls for responsible fatherhood among poor men.

Despite a lack of direct evidence to support it, this political narrative about the importance of fathers as men grew to a crescendo by the turn of the twenty-first century when in 2005 Congress created a $150 million annual federal funding stream to support the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative. This funding has since supported hundreds of organizations that offer marriage and relationship education and activities related to fatherhood. Many recipients of government funding for responsible fatherhood programming have been explicitly religious or faith-based organizations with missions focused on reinstating “family values” grounded in the sanctity of married two-parent families.³⁰ While the George W. Bush administration emphasized marriage promotion, Barack Obama, motivated by a limited relationship with his own father, made fathering, fathers’ economic self-sufficiency, and child support enforcement major parts of his presidential platform.³¹ Echoing earlier claims about the need for fathers, not the state, to support children, Obama described the “hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children [as] one that no government can fill.”³²

Through these various iterations, the political discourse of “fatherlessness” has served as a compelling 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.

It is difficult to address the underlying issues that make it hard for fathers to be and stay involved, including little education, few job skills, criminal histories, and relationship conflict. It is therefore easy to dismiss these programs as a futile policy experiment. Yet they seek to capitalize on how fathers who enroll in these programs genuinely want to comply with child support orders, cooperate with their children’s other parent(s), and see their children regularly.⁵⁰ These programs may be successful, not in that they fix the structural issues that undermine fathering, but in how they stand to provide what our society often denies marginalized men: a space to develop and claim identities as good fathers outside the bounds of whiteness, marriage, and money.

Fatherhood programs, most of which are funded through government grants, are constrained by federal guidelines that require activities focused to some extent on “healthy marriage,” “responsible parenting,” and “economic stability.”⁵¹ Pursuant to these top-down requirements, most programs emphasize marriage and two-parent families to some degree. Yet many focus on education, jobs, and fathering classes due to how poverty and unemployment can weaken men’s dignity and motivation to be engaged parents.⁵² The emphasis on employment also directly reflects how the responsible fatherhood provisions of welfare reform policy underscored “economic self-sufficiency” and child support enforcement as ways to reduce public welfare costs.

These distinct policy priorities signal particular and somewhat conflicting political understandings of the underlying causes of “fatherlessness.” While some assume that uninvolved fathers lack family values and personal initiative to maintain contact with children and coparents, others recognize that men’s fathering abilities and motivations develop within a larger context of opportunities and constraints.⁵³ The reality is that most low-income fathers already possess the motivation to be involved, but lack the means and support to do so.

Policy priorities also call into question the true purpose of fatherhood programs. Are job training services about overcoming deficits in fathers’ work ethics? Or are they about providing more economic opportunity? Do men need fathering classes to teach them that they should care about and support their children? Or is their primary purpose to help fathers develop parenting and relationship skills (and what must those “skills” entail)? This all points to perhaps the most important sociological question related to responsible fatherhood policy: What is the role of government and public programs in facilitating fatherhood? Is it to supervise and modify men’s behaviors in line with dominant social expectations of “responsible” fathering? Or is it to reduce the financial and practical costs of fathers’ involvement?

These questions reveal how fatherhood as a policy issue exists at the nexus of culture and structure. Responsible fatherhood policy has a dual purpose: to shift cultural ideas of fathering and to provide resources needed to live up to those ideas. Gauging the policy’s full salience depends on asking the right questions that get at how these goals intertwine and how they might diverge. Studies of poverty policy benefit from a cultural analysis; without one, culturally unaware policies reinforce stereotypes of those forced to live in poverty.⁵⁴ Polices are cultural products that reflect assumptions about deservingness, responsibility, and a society’s structure of opportunity. Cultural values also shape political narratives and the range of alternatives that policy makers envision.

Earlier generations of poverty scholars were associated with the “culture of poverty” model that explained being poor as an outcome of not having the right values. However, numerous studies of fathering among men in poverty reveal that they espouse the same cultural values of paternal responsibility as affluent fathers.⁵⁵ More recent poverty scholarship focuses instead on how people respond to poverty using different cultural frameworks and narratives. Cultural concepts are useful for understanding the meanings men bring to and develop within responsible fatherhood programs. Studying fathering frames—the lenses men use to perceive and interpret their parenting—helps us understand how individuals envision what is possible for their lives. Similarly, narratives, or the stories fathers tell that causally link life events, reveal how they make sense of their identities, connections to others, and life chances.

