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2 Being There Beyond Breadwinning

Responsible fathering means taking responsibility for a child’s intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being. This requires 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.

Obama White House Archives (2012: 2)

I used to feel like money made me a responsible father, . . . that being a good father is like cashing your kid out, making sure they got the best clothes or the best shoes. I’ve learned that being responsible is in the love you provide and the time you spend with your kids, the talking to, the reading. . . . Just be there for them mentally and physically. If you can’t afford something, you should still be there, listen to them. If they’re scared of the dark, you should be there for them, laying in their bed with them.

Cayden, age twenty-four, Black father of two, and DADS participant

The above two definitions of responsible fatherhood both emphasize the importance of fathers’ presence, contributions to children’s learning, and support for children’s emotional needs. How they differ is perhaps more significant. Whereas government definitions also emphasize economic providing, Cayden learned from DADS to think of paternal responsibility primarily as loving and caring for his children, even when he could not afford to provide a lot of money for them.

Cayden wanted to give his children more, both more money and more time, which had led him to DADS. He enrolled with the hopes of finishing his high school diploma and finding steady work. Having grown up in deep poverty, Cayden stopped school before his senior year to care for his newborn daughter, Alisha. Subsequently, he struggled to find and keep jobs, went to jail for selling drugs, and had another child, a son named Cayden Jr., with a new girlfriend. He had not seen Alisha in over two years and owed thousands of dollars in child support. But with no high school diploma and a criminal record that left an indelible mark on his employment prospects, he could barely support himself. This, however, was not the full extent of his parenting concerns. Although he no longer believed that money made him a good dad, he admitted a lingering doubt that he was providing sufficient time and love—the two components he now understood to be central to responsible fathering.

Cayden initially told me that he was a good father because he did everything he could for his son and kept up to date on his child support payments for his daughter. Yet, as our interview continued, he confided to me about his fears that he was not a very good father after all, because two years had passed since he had last seen Alisha:

It makes me feel sad sometimes wondering what she’s doing. . . . I just try to focus on the son I have and keep this going. I go to the courthouse and file paperwork, but I try not to let it bring me down because I can’t find her. The police basically say since I don’t have no custody that [her mom] can take her. I have dreams of my daughter being a sister to my son. I even moved to [another state] where her mother was, but I couldn’t make it financially. I couldn’t find work, so I couldn’t pay support. I couldn’t get food stamps, so I couldn’t eat. . . . If I could, if there was a way to be there with her, I would be. I want to be there for her as a father, the same way I’m there for [Cayden Jr.]. I’m not a deadbeat. It’s not like I had the baby with her and just left. She left me.

Cayden paused, shed a tear, and reached for his wallet. He showed me a picture of two-year-old Alisha, beautiful with deep, wise brown eyes, in a bright blue dress, smiling up at the camera with arms outstretched inviting a loving embrace. “This is how I imagine she’d look at me if I ever got to see her again.” The picture was one of only two he kept with him at all times. The other was of Cayden Jr., taken around the same age.

These side-by-side images mirrored how the two children were equally important in Cayden’s estimation of himself as a father. One represented his successes, the other a constant reminder of what he feared were his failures. Noting as he put away his wallet:

They only take eighty dollars a month for support, and I used to spend over three hundred when I was with her. You can’t even buy shoes with that. Your baby mama wants you to be home, she’s crying, your baby needs diapers, and you’re spending your money on beer and cigarettes. That’s a deadbeat. . . . In a sense, I feel like a deadbeat sometimes when it comes down to it, but I’ve got to keep my head up and realize that I’m not. It’s not my fault. I’m doing what I can. I’m here.

For Cayden, “here” had a profound and multilayered significance. It meant he was alive after turning away from street life and selling drugs, that he was again living near both his children, and especially that he was in DADS. Motivated by worries over being a failed father, he found his way to the program and met fellow participants who shared these insecurities. There they learned more about the meanings of good fathering that went beyond breadwinning. They were also acutely aware of how, despite loving and wanting to be there for their children in many ways, they lacked the resources to realize the varied components of this broader understanding of responsibility.

Like Cayden, many of the men feared that they fell short of providing the money and resources their children needed. Even more, they worried about how their life circumstances could hinder their ability to provide the things they were learning their children needed most from a father: his love, his time, and the promise that he would remain a constant presence in their lives. Cayden struggled to pay his child support every month. Yet he worried even more about how he was not there to comfort Alisha when she was scared of the dark, as he could do with Cayden Jr.

MEANINGS OF “BEING THERE”

To understand how much responsible fatherhood policy and programming mattered in the lives of Cayden and his fellow participants, I first needed to understand what being a responsible father meant to them. Cayden’s explanation was a preview of what I would learn while studying fathers’ experiences. In interview after interview, fathers offered the same answer to my question about the meaning of responsibility. It meant being there for their children. Without my prompting, thirty-eight of the fifty men I interviewed individually told me that being there was the defining quality of a responsible father. All the others used similar phrases such as “being around” and “showing up.” I learned that “being there” was a way of defining responsible paternal involvement even, and sometimes especially, for fathers who had little or no contact with their children. Most importantly, being there was a way of redefining what it meant to be a good provider that did not discount marginalized men like Cayden who made little money.

In this chapter, I show how poor fathers of color justified distinct meanings of paternal responsibility. These men provided crucial insight into how efforts to promote fathers’ involvement first require a deep and empathic understanding of how social and economic conditions influence the ability to craft and claim identities as responsible parents. Poor men’s life circumstances are least likely to align with stereotypical ideas of proper fathering: being married to one’s coparent; living with children in a safe, stable home; and working hard as a well-paid breadwinner. Falling short of these ideas, and consequently identifying as failed providers, can undercut individual initiative, even among the most motivated men. Although policy holds marginalized fathers responsible for the same relational and financial responsibilities as more affluent ones, society does not allow them the same means for living up to these expectations.¹

Focusing on how men construct identities as good fathers in the context of severe disadvantage is not merely an academic or intellectual exercise. Fathers’ parenting identities have profound implications for how involved they are with children, and whether they believe they deserve to be involved. Not surprisingly, fathers who view parenting as central to their sense of self are more involved with their children.² Equally important is paternal self-efficacy—how effective men think they are as parents—and if they think others judge them as good fathers.³ Those judgments depend on the criteria fathers and others use to assess good parenting, criteria that have remained remarkably consistent over time.

