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