Cultural narratives often involve what sociologist Michèle Lamont called “boundary work,” drawing conceptual distinctions between different kinds of people and practices.⁵⁶ Individuals draw symbolic boundaries to differentiate themselves from others, create a shared sense of belonging, and make claims to moral worth and responsibility. Sociologist Maureen Waller’s research on the meanings low-income fathers assign to parenting revealed that men draw sharp symbolic boundaries between “good” and “bad” dads by redefining responsible involvement in ways consistent with their abilities.⁵⁷ Responsible fatherhood programs merge culture and structure by providing resources for the enactment of ideas marginalized men use to claim moral worth as good fathers. Designing effective fatherhood policies and programs requires developing narratives of fatherhood that both resonate with marginalized men and account for the inequalities that constrain their parenting. Without both, there is a risk of reinforcing culture-of-poverty stereotypes and rendering invisible the unequal structural dimensions of fathering.

By focusing on fathers’ narratives and the symbolic boundaries they draw around “responsible” fatherhood, this book seeks understanding of how policy shapes the definition, evaluation, and expression of fathering among men central to political debates and directives about paternal involvement. Responsible fatherhood policies were created to target men who do not live with their children, are not married to children’s mothers, and do not make consistent support payments. The sixty-four fathers described in the chapters that follow are not representative of all nonresident or non-married fathers or those with outstanding child support obligations. Many did live with their children, several were married, and some made regular monetary or in-kind contributions to their children’s households. Still, Christopher and his classmates represent our country’s most marginalized fathers. Analyzing their experiences in DADS allows us to understand how policies intended to facilitate fatherhood might help men who encounter the most social and economic obstacles to realizing their parenting aspirations.

Any full and fair consideration of these men’s fathering narratives and experiences requires an intersectional perspective that sees race, class, and gender as interlocking forms of inequality.⁵⁸ Their accounts of parenting revealed a lot about how the interplay of economic circumstances, racial discrimination, and gender identity led them to DADS. Only by understanding how the program responded to these overlapping systems of oppression can we make sense of the messages of responsible fatherhood programming. Fathers’ stories also illuminated the mismatch between political narratives and legislative provisions regarding paternal responsibility and the realities of marginalized men’s actual lives as shaped by these inequities. Adopting this intersectional lens requires questioning the gender implications of a policy focused specifically on men’s parenting.

FATHERHOOD, MANHOOD, AND GENDERED FAMILY POLICY

A policy focused on promoting men’s emotional engagement with children reflects an important shift in the gender dynamics of the U.S. welfare state. Whereas family policies have historically targeted men as fathers tasked with being husbands and breadwinners, responsible fatherhood policy targets fathers as men with caregiving responsibilities. Unlike earlier policies focused on paternity establishment and child support enforcement that prioritized men’s biological and financial connections to children, responsible fatherhood policy also focuses on promoting emotionally close father-child relationships, regardless of genetic paternity. For men like Christopher who have few other characteristics that allow them to claim a high social status, the idea that being a caring father makes a man valuable is particularly compelling. It also defies many still-dominant stereotypes about masculinity, gender, and family roles.

Yet just because a policy promotes nurturing father-child relationships does not mean that it necessarily challenges the gendered division of family labor. Promoting a nurturing parenting style for men presents its own challenges. The breadwinning-only father, the dominant fathering model of previous generations, is characterized as emotionally distant and insufficiently caring. However, men who are primary caregivers are also often stigmatized as insufficiently masculine and as not living up to their financial responsibilities. If fatherhood—and by extension manhood—are no longer about providing just money, how do men meet greater demands for caring and emotionality without feeling emasculated? This is 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

Still, there is no denying 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 they sought support: unemployment; homelessness; food insecurity; stigma associated with criminal records; custody battles; inability to keep current on child support payments; family complexity; and coparenting tension. Simply put, fathers in DADS were mostly young and significantly disadvantaged, and in many cases they had nonexistent or conflicted coparenting relationships with the mothers of their children. Although their experiences are not representative of fathers generally, their stories do reflect the all-too-common extreme challenges of the over five million economically vulnerable fathers in the United States who struggle to live up to political and social definitions of “responsible” fatherhood.⁸⁴