Fathering scholar Joseph Pleck outlined four historical phases of fatherhood, each associated with a particular idea of what a good father primarily does. These ranged from the moral teacher of the preindustrial era and the distant breadwinner of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the sex role model of the mid-twentieth century and the nurturing “new” father of the contemporary period.⁴ Financial provisioning has been central to understandings of proper fatherhood throughout all these phases. This “breadwinner ideology” is a deeply gendered understanding of family responsibility that tasks men with financially supporting an entire household through a “family wage.”⁵ The man-as-family-breadwinner ideal presumes significant economic privilege and obscures how women are primary economic providers in many families, often in addition to being primary or sole unpaid caregivers.⁶ Breadwinning is an example of what sociologists Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe called “manhood acts,” or practices through which people assert their identities as men.⁷

Given the connection between fathering and masculinity, breadwinning is also a fatherhood act that establishes and upholds men’s identities as responsible parents. Job insecurity and the inability to earn any wage, much less a wage large enough to support an entire family, can therefore present a masculinity crisis whereby men’s gender and family identities are threatened. Scholars have explored how economically vulnerable men who cannot fulfill the financial expectations of the breadwinner role redefine their gender and parental identities in ways that account for what might be called “bread-losing,” or the inability to live up to the breadwinner ideology due to unemployment or low wages.⁸ Men frequently craft flexible fathering identities in response to their socioeconomic circumstances, especially when they lack the economic markers associated with being a successful financial provider.⁹

Although stably employed fathers tend to maintain high provider expectations, fathers who are under- or unemployed focus more on the relational aspects of involvement that they feel they can more readily attain.¹⁰ Part of this is using language that signals a commitment to good parenting and the varied meanings of involvement without defining responsibility solely in terms of money. “Being there” captures this broader understanding of fathering. Sociologist Maureen Waller found that, for nonresidential fathers, being there meant communicating with and seeing their child regularly, providing emotional support and guidance, and being accessible.¹¹ They accentuated the emotional aspects of their relationships and acknowledged “new” father expectations of quality time and loving interaction. As sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson discovered, being there—which can mean anything from daily contact to occasionally buying diapers, food, or clothes—is an understanding of responsible fathering that allows men to claim the status of good-enough dads who are doing the best they can.¹² Underscoring accessibility and emotional involvement through the language of “being there” helps marginalized men manage and meet parenting expectations in the context of disadvantage.

This calls into question how most political discussions of fathering frame paternal involvement in discrete and dichotomous terms of “presence” versus “absence.” Discourses of “absentee” fathers generally assume economic, legalistic, or residential definitions of paternal responsibility, which tend to reduce fatherhood to a relational status dependent on men’s connections to women and children. In reality, many fewer men than these discourses would have us believe are completely absent from their children’s lives. Fatherhood scholars William Marsiglio and Kevin Roy argued that the “provide-and-reside” model of fathering on which policy is based is out of sync with how many parents, including mothers, express diverse and nuanced definitions of responsibility.¹³

Men doubly marginalized by poverty and racism tend to struggle the most with living up to breadwinning expectations of paternal responsibility. Ideas of responsible fatherhood embedded in directives to support “a child’s intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being” incorporate traditional aspects of economic providing with contemporary ideas of emotional and social engagement. I learned that, for poor men of color, these “newer” ideas of nurturing fatherhood meant that they now risk failing in numerous ways as parents. The main problem for the men in DADS was that their social and economic constraints prevented them from achieving either traditional or contemporary fathering goals.

Breadwinning is often talked about as the component of responsible fatherhood economically vulnerable men can least afford. Yet both the financial and emotional components of fathering have costs that often surpass their means. Fathers who do not live with their children, as was the case with many DADS participants, are more likely to spend time with kids when they have more economic resources; those who do live with children are more likely to contribute financially as a replacement for time and care.¹⁴ That money is often a prerequisite or substitute for other forms of involvement suggests that more flexible definitions of fathering rarely translate into more emotional engagement when fathers’ breadwinning capabilities falter. As was the case for DADS participants, this signals how broader ideas of paternal engagement can validate men as more than mere breadwinners, while simultaneously setting them up to feel inadequate as both providers and caregivers.

Fathers’ stories reflected this harsh reality. They also revealed how men actively used the program to claim identities as responsible fathers and deflect stigma that they were failed providers and parents. A primary way they did so was by co-opting the language of provision, which traditionally denoted fathers’ financial responsibilities, and using it to describe the value of fathers’ time, love, and existence. By defining a “good provider” as one who gives of himself, especially in the context of deep poverty, fathers were able push back against the controlling image of the “deadbeat dad.”¹⁵ Men viewed DADS as an opportunity to improve their job prospects and their children’s lives. Even more so, they experienced it as a rare space for the performance of important boundary work. For them DADS was not just a social program. It was a unique place where they could draw symbolic, relational, and sometimes even physical boundaries between the men they used to be and the fathers they wanted to become.

This chapter explores how marginalized men used particular frameworks of fathering and providing to make claims about their moral worth as responsible parents. Sociologist Ann Swidler theorized how people in distinct structural locations develop different cultural “toolkits” they can use to create strategies of action that solve their problems in emotionally resonant ways.¹⁶ DADS gave men additional conceptual tools to understand and justify involvement in nonfinancial terms. They relied on program messages to explain their parenting choices, shape high-status paternal identities, and resist characterizations as deadbeat dads. Ultimately, they selected and interpreted meanings of responsibility that most aligned with their abilities. This signified how marginalized men still feel accountable to breadwinning-plus definitions of good fathering directly at odds with their life circumstances, but also how they make sense of the structural inequalities that shape their parenting.

