Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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