He wanted to prove to his grandmother and Monique that he was committed to being a better dad than his own had been and that he was a “real man” who, despite having little money to offer, could role-model hard work, perseverance, and integrity for his son. Christopher described his time in DADS as a way of ensuring that Chris Jr. would have more, especially a father he knew and admired:
They give you the right mind frame of being able to do things. I felt good about that [DADS] certificate at the end of the day. I might not have a job, but I got up every day, I went to this class, and I attempted to do something better, to be something better. . . . I was doing something with myself instead of just running the street trying to make a couple dollars. I was actually trying to be a productive part of society. . . . We went from being on this block every day to making it to class every day. It became a priority for us, to prove our parenting.
However, as our interview continued, Christopher admitted having doubts about how much his participation in DADS actually changed his life circumstances. “We got a certificate; now what? . . . How far is two hundred dollars going to go in two weeks when you’ve got to buy food and clothe yourself? Unless you just plan on going out and hustling with it, what do you expect us to do?” With his DADS certificates proudly hung on his son’s bedroom wall, Christopher was unsure about what he would do next.
Christopher’s experience points to why responsible fatherhood policy and ideas about family and poverty that motivate it are controversial. Many view fathers like Christopher as a social problem to be solved. According to this logic, without a dad’s consistent presence in the home—what many call “father absence” or “fatherlessness”—Christopher had failed to learn how to be a good father from a parent of the same gender who modeled responsible work and family behaviors. With goals to prevent poverty and to promote child well-being, programs like DADS aim to teach men about the importance of fathers and how to meet their paternal obligations. Others criticize this logic as misrepresenting the social and economic factors that shaped Christopher’s life chances. They argue that a missing paternal presence did not doom him to poverty and incarceration; rather, a society in which poor children of color face racism and other overwhelming obstacles to education and well-paid jobs did.
Nevertheless, echoing narratives of father absence, Christopher acutely felt the lack of a father in his life. Though he had received all the resources and care he needed from his grandmother, Christopher felt like a “have-not” due to not having had a father in his life. Ultimately, despite his appreciation for the “amazing” grandmother who raised him, he still believed that a father is essential. Christopher’s deep desire for a close relationship with a man parent is a critical policy concern and the crux of the debate over the social role of fathers. What is at stake in this debate—and more importantly, in actual families like Christopher’s—is how fathering both shapes and is shaped by class, race, and gender inequalities and how policy should intervene. Given that these same inequalities influence Chris Jr.’s chances of being a “have-not,” these are high stakes.
Sociological research illuminates the aspirations and challenges of marginalized fathers who struggle to be present in their children’s lives.3 Turning away from deficit understandings of fatherhood that emphasize what fathers lack and do not do for their children, this research highlights how social and economic constraints can undermine the best fathering intentions. Many poor men of color defy the stereotype of the “deadbeat dad” who deliberately neglects his parenting responsibilities. Instead, they embrace ideas of good fathering focused on time and care that seem more attainable in the context of their constraints. Responsible fatherhood policy accords with these changing meanings of men’s parenting by officially emphasizing both the financial and relational aspects of fathering.4 Yet how it does so in practice, and especially how men like Christopher make sense of these messages, has fallen outside the purview of much of this research.5
Most studies of fatherhood programs have focused on whether they helped fathers meet federal policy goals, such as more frequent father-child contact and increased earnings.6 Although important, these variables miss the full sociological significance of responsible fatherhood policy and programming. While they address key policy metrics, they do not fully capture why fathers who go through these programs believe they come out with a more nurturing attitude but no better able to provide for or see their children. To fill that gap, Essential Dads draws on the stories of Christopher and sixty-three of his fellow DADS participants. Rather than allowing for claims of causality or program impacts, attention to fathers’ narratives captures the interpretive aspects of fathering as shaped by men’s experiences in a fatherhood program. These stories powerfully illuminate how policy shapes marginalized men’s parenting perspectives and experiences in the context of dire economic circumstances and shifting cultural expectations of fatherhood and manhood.
The ideas men brought to and learned from DADS reveal a great deal about U.S. political understandings of how fathering is implicated in inequality, the gendered dynamics of parenting, and the importance of men as parents. From this vantage point, “responsible” fatherhood is a much more complex issue than whether or not a man financially supports and interacts with his children. It requires careful consideration of the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.
With that goal in mind, this book provides new insights into what many consider one of the most pressing social problems of our time: marginalized fathers’ tenuous connections to their children. It does so by answering key questions about this understudied aspect of U.S. social policy. How do men’s understandings of paternal responsibility shape their engagement with fatherhood program messages and services? Does responsible fatherhood programming challenge or reinforce gendered, racialized, and classist ideas of parenting? What does this reveal about the potential for policy to create more equitable conditions for fathering? Answering these questions first requires that we understand how “irresponsible” fathering came to be seen as a social problem.
THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF “FATHERLESSNESS”
Responsible fatherhood programs emerged in the United States in the 1970s as a response to a complex set of social, economic, and political changes in family life and welfare policy.7 Panics over the “decline” of fathering, however, go back much further. Beginning with mothers’ pensions in the early twentieth century, U.S. welfare policy framed poverty as the result of family disruption, specifically the loss of a father and breadwinner. Drawing on this man-as-provider family model, cash assistance policies for poor families—consisting almost exclusively of impoverished mothers and their children—were conceptualized as a husband/father substitute.8
As the composition of welfare rolls changed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, race and class stereotypes converged to paint white widows as deserving of public support for doing the labor of raising children and Black single mothers as lazy, promiscuous dependents on the state. Prior to the 1940s, white widows were the majority of mothers who received welfare cash aid as compensation for deceased fathers’ wages. Those who advocated for mothers’ pensions argued that mothers without income because of the father’s death, desertion, or unemployment deserved financial assistance from the state in exchange for the valuable public service they provided as guardians and caretakers of children. As never-married and divorced mothers, especially those who were not white, began to comprise a greater share of welfare recipients, many child and welfare policy advocates criticized the state for encouraging father absence by replacing men’s expected contributions to their families with public aid.9 Much of this concern focused on Black unmarried mothers presumed to be raising the next generation of “juvenile delinquents” without fathers who were deemed necessary to teach children mainstream family values and keep them out of poverty.10
Many were also concerned about how increasing industrialization reshaped fathers’ family responsibilities to focus on breadwinning. Fearful that time spent away from children undermined