The “new” father ideal codified in policy may be a more flexible definition for privileged men who can mobilize their social and economic resources to meet (or outsource) the simultaneous demands of providing money, time, and care. However, marginalized men can experience expanded notions of the father’s role as more restrictive when deep poverty and racism limit living up to multiple components of responsible parenthood. That Cayden paid little in child support and had no contact with Alisha meant that he feared falling short in multiple ways as a father. DADS helped him manage these insecurities by giving him a space to claim and enact an identity as a good father—“not a deadbeat”—who was “here” and “trying.” One of the most significant components of DADS was how it framed the nonfinancial aspects of fathering as valuable forms of provision, allowing men without class and race privilege to assert identities as successful providers.

REDEFINING THE GOOD PROVIDER ROLE

Fathers described how their prior understandings of being there focused on “providing” or being a “good provider,” but not just financial resources. DADS validated this breadwinning-plus model of fatherhood that the fathers already valued. They defined providing as giving children money and material goods, such as diapers, but just as importantly time, opportunity, and a father committed to their well-being. Fathering classes offered through DADS reinforced this multidimensional idea of provision, including physical presence, emotional engagement, and monetary support. The 24/7 Dads classes many took explicitly taught men to think of providing in this broader way by noting that “the problem that many dads have is that they allow work to control their lives so much that they lose sight of how much they value family and the relationship between work and family. They think of themselves as providers of money or that providing money is so important that it’s okay to not provide in other ways.”¹⁷ Although working too much was rarely a problem fathers in DADS had, given their limited job prospects, many explained how the classes helped them better see themselves as providers of all things children needed to thrive. Fathers repeatedly described to me the importance of supporting their children financially, but also insisted that money alone was insufficient for being a responsible father. Men’s participation in the program helped them rearrange the hierarchy of responsibilities in their estimations of the father role.

Challenging the idea that breadwinning should be a father’s main parenting priority, respondents stressed how time, care, and their participation in DADS were ways of being there that most benefited children. Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old Black father of two, told me that the most valuable lesson DADS taught him is the importance of providing a father’s time:

I’m there. I teach him right from wrong. I buy him clothes. . . . I take him to school. I pick him up, send him to doctor’s appointments, help him with his homework, and teach him how to play sports. . . . The classes taught us to be there, not just financially, but physically. . . . Spending time with your kids is the most important. Money goes and comes, but time goes and don’t come back. I’m there from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep. I was there to see his first crawl.

Like Cayden and Taylor, most fathers described good providers as those who go beyond breadwinning to be there physically and emotionally. This was something they believed before joining the program.

Still, messages from DADS were crucial for reinforcing their breadwinning-plus script of responsible fatherhood. The program’s emphasis on the importance of care and time was symbolically powerful to men who relied on these messages to develop a sense of themselves as good providers, despite the various life circumstances that prevented them from offering children much money. DADS helped men rationalize that their presence was even more important than finances. Fathers learned that time was a finite resource in a way money was not and something only a father could offer. Although money was certainly finite for men in DADS, they came to understand paternal presence as even more valuable and scarce. These messages gave fathers something they never had before: a framework for understanding their worth to children as providers in a way not dependent on education, employment, or earnings.

How men used the language of provision to describe responsible fatherhood reflected this new understanding. When talked about in relation to fathering, the terms provide and provider generally indicate supplying the money or material goods necessary to meet children’s needs for food, clothing, housing, and the like. Notably, however, the fathers I spoke with talked about provision in terms of meeting their children’s needs for attention, protection, instruction, and nurturance. That DADS staff and the curriculum discussed providing in this way helped fathers conceptualize paternal provision in broader, more inclusive terms. Michael, a twenty-four-year-old Latino father of two, told me: “Some people think that being a good dad is . . . providing stuff for them. I think being a good father is actually being there emotionally and physically and providing care for them, such as when they’re sick.” For fathers, this redefinition of the good provider role helped them reframe successful fathering around components of parenthood they could attain.

As part of fathers’ identity work, it allowed them to claim identities as good providers in ways that were possible in spite of their economic obstacles. Dustin, a twenty-two-year-old Black father of one, talked about providing as supplying all the tangible and intangible things his daughter needed to thrive: “Being there is the ability to provide for all their needs, being able to pay rent and do things like that, but not only that. It’s about preparing for her future, reading to your daughter, teaching your daughter, talking to her, taking her out to the park, having family moments, keeping her away from all the music, all the negative stuff. . . . Providing is not just money. My own dad gave me lots of money, but he didn’t really provide because he wasn’t really there.” According to these men, providing was an all-encompassing term that captured the many varied components of responsible fatherhood. They believed it was equally as important to provide things as it was to provide a dependable father-child relationship through which children felt safe and loved, created fond memories, and learned to trust others. Facundo, a nineteen-year-old Latino father of one, described providing as being there “at soccer games, taking him out for ice cream, sitting on the couch with him watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating cereal.” For Caleb, a forty-year-old Native American father of three, being a good provider meant that “ain’t nobody sitting at the award ceremony at school looking for Dad.”

Defining providing and being there outside the bounds of breadwinning also helped fathers emotionally manage how work and care responsibilities conflict when time was a limited resource. Curtis, an eighteen-year-old Latino father of one, told me that DADS “teaches you that you’re not a bad dad if you can’t give your kid what they want, all the extra things. You’re not a bad dad for that. You can’t get mad at yourself. All you can do is try harder. If you work a lot and go home tired, and you can’t really socialize with your family because you’ve got to get up in a couple hours, you can’t hate yourself for that. Sometimes you can only do one thing, either your family or your job. Sometimes in providing for your family you’re struggling with your family.” Curtis learned that being a good father meant having to make hard choices between the different components of involvement. Like others, he described time spent at work as a way of spending time on behalf of, if not with, his children.

