Essential Dads. Dr. Jennifer M. Randles
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