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