Other fathers talked about providing as what a responsible father should not do to be there for his children. As the 24/7 Dads curriculum noted, this included not putting breadwinning and money above children’s other needs. David, a twenty-two-year-old Black father of one, explained that being there is about “making sure they have everything they need, . . . being at all their school events, so she can look up and see me there. But it also means not putting work before my daughter.” Tanner, a thirty-seven-year-old multiracial father of two, participated in DADS through a residential drug addiction treatment program, an alternative to a second lengthy prison sentence. He described how being there as a good provider was about making a deliberate decision to avoid drugs: “Being a provider means giving emotional support, guidance, and living up to the whole statement of the difference between right and wrong. It means never being on that side of the glass ever again, to not put my kids and my loved ones through that.”

Like Tanner, almost half of the fathers had spent some time incarcerated since their children were born. Many also had histories of life-threatening gang involvement. For these fathers, being a provider meant doing anything necessary to stay alive and maintain contact with their children outside penal institutions. Maintaining sobriety, avoiding the streets, and staying alive and out of jail were all parts of “being there” as a good provider who was always present in the most literal sense. “My kid kept me off the streets,” explained Marshall, a twenty-year-old Black father of one, “and now I’m in the house daily, trying to create a better future. I play around with him, talk to him, let him know that I love him.” None of that would be possible, he concluded, if he went back to “street life” and got killed. Focusing on presence and attention as unique forms of paternal provision was a key way fathers overcame insecurities that they were not worthy of being in their children’s lives. Fathers also coped with this fear by claiming identities specifically as providers of upward mobility for their children.

PROVIDING OPPORTUNITY

Men explained how being a good provider meant offering their children very different lives than the ones they had lived. Protection was a recurring theme in fathers’ descriptions of provisioning. This meant keeping their children physically safe, but also protecting them from the hardships of poverty. Given their limited means, “responsibility” often entailed significant personal sacrifice from fathers. Caleb told me: “I wear rags, but my son has everything he needs. I save up for his presents, even if that means I only drink one cup of coffee a day and don’t eat much.” Arturo, a twenty-two-year-old Latino father of one, had struggled since he could remember, especially after his grandmother who raised him passed away when he thirteen. He had to quit school and start working in the fields to support his younger siblings. He was homeless for two years and struggled to find consistent off-season work. After he returned to school, he was expelled for gang-related fighting. Arturo found out he was a father when his daughter was three months old. This discovery, he told me, kicked his “protector-provider reflex” into high gear, a feeling he knew well since he was a teen:

I had to step up and lose that part of my life of going to high school just to work and pay bills. I was the only kid in the fields. Having [my daughter] brought back the responsibility of when I was thirteen years old, having to pay all these bills and making sure I got money to my mom. Now I have to make sure I make this money so I can provide for my daughter. I don’t want her to go through the stuff I went through. . . . I became a dad in a week. Being there for her means that I’m actually willing to protect my family at any cost no matter what danger they’re going to be in. That means that you got to be willing to sacrifice yourself to make sure they’re safe and in a good place, which means making sure she has a better life than I grew up having.

Fathers’ emphasis on giving children a better life was in part about giving them money and things. More than this, though, for fathers like Arturo, providing meant protecting their children from similar lives characterized by danger and deprivation.

Being a provider in this sense involved becoming a barrier between their children and the hunger, homelessness, gangs, drugs, jail, and early work they themselves knew all too well. To be this kind of bulwark, fathers believed they needed to forge different life paths, which entailed cutting off ties to family members and friends they believed kept them anchored to disadvantage. Ricardo, a twenty-two-year-old Latino father of two, enrolled in the program for this very reason. He was there to get “on the right track for my kids, to start going forward. Being there and being a good dad is not giving up on them for things like drugs and addiction. . . . In trying to move forward, I have to get away from family members that are involved in gangs. Staying on the right path means I got to cut off some of these connections. I can choose to be in their lives or my kids’ lives.” This was not an easy choice. To cope with homelessness, hunger, and the constant threat of violence that cast a pall over their young lives, many fathers turned to the gangs that made up a large part of their communities—and their families. Many of their own fathers, brothers, and cousins, the men they trusted and often the only men they really knew, initiated them when they were barely teenagers. “Going forward” for fathers like Arturo and Ricardo meant turning away from these support networks that at earlier points in their lives had protected them from worse fates.

Being there and protecting children in these ways would involve, as Ricardo concluded, “making two lives right” out of the only “wrong” one he had ever known. More than providing opportunities for upward mobility, it was about protecting children from disadvantage by providing a barrier between them and the poverty, gangs, and incarceration that hindered fathers’ own life chances. As with Ricardo, this goal often compelled fathers to make difficult choices about long-standing social connections and lucrative, yet illegal, activities. To Keegan, a twenty-one-year-old Black father of three, being there meant his “kids knowing that I’m coming back at night,” a sense of security he did not experience due to his own father’s perilous gang involvement and frequent incarceration. He risked this security for his children by writing bad checks that led to a three-month stint in jail. Keegan blamed this, in part, on his own pride: “A couple of checks were just to have money, but I got caught the last time because we didn’t have no diapers. We couldn’t afford both diapers and formula, and we needed both. I told myself, ‘I’m going to do this one last time.’ I didn’t want to borrow money, so I wouldn’t have to owe nobody.” Reliving what he saw as a child, Keegan was arrested in front of his son, the one who needed those diapers. From that point on, being there was about never going through that again, even if that meant having to ask for help when money ran out.

When fathers talked about being providers of protection, they meant keeping children away from physical harm, but even more so, from material hardship and fears of losing their parents. Enrique, an eighteen-year-old Latino father of one, told me: “To be a good dad is to make sure she doesn’t go where I’ve been, to provide her a different life. I wouldn’t want my daughter to go through what I did. I want her to graduate, to be successful, to not struggle, not worry about bills. I want her to be happy, to not live in homeless shelters like I have.”