To understand how these definitions reflected in policy were translated into practice, I also interviewed ten program staff and spent fifty hours observing program activities, including community partner/staff meetings and fathering classes. I spoke with: the WEP executive director and DADS program founder; two DADS program managers; the WEP director of employment services; the DADS program assistant; the program manager of the gang recovery program; two DADS case managers/fathering class instructors; one relationship class instructor; and the program liaison for the domestic violence support center.⁸⁵ Talking with staff allowed me to understand how they focused on some aspects of responsible fatherhood discourses while downplaying others. In a highly competitive funding environment, those who administer programs like DADS are constrained by funding guidelines as they work to meet the real needs of struggling parents. Putting fathers’ stories in conversation with staff accounts revealed crucial tensions and compromises as top-down policy narratives met fathers’ lived experiences.

As a white, highly educated, middle-class woman, I did not share many social characteristics with the men I studied. I was, however, on the verge of sharing one that was crucial for navigating this social distance: parenthood. Fortuitously, I was visibly pregnant with my first child during each of the interviews. My pregnancy was an increasingly obvious quality that men wanted to discuss during interviews, which allowed me to position myself as a less experienced parent in need of advice fathers were qualified to give. As a pregnant interviewer, I embodied a social status that evoked memories of their transition to parenthood and underscored the meanings they attached to parental responsibility. My body visibly prompted them to share with me how they thought about gender differences in parenting. This provided a unique empirical window into fathers’ understandings of the differences between fathering and mothering. I discuss this dynamic and the insight I gleaned from it in detail in the appendix.

The sociological story of fathers’ experiences in DADS unfolds in two interrelated parts. The first part of this book shows how marginalized men utilized the program to claim identities as responsible fathers. In chapter 2, I focus on how men explained what drove them to DADS and the definitions of “responsibility” they brought to and learned from the program. DADS promoted a broad idea of paternal provision that included financial resources and relational support. This allowed fathers to tailor their understandings of involvement to account for the social and economic constraints they faced, including racism and poverty. Program staff, teaching materials, and especially the fathers themselves used the language of provision to describe men’s abilities to meet their children’s full needs for care, attention, and opportunity. Focusing on narratives about paternal responsibility that most resonated for men underscores the importance of cultural images that do not discount or stigmatize poor men of color. It also reveals how marginalized fathers uphold perceptions of their value as responsible parents by drawing symbolic boundaries around what it means to “be there” for their children.

Chapter 3 builds on this by delving into fathers’ accounts about how social, economic, and relational challenges prevented them from acting on their definitions of responsibility. Much of the previous research on low-income fathers’ involvement has emphasized the economic factors that shape men’s family relationships, with less attention paid to the stories men use to explain their choices related to those relationships. Gathering their stories while they were in DADS revealed how poor fathers believed they lacked many of the resources and opportunities necessary to forge and sustain bonds with their children. Men’s descriptions of the program as a unique situated space for fathering provides important clues for how fatherhood policies can be designed around the cultural and structural dimensions of parenting that make the most sense within the context of marginalized men’s lives.

One of the most crucial dimensions is fathers’ experiences with and understandings of family complexity and their ties to coparents. Chapter 4 therefore highlights how fathers’ goals for better, more cooperative coparenting relationships motivated many to be in the program. A major reason most participated in DADS was to demonstrate their parenting commitments to mothers who they believed mediated access to their children. By showing how the program helped fathers negotiate coparenting obstacles to involvement, the fourth chapter examines how DADS supported men’s efforts to forge stronger father-child relationships undermined by weak or conflicted couple bonds. It sheds necessary light on questions of how much fatherhood policy and programs should emphasize two-parent families and marriage.

