without his kid, “I’d probably be in jail.” Quick, who is black, twenty-four, and a student at the Community College of Philadelphia, says, “I’d be dead, because of the simple fact that it wasn’t until Brianna was born that I actually started to chill out.” Apple, a black twenty-seven-year-old who washes dishes six days a week at Jim’s Steaks, a hoagie shop on South Street, says, “I guess after I got caught up in the bad life, as far as jail, the kids helped me keep my head up, look forward. I got something to live for. Kids give you something to live for.” Lee, who was just laid off from an optical lab and is currently working odd jobs to get by, is an African American forty-two-year-old father. He says, “Without the kids I’d probably be a dog. I hope not with AIDS.” Thirty-seven-year-old Seven, the black on-and-off house painter, tells us, “I couldn’t imagine being without them because when I am spending time with my kids it is like, now that is love. That is unconditional love. It is like a drug that you got to have.”
For these men the imagined alternative to becoming a dad is not a college degree or a job as a CPA, it is incarceration, death, rehab, “the bad life,” “a dog with AIDS.” Kids, on the other hand, are something to live for, to fight for, “a drug that you got to have.” Self is a twenty-one-year-old African American who is certified as a home health aide but can only get part-time work at a nightclub. He recalls, “What influenced me to have children was that I felt alone. It’s a good feeling to always know that I have somebody to relate to. A child at that. Somebody that’s going to look up to me, to learn from me and things like that.”
White metal finisher and part-time construction worker Alex, age twenty-two, says that without his children, “I would be out getting high because I would not have anything. I would have my girlfriend but my baby is the most important thing in my life right now.” Will Donnelly is white, twenty-four, and works part-time as a mechanic. He teaches boxing on the side at the Joe Frazier gym.13 He says, “I think I’d probably be in jail. My little brother is in jail, and I figure without kids, whatever he was doing I’m sure I would have been doing it with him.” A white building superintendent and jack-of-all-trades, Bill is thirty-eight, and white carriage-driver Joe is now forty-five; both offer particularly poignant responses. Bill says, “I’d still be out there. I’d still be fucking off, drugs and all. I think about my kids and there’s just this hope I have now of getting a good relationship with them.” Joe responds, “Man, I wouldn’t even know how to answer that, they are such a big part of my life. I would probably be in jail down on Eighth and Race.”
We ask Lacey Jones, a black forty-two-year-old who cooks at Jessie’s Soul-on-a-Roll in North Philadelphia, “How did you see your future before you became a father?” “I didn’t have no future,” he replies. “I didn’t care. I lived for the moment.” We ask, “Did you think you would live to see forty-two?” “No. Nobody did,” Lacey admits, and then adds, “Nobody expected me to be there to see seventeen.” Lacey now lives with his fiancée and her daughter plus the nine-year-old child whom he gained custody of a year ago. He gets up at 5 a.m. to ensure he’s on time for his 7 a.m. shift, works forty hours a week, never touches anything stronger than beer, and spends most of his leisure time with family—visiting with his eighteen-year-old daughter and her kids, offering advice to his seventeen-year-old son, or spending time with his fiancée and the two little girls who live in his household. “I spend as much time as I can with my family,” he says with satisfaction.
His life wasn’t always this way, though. The two oldest children—only nine months apart—were conceived on the heels of his release from prison at age twenty-three, after his murder conviction was overturned on a technicality.14 Both women lived on his mother’s block, and “it was back and forth. I’d mess with her for a minute. I’d go mess with the other one for a minute. Once one got on my nerves, I went with the other.” In both cases, Lacey says, he was “just not thinking” when conception occurred. By age twenty-four he was incarcerated again for robbery. He began seeing the mother of his nine-year-old while in prison, where, somehow, she got pregnant; Lacey wasn’t released until the child was five. Lacey treasures all his kids, but especially the youngest, because she offers him the opportunity to watch one of his children grow up. When asked what his life would be like if he didn’t have children, he says, “I can’t imagine that one. I really can’t. I can’t imagine it. ’Cause my life without them, it would be empty. It would be empty. That’s what kept me going in prison, knowing that I had to come out and be there for them.”
How can men like Lacey even consider bringing a baby into the world when their lives are so chaotic, their relationships so fragile, and their means of support so unstable? Don’t they understand that these are not good situations for a child to be born into? We asked each father what they thought was the best time and circumstances to become a dad. Ironically, almost every response pointed to standards that the men themselves had not met when they had their first child. Andre Green is a good case in point. He counsels that men should become fathers “when they are older and married. Just wait till they get older and married.” Monte, a white twenty-one-year-old with three children already says one should be twenty-five and established before thinking about children. “You know, some people like to go to college, so that’s four years. Finish them four years of college, and then look for a job, take a job, and get some money out of that job. Then if you have a kid you’ll be able to take care of that kid.” William, white and twenty-seven, is the father of an eleven-year-old. “We were fourteen, fifteen years old,” William says, referring to the period when he and his child’s mother conceived. “You don’t have a kid that young. I believe if you’re going to have a kid, wait until at least you’re twenty-three, twenty-four years old. Because then you’re done with high school; you can go to college; you can do what you want. And then you can get yourself situated and have the kid, you know what I’m saying?”
Most men at least pay lip service to the norm that the ideal age to begin having children is in one’s late twenties or early thirties (though one put it as high as thirty-seven), because by that time one is done with school, established in the workforce, and settled down. Not until this stage, fathers claim, are men prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. A few even say that one should be married first, and should wait until several years after the wedding (past the “jittery years” of marriage, according to one who had some experience in that department).
Hill, a thirty-year-old black father with a four-year-old child, tells us, “I would say thirty because, at least for men, between thirteen and thirty years of age the world is like a playground—you don’t really know what you want to do, you just want to see how much you can do, how much you can get away with.” Thomas is a white father of a nine- and six-year-old and is currently in a halfway house finishing out a prison sentence. He is one of ten siblings, each of whom have the same mother but different fathers, and has been to jail five times in his twenty-eight years. At first Thomas refuses to give a precise age, saying only that it’s when “you’re ready to settle down.” He continues, “You’ll just get tired of partying, and even if you don’t party you want to slow your life down a little bit. Instead of going out to dinner you just want to sit home and watch the news. You know, just settle. Actually, right now would be the ideal time for me to become a father. I’m twenty-eight. Yeah, right now would probably be good, ’cause I’m done with the fast life.”
EMBRACING FATHERHOOD
The portrait of low-income fathers that emerges from these responses is striking—many clearly have a thirst for fatherhood, though they might not discover it until their partner delivers the news that she has conceived. Despite the fact that most are in very tough circumstances and believe strongly that situations like theirs aren’t the kind to bring a child into, a large majority still respond positively to the pregnancy. How do they resolve the dissonance between their desire for fatherhood and strong cultural norms—norms that they themselves seem to espouse—about the proper conditions for having children?
On the one hand, these men often show surprising optimism about the future. Yet at the same time, their narratives reveal deep uncertainty about