Elias, a twenty-one-year-old Latino father of one with another on the way, also described how paternal responsibility was primarily about radically changing his life and safeguarding his children from the anxiety and deprivation of his own childhood. A gang member since the age of ten after being “jumped in” by brothers and cousins, Elias had been shot three times and dropped out of school with the hopes of becoming a Marine and leaving gang life and poverty behind. Although that did not work out as he had planned, he acknowledged his “luck” that he was still alive. He wanted most of all to provide his children with more options, ones not limited to “choices” between gangs, prison, poverty, or death. He explained:

I don’t want my kids raised around this neighborhood, the place where I was from, to sit here and see that it would be OK to be a gang member. I didn’t want to fail as a father. I was scared of getting locked up or getting shot again, and my son’s father getting ripped from him without him even finding out who I am. . . . I want them to be in a good, stable environment where his parents ain’t fighting or beating each other up. . . . On top of supporting them financially, I want to make sure they can get into a good school, start a little savings fund, something just so that they don’t have to struggle in life like I did.

As Elias proudly showed me a sonogram image of his unborn child on his cell phone, he pointed to his heart and said: “I want this child to just fly through life, go to college, do something, pursue a dream. This child will be and have more than me.”

Likewise, for his classmate Rodrigo, a nineteen-year-old multiracial expectant father, being there and providing more for his unborn daughter meant being in a position to provide the security he was not able to offer during his girlfriend’s first pregnancy, which they chose to terminate:

I was with the wrong people, selling drugs, and got in trouble. Some guys tried to rob me, I got kicked out of school for fighting, and we aborted our first baby. This baby is due in two months. I really wanted that first child, but I didn’t feel like I had a say in keeping it because I couldn’t provide for it. But now I’m working and back on track to take care of the baby. The abortion fucked us both up. I still dream about that baby. Now I’m working, and I don’t want someone else raising this kid. A good dad’s first priority is safety. I want my daughter to dream, to have a life, and I’m trying to make that life right.

Rodrigo, still deeply disturbed over the abortion, articulated a particular pro-life stance—that is, that having a life meant having the means to dream. Doing right by his daughter, and really giving her life, would mean providing her with opportunities for upward mobility.

Some fathers were not as critical of illegal activities if those activities enabled them to provide children with these kinds of opportunities. For them, provision was less about things and more about intent. Owen, a twenty-year-old multiracial father of three, noted that “being a good dad has nothing to with money, but with the intention behind the actions you do. If you’re selling drugs to help put food inside your family’s mouths, not to sit there and buy big chains and a car with big old rims and stuff like that, if it’s to help pay for gas or electric bills, then that’s the definition of a good dad. You’re going about it the wrong way, but it’s still the definition of a good dad, someone doing what he needs to do for his family.” For these fathers, being there as providers had many components. Parsing them in these ways was a powerful form of symbolic boundary work that entailed drawing distinct lines between responsible fathers who did whatever was necessary to promote upward mobility for children and those who only cared about themselves. It was about giving their children missing social and economic advantages, which included money, but also knowledge, good values, and a father to keep them on the right paths in school and work. Being a responsible dad also meant providing prosperity by protecting children from the circumstances and choices fathers believed had derailed their own lives and plans for advancement. Enrolling in DADS was their attempt to change their children’s life chances and to break their link in the intergenerational cycle of poverty. For many, doing so meant providing, first and foremost, a father himself—one who need not be successful by conventional breadwinning standards to have value and worth as a parent.

PROVIDING A FATHER

Most men described fully “being there” as a provision of the self. This was particularly important for those who did not have consistent contact with their own fathers or saw them as mere financial providers. A father who provided of himself was one who gave his children time and attention, but also the cognitive and spiritual components of involvement. Fathers spoke often of providing their children prayers and positive thoughts and feelings. Ricky, a twenty-two-year-old Black father of one, put this most pointedly when he told me that being a good father and provider meant: “just being around. That’s it. You can be the brokest, the dumbest, the ugliest, the cutest, the baddest, the goodest. I don’t care, just be around your child. I’m around my child every second I can. I ain’t never had the big stuff, and all I wanted from my father was for him to say, ‘Hey, son.’ I think about my kid every second, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year. He’s on my mind. How I think and feel is what makes me a good dad.” Ricky regretted that he saw his son, William, only on the occasional weekend and that his low earnings prevented him from buying more. That he thought about William the rest of the time and bought what his meager means would allow, however, made him feel like a good father and provider. The program’s emphasis on the importance of paternal presence, despite low earnings, reinforced men’s beliefs that responsible fatherhood is not necessarily about providing money, which is often out of fathers’ control. Rather, they told me, it is about doing the best one can, especially by making personal sacrifices on behalf of their children.

Randy, a twenty-nine-year-old Black father of three, talked about being there in this way and explained that taking care of his kids entailed “spending time with them, buying what I can, trying to hang out when I can, and just talking to them about life. I ain’t really got no money, but I do what I can.” Homeless and often hungry, Randy proudly confided to me that he used some of his food stamps to buy milk for his children and sold the rest to get his daughter diapers and wipes. He skipped many meals to do so. He provided for his children, he reasoned, using the currency of his own comfort and well-being. To Ricky, Randy, and others, responsible fathering emerged from these kinds of “doing what I can” sacrifices. In acknowledging that they gave their children relatively little compared to better-off fathers, they also highlighted that what they gave was a greater portion of the very little they had, usually at the expense of meeting their own basic needs. This emphasis on selflessness and the idea that children need fathers’ presence as much as they need money was one way men claimed identities as worthy fathers who provided value to their children’s lives. To echo Ricky, even the “brokest” and “baddest” fathers had a lot to offer by just being proximate to their kids.

From fathers’ perspectives, time and presence were the most valued assets they, and only they, could offer their children. Jonathan, a twenty-three-year-old Latino father of two, communicated this when he told me: “If you can imagine a kid, and you just send them money and keep a roof over their head, and they’re just there growing up on their own, they have some of what they need, but they’re missing out on you. How would they know right from wrong?” Other kids may have more money and things, Jonathan noted, but his children were “more privileged” than those with breadwinning-only rich fathers. He believed that such kids were impoverished in terms of what really matters—a father who loves and values them enough to be around and spend his precious time with them.