An intersectional understanding of responsible fatherhood policy and its implementation requires that we go beyond an analysis of how DADS helped men claim statuses as good parents and ask whether such programs promote truly egalitarian parenting. Fatherhood programs are not ideologically neutral contexts for fathers’ identity work. They are political spaces with profound implications for cultural understandings of fathering and its connection to race, class, and gender inequalities. The second part of the book therefore takes a more critical stance by analyzing the underside of dominant messages about fathering promoted by DADS. Chapter 5 examines how DADS distinguished paternal care from mothering and emphasized masculine forms of nurturance. It details the narrative strategies fathers used to claim caring paternal identities that merged stereotypically masculine and feminine aspects of parenting—what I call hybrid fatherhood—without feeling emasculated. Despite the pretense of more egalitarian parenting, this hybrid construction of fatherhood devalues care deemed feminine and contributes to the durability of unequal gendered parenting arrangements.

In line with political narratives of responsible fatherhood, DADS also taught that fathers, as masculine role models, uniquely contribute to child development. Chapter 6 analyzes how this discourse of paternal essentialism resonated for fathers who found value in messages characterizing them as essential for children’s well-being as men, not economic providers. I show how the “essential father” discourse is a response to gender ideologies and race and class inequalities that intersect to shape cultural norms of good fathering that further marginalize poor men of color. Alas, there is little social scientific evidence supporting the “essential father” discourse as a rationale for fathers’ involvement. I show how the valorizing image of the essential father individualizes social problems attributed to father absence and culturally scapegoats “fatherlessness” for much more complicated structural inequities.

The concluding chapter discusses the social and policy implications of the book’s findings in light of decades-old debates about fathering and its connection to inequality. These implications go far beyond responsible fatherhood programs to the very heart of our national ideas about families, racism, sexism, poverty, and why parenting matters. Policies are counterproductive when they reinforce patriarchal ideologies that children are necessarily worse off without men as parents. There are dangers in the “essential father” discourse, a cultural narrative that ultimately blames marginalized men for the structural constraints they and their children face. But it is hard to challenge an ideology by now so deeply engrained in our political zeitgeist, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.

How might we teach fathers, and all caregivers for that matter, that they are essential without resorting to insidious messages about masculinity that derive their power from the implicit devaluation of mothers, women, and femininity? I provide an answer by outlining a blueprint for a fundamental shift in the political discourse about the importance of fathers, one that emphasizes the value of nurturance and how a father’s importance derives from the ability to be a loving parent who can meet children’s emotional, relational, and material needs. Essential Dads underscores how cultural, social, economic, and political factors shape that ability. Rather than teaching fathers that they are essential to families because they are men, it is essential that we address the unequal social conditions in which fathers like Christopher parent. This book tells the story of how DADS tried to do both.

Admittedly, I started this research expecting to be more critical of responsible fatherhood programs. But after spending hundreds of hours talking to fathers about why they came to DADS, the reasons they stayed, and what it meant for their lives and families, the only book I could honestly write is one that reveals the radically progressive potential of programs like DADS. Ultimately, I endorse these programs. I also make a case for why we must heed fathers’ stories so that parenting policies can be even better.

To that end, it is important to acknowledge that DADS was only one program within a much broader national landscape of fatherhood programs scattered throughout the country that have divergent messages, strategies, and goals. Even so, there was much to be learned from studying in-depth one program that reflected and grappled with the major matters at stake in responsible fatherhood policy, including: meanings of good fatherhood, money’s role in fathering, marriage, masculinity, and men’s value as parents.

Accordingly, each chapter that follows returns to the issues at the heart of Christopher’s story with which we began. What did it mean to him to be a “responsible” father? Is it enough that DADS allowed Christopher to prove himself as a parent, even if it did not fundamentally change his economic circumstances? Did DADS help him navigate the constant conflict he had with Chris Jr.’s mother, Monique? What did the program teach him about the unique value of fathers beyond what women caregivers like his grandmother could provide? How did this shape his commitment to compensate for his own father’s shortcomings through his relationship with his son?

The answers illuminate how U.S. responsible fatherhood policy unfolded in the lives of real men who stand to gain—and lose—the most from how we ultimately decide to regulate or facilitate fathering through policy. Ultimately, those answers also teach us how politically valuing, not just fatherhood, but all caregiving is vital for addressing race and class injustices, especially those that hinder the essential contributions Christopher and the millions of fathers like him strive to make.