In drawing symbolic boundaries between themselves and other fathers who provided only money, albeit a lot more than they could, fathers in DADS stressed how money could not replace the value of fathers’ time, attention, and wisdom. Anyone, they rationalized, could provide money and things, but only fathers could provide a guiding paternal presence, rendering them uniquely important. Tomas, a thirty-three-year-old Latino father of three, learned this through DADS and life experience: “Don’t just tell them go outside and play, but actually try to get involved. A lot of dads aren’t active anymore. Go to a park, just play with the child, and just be there for them. The most important thing is time. You may not have a lot of money to take them to fancy places or to the mall, but if you can spend time, that would be an invaluable kind of thing you can’t replace. I’m learning from [DADS] not to just say, ‘Here’s ten dollars, where do you want to go spend it?’ ” Estranged from his two older children whom he saw only occasionally when they were young, he was trying to be a better parent with his youngest by spending time, not just money. Tomas hoped spending this time would prevent his younger child from resenting him like his older siblings did.

His classmate Maxwell, a twenty-one-year-old Black father of one, also emphasized time when describing what fathers were specifically equipped to give their children: “Being a good dad is stopping what you’re doing to spend time with your son, to teach him things, like talking, to read him books, to teach him the ABCs, and to teach him to cope. I do my money part as a father, the clothes, the diapers, the wipes, and everything, but buying diapers, clothes, and food is something that anybody can do for him. I’m the one who has to spend time and teach my son. Anybody can buy something. That’s just money. That’s not a father.” Men reasoned that they, and they alone, could give children confidence by proving that their fathers loved them enough to be and stay around.

By stressing this message, DADS helped men overcome the insecurities of being failed financial providers. Many told me that they came to the program believing they were lacking as fathers because of their inability to earn a lot of money. Harris, an eighteen-year-old Black father of one, described this feeling of inadequacy:

I came in believing I don’t have a lot to offer, but I was going to make sure I’m in my kid’s life. I don’t have a big house and a lot of toys to give my son. All I can give him is love and quality time and show him I really care about him. . . . I don’t have a spot. I don’t have a house. I don’t really have anything. But I now know I was worrying about the wrong things, about how I was going to provide for him, instead of being a father. That’s how my dad was, a financial father spoiling me with money, not with time.

Through DADS Harris was learning to challenge benchmarks of good fathering that depended on privilege. With dreams of taking his son fishing and being more than the “financial father” who raised him, Harris now felt he had a lot to offer by committing his life to his son’s well-being and “spoiling [his] son with attention and quality time.”

Providing this time and attention meant facing the omnipresent threat of violence, death, and incarceration these men faced. The realization that staying alive and being around for one’s children were accomplishments and forms of provision was a catalyst for changing their lives. Ambitions of being responsible fathers who continued to defy these odds motivated them to change into the kind of people they aspired to be. This came up in the third focus group I conducted when men discussed the meanings of responsibility they were learning in DADS:

RODRIGO	(nineteen, multiracial, expectant father): A daddy is a sperm donor who just hits it and leaves, but a father is responsible.
JAMES	(nineteen, multiracial, father of two): We sit here and talk about ways to become better dads and how some dads do nothing. Dudes make babies and just leave their babies with the moms, and somebody else comes and takes responsibility.
XEO	(twenty-one, Black, father of one): Responsible fathers play a direct role in taking care of a child.
JAMES:	Right, a good dad is a person who’s there to provide and protect and love their family when they need it.
RODRIGO:	Yeah, we’re always talking here about how a father balances that with the ability to show them affection, to show them love from their father. It’s not the same as love from the mother.
JAMES:	Right, man, you got to be there to provide anything you can when you can and not just money but love, basically everything that a child needs. A dad should be there to provide for them, and they should want to be there.
XEO:	Right on! It’s just actually being there, being present, taking care of duties.
JAMES	(interrupting in agreement): Through play time, bath time, all that time with your kids.
RODRIGO	(interjecting excitedly): Yes, actively do everything!
MANUEL	(nineteen, Latino, father of one): That’s why I consider myself a good dad because any chance to be with my daughter I spend with her.
RODRIGO:	You got it, man! [DADS] is teaching us that being a father is that whole other mindset, another mentality entirely. It changes who you are. It has to change you. [Everyone nods in agreement].
JAMES:	Everything about you—moneywise, who you hang around, the stuff you do, dropping a lot of the stuff you used to do—you got to change it all.
MANUEL:	I would be at home doing nothing without my baby.
JAMES:	And I’d be in the streets kicking it if I didn’t have my kids. When she was born in the hospital, they put that ink on her feet. They put her footprints on my shirt. Right then, right there, I’m thinking, “Damn, I got to start doing something right now. Everything has to change. Everybody I hang out with got to go.”
MANUEL	(shaking his head and sighing in deep agreement): The only thing that stops me from being a better dad is not being able to live with my daughter. I got to change that.
XEO:	I have chills right now. [JR: Why?] They’re in my head. They’re talking about what I’m going through, what I’m living through with my kids.

A consensus emerged around the belief that responsible fatherhood necessitated a fundamental shift in how men spent their time, who they spent it with, and essentially how and why they were living. DADS helped men redefine fatherhood and fathers’ value to children in emotionally resonant ways that made sense given their social and economic constraints. By validating this multifaceted understanding of responsibility, namely the idea that “good providers” offer their unique love, care, and time, DADS gave men conceptual tools to make claims about their moral worth as responsible parents. This allowed men to understand and justify their paternal involvement in nonfinancial ways. Beyond this, it helped them develop and claim a high-status paternal identity not grounded in the exclusionary white middle-class breadwinner ideology. Program messages co-opted the language of provision to challenge the notion that responsible fatherhood requires race and class privileges. In doing so, they helped men resolve identity challenges rooted in fears of being failed fathers.

Hence “being there” was not just about presence. It was about becoming and being a different kind of person who put their children first in terms of money, time, and identity. A responsible father is someone who identifies foremost as a provider, protector, and teacher of his children. Living up to this identity entails changing into a person worthy of these responsibilities, a goal that drove many men to DADS. Alex, a twenty-four-year-old Latino father of one, described in another focus group to passionate nods of agreement how society expects so little of poor fathers of color: “It would be easy to walk away from being a dad and confirm all those stereotypes. But we’re here, we’re students, we’re making money, which can take us away from our families. We’re trying to actually take that step forward and raise a kid in spite of all of it.” To Alex and his fellow participants, being there as responsible fathers involved more than just being around. It required defying racist, classist, and gendered labels about who they fundamentally were and what they were capable of for the sake of their children. “Being there” meant not confirming stereotypes about men of color being mere “sperm donors” who “just hit it and leave,” even when others believed that was all they were fit to do.

Like James, who felt changed the moment his daughter’s footprints were stamped on his shirt, most men described becoming fathers as the most profound experience of their lives. This was true even for those whose children were unplanned. Children’s existence—and their fathers’ reckoning with such an awe-inspiring responsibility—altered the fathers and their sense of self, despite how much they were able to see their kids. Peter, a twenty-three-year-old Black father of two, did not find out he was a father until his oldest son turned a year old. This discovery filled a void in his life and in his identity: “I prayed for this child. I just wanted someone that I can love, support, and everything. My son filled a hole. . . . A good dad is a provider. He also knows how to relate to his child. He always knows what the child is doing, what they can do, what they can’t, their personality.” This deep knowledge of his son gave Peter’s life meaning it was missing before. Unfortunately, that was tempered by the reality that he barely saw his children after their mother got a new boyfriend. “It’s been three weeks since I last saw them, and when I leave, I don’t know when I’m seeing them again.” This uncertainty devastated Peter, but it did not undermine his motivation or identity as a parent. He concluded after describing to me the pain of separation from his children: “You still got to wake up. Either way it goes, you’re a father.” For Peter, being there as a responsible dad meant persevering in the face of extreme hardship and having someone to love unconditionally, someone whose mere existence rendered you valuable despite any personal, social, or economic shortcomings. This life purpose was a gift, one that fathers believed they were beholden to give back by being there in mind, body, and spirit. As men talked about what they believed fathers should provide for their children, they also revealed what children provided for them: a sense of purpose and a vicarious upward mobility.¹⁸

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN IDENTITY AND INVOLVEMENT

Although almost all the men told me they identified as good fathers committed to being there for their children, many were involved much less than they wanted. Several indicated that participating in DADS was a way of “being there” because it meant they were working to improve their parenting skills, employability, and coparenting relationships. This aspirational way of thinking about involvement came up most when talking with nonresident fathers who believed that time spent away from children now because of work or school would ultimately allow them to be better, more involved dads in the future.

One particularly poignant conversation about this was with Emmett, a twenty-four-year-old Black father of one deceased child, who described through tears how participation in the program allowed him to maintain his identity as an involved father. He was grieving the death of his daughter, Shannon, who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when she was twenty-eight days old. During our interview eight months after her passing, he expressed deep regret that he did not spend more time with her during her brief life: “I came for [Shannon]. I didn’t come back for myself at all. . . . I continue on the right path to better myself and live, or I go back to what didn’t get me nowhere . . . , making me more depressed. Now I’m here for myself to better myself and possibly for my children in the future. . . . I don’t have her, but I am a spiritual dad. I’m not a dad on this earth, but I’m a father to a child in heaven.” Being in the program allowed fathers like Emmett to claim identities as good dads and providers who showed up to work or school each day and strove for upward mobility for their children. DADS offered men a way of being there when they were unable to see or spend more money on behalf of their children.

Thus, to fathers, being there was not always about direct interaction with children. It could even mean the opposite, in the sense that long stretches of time away from children, especially due to work, indicated commitment to families. The reasons for separation determined if they were “there” or not. Fathers believed they were involved dads even when they were incarcerated or otherwise rarely saw kids. They rationalized that intent mattered more than the level of interaction, especially when they were trying to improve their own lives on behalf of their children. Orlando, a thirty-five-year-old Latino father of five, told me: “Kids need to know their father’s time.” By this, he meant that children knew where their fathers were and when they would see them next. Childhood memories of not knowing when and how much they would see their dads motivated men to prevent this doubt and disappointment for their own children. This is also why men understood participation in program activities as time spent physically away from children, but emotionally and psychologically with them. Knowing a father’s time meant children knew that their dads were safe and doing something for their benefit.

Still, money was central to men’s understandings of responsibility, and many felt demoralized as failed providers when they lacked the means to give their children more. Despite fathers’ efforts to rationalize their relational, rather than just financial, value to children, many still grappled with the breadwinner ideology. Aaron, a twenty-one-year-old multiracial father of three, tried “not to shut myself out of their lives because I’m not providing enough.” His children’s mother would give him a list each month of the items his children needed. He was proud of the times he could afford to buy every item. Yet some months he came up short, prompting him to look for a second job. He too emphasized the importance of being there by “listening, physically and mentally, and understanding my kids’ habits.” But he dreamed of being able to buy anything his children needed or wanted. When their mother gave him that list, he wanted to be able to “tell her, ‘OK, sure, give me a second. I’ll go get the money and bring it right over,’ without even really thinking or worrying how I’m going to make it and help them pay the bills.” A truly responsible father, he concluded, was the kind who could take his child to a store “and say, ‘Pick out anything you want,’ without giving it a second thought. He’s not someone who encourages their child to want less than the best because that is all he can afford.” Like Aaron, many fathers described being there in aspirational terms, as in what they would do if unconstrained by lack of money. These descriptions conjured up images of possible selves who were successful earners and financially comfortable family men. They saw DADS as their only route to making these aspirations a reality.

This is likely why forty-five of the fifty fathers I interviewed told me they believed they were good fathers doing their best to fulfill their parenting responsibilities. Four others told me they were at least moderately good fathers. Only one said unequivocally that he was a bad father. Alas, almost everyone admitted they had doubts about their claims of being good dads, sensing that their actions did not always fully align with their understandings of being there in terms of how much they gave to and saw their children. Fathers blamed themselves for these shortcomings, while simultaneously acknowledging the barriers that prevented them from living up fully to their own definitions of responsible fatherhood. Low wages, geographic distance, homelessness, lack of transportation, custody arrangements, restraining orders, tense relationships with coparents, and addiction, among many other reasons, prevented men from realizing their parenting ambitions. The DADS program was essential in these cases for bridging the gap between men’s paternal identities as involved fathers and their actual behaviors influenced by multiple and often insurmountable barriers. It was a unique situated space where they could redefine being a good provider as not just a parent committed to giving children financial support, but a father who loved them enough to change his life and life chances for their future well-being.

BEING THERE AS BEST THEY CAN

The men’s stories aligned with Edin and Nelson’s finding that marginalized fathers espouse a “doing the best I can” ethos that justifies providing materially only on an as-able basis, often through highly visible or essential items such as expensive sneakers or formula and diapers.¹⁹ Given that this rarely covers half the actual costs of raising a child, mothers and others still believe that fathers’ attempts to do what they can often fall far short of enacting the responsible parent role. Fathers’ narratives indicated that they too were acutely aware of these perceived inadequacies and worked hard to develop identities as responsible fathers who reject narrow expectations of financial provision. On the surface, the result is a flexible and vague conception of responsibility whereby “being there” can mean doing anything on behalf of children.

Yet, considering the inequalities that structure the lives of marginalized fathers, being there—even its most essential component of staying alive—was no small feat for the men who found their way to DADS. It entailed resisting the pressure, both economic and social, to participate in illegal underground economies and gang activity, which risks cutting off paternal involvement if a father is incarcerated or, even worse, if he is killed. This resistance often requires fathers to cut off ties with close friends and family members. It also resigns them to the very low-wage sector of the formal labor market where even full-time work rarely earns enough to support a lone individual, much less a family. That these were core concerns of most of the men with whom I spoke revealed the inherent limitations of using definitions of paternal involvement based on white middle-class men as a starting point for political discussions of fathering. These accounts compel the question: What does “responsible fathering” look like when a man must worry that he may not make it to his child’s next birthday?

These findings also showed how government programs enhance marginalized fathers’ abilities to devise parenting scripts that allow them to resolve fundamental identity conflicts resulting from inequality. More broadly, they suggest how definitions of responsible fatherhood focused on time and care can be as problematic as those that emphasize breadwinning. Racism and economic vulnerability do not just undercut the ability of poor fathers of color to provide financially for their children. They prevent many from “being there” according to any definition.

Programs that focus on fathers’ identity regarding issues of breadwinning and caregiving represent a radical shift in how policy intervenes in fathering. Political definitions of good fatherhood in the United States have hinged on economic self-sufficiency and family financial support. In a significant departure from these criteria, responsible fatherhood programs may be one of the most important political and social contexts for developing men’s abilities to assert identities as successful men and fathers who circumvent singular expectations of economic providership.²⁰

Offering fathers a space to connect with similarly situated men allows them to share and confide with others who empathize with what it is like to be on the margins of families and society.²¹ By increasing men’s sense of belonging and promoting a more inclusive understanding of family, fathering, and masculinity, programs can also be catalysts for changed perceptions of the gendered attributes of parenting.²² They are also politically redefining what fatherhood means outside the narrow bounds of biological paternity, marriage to children’s mothers, and financial child support. Shifting the perspective about the intended goals of fatherhood policies—from one solely focused on fathers’ finances and children’s outcomes to one that also acknowledges the importance of validating how men define, negotiate, and manage fathering expectations—is a powerful strategy for reducing the marginalization of men in family policy.²³

Fathers’ stories also reinforced the importance of designing policies and programs around the cultural dimensions of parenting that most make sense in the context of marginalized men’s lives.²⁴ We must understand how and why particular models of fathering resonate more with low-income men because they account for the inequalities that profoundly shape their lives. Without this insight, definitions of fathering embedded in policy risk reinforcing those inequalities and culture-of-poverty assumptions about marginalized men’s parenting. Fathers’ narratives specifically point to the need to rethink paternal “responsibility” in the context of deeply entrenched structural constraints. Government definitions that task fathers with addressing children’s full needs obscure how living up to one component of responsibility can jeopardize fulfilling others. Like Cayden, who quit high school to care for newborn Alisha, numerous fathers I studied experienced social and economic setbacks as the results of putting their children’s needs first. Many had to choose between higher-paying illegal and life-threatening activities and making much less to ensure that they would live long enough to see their children grow up. This suggests that marginalized fathers emphasize care and time not only because they are the components of fatherhood they can actually achieve, but because it is the most emotionally resonant way marginalized men can justify making impossible parenting choices.

“Being there” signals more than a greater focus on time and love over money in men’s descriptions of good fathering. That almost all the fathers I studied used this language indicates that it has become a common conceptual shorthand for reconciling the growing expectations of fathering and marginalized men’s inabilities to realize them. Both ubiquitous and amorphous, “being there” can refer to any level and type of involvement, even enrolling in a fatherhood program like DADS. Lest one should think this renders the phrase meaningless, I argue that the opposite is actually true. Men across lines of race and class have embraced the “new” fatherhood cultural ideal that dads should be financial providers and nurturing caregivers.²⁵ That marginalized men equally espouse this multifaceted understanding of responsibility, despite the many more obstacles they face in fulfilling it, challenges culture-of-poverty assumptions that poor fathers of color hold different parenting values.²⁶ I found that “being there” captured how men used a fatherhood program to perform paternal identity work, especially by aligning their challenging lived experiences with culturally ascendant ideas of being worthy men and fathers.

Ultimately, in carefully listening to these men, I discovered how DADS helped them tailor their definitions of good parenting and providing to account for the socioeconomic constraints that eroded connections to their children. The program was an opportunity to abandon lifestyles, relationships, and disadvantages that undermined their fathering capabilities. As importantly, it helped them negotiate definitions of “good” versus “bad” fathers and reconfigure dominant fatherhood scripts—especially that of the good provider—based on the experiences of white middle-class men and the implicit exclusion of men like them. Cayden and his classmates pursued the program to align their identities as responsible fathers based on a breadwinning-plus script with their behaviors. As I show in the next chapter, what they found was a group of people who validated these flexible, more inclusive meanings of “being there” and helped them access the resources they needed to live up to them.