with time and care.47 Highlighting the emotional and relational components of parenting allows low-income fathers who lack the economic markers associated with being a successful breadwinner to claim a good-father identity in the context of disadvantage. Stressing presence and affection allows marginalized men to bridge the gap between middle-class idealized images of fatherhood and their own experiences limited by economic constraint. That unemployed men are more likely to emphasize time and care over money as key features of good fathering points to how inequality shapes definitions of responsible fatherhood.48
Although marginalized fathers embrace these broader definitions, they still struggle to relinquish earning as central to their paternal identities and to develop a sense of themselves as parents with status and value. Part of this is because many policies, especially child support enforcement, still prioritize and mandate through punitive sanctions men’s monetary contributions to children over other aspects of their parenting. This is where fatherhood programs intervene. By stressing the importance of fathers’ presence and emotional involvement and helping men overcome financial barriers, responsible fatherhood policy is a distinct departure from how welfare policies have historically marginalized men as mere wage earners and support payers.49 It officially recognizes men’s commitments to provide care, not just money. This is crucial for men at the center of social scorn and panic over fathering, those like Christopher whom society dehumanizes by casting them as failed providers.
It is difficult to address the underlying issues that make it hard for fathers to be and stay involved, including little education, few job skills, criminal histories, and relationship conflict. It is therefore easy to dismiss these programs as a futile policy experiment. Yet they seek to capitalize on how fathers who enroll in these programs genuinely want to comply with child support orders, cooperate with their children’s other parent(s), and see their children regularly.50 These programs may be successful, not in that they fix the structural issues that undermine fathering, but in how they stand to provide what our society often denies marginalized men: a space to develop and claim identities as good fathers outside the bounds of whiteness, marriage, and money.
Fatherhood programs, most of which are funded through government grants, are constrained by federal guidelines that require activities focused to some extent on “healthy marriage,” “responsible parenting,” and “economic stability.”51 Pursuant to these top-down requirements, most programs emphasize marriage and two-parent families to some degree. Yet many focus on education, jobs, and fathering classes due to how poverty and unemployment can weaken men’s dignity and motivation to be engaged parents.52 The emphasis on employment also directly reflects how the responsible fatherhood provisions of welfare reform policy underscored “economic self-sufficiency” and child support enforcement as ways to reduce public welfare costs.
These distinct policy priorities signal particular and somewhat conflicting political understandings of the underlying causes of “fatherlessness.” While some assume that uninvolved fathers lack family values and personal initiative to maintain contact with children and coparents, others recognize that men’s fathering abilities and motivations develop within a larger context of opportunities and constraints.53 The reality is that most low-income fathers already possess the motivation to be involved, but lack the means and support to do so.
Policy priorities also call into question the true purpose of fatherhood programs. Are job training services about overcoming deficits in fathers’ work ethics? Or are they about providing more economic opportunity? Do men need fathering classes to teach them that they should care about and support their children? Or is their primary purpose to help fathers develop parenting and relationship skills (and what must those “skills” entail)? This all points to perhaps the most important sociological question related to responsible fatherhood policy: What is the role of government and public programs in facilitating fatherhood? Is it to supervise and modify men’s behaviors in line with dominant social expectations of “responsible” fathering? Or is it to reduce the financial and practical costs of fathers’ involvement?
These questions reveal how fatherhood as a policy issue exists at the nexus of culture and structure. Responsible fatherhood policy has a dual purpose: to shift cultural ideas of fathering and to provide resources needed to live up to those ideas. Gauging the policy’s full salience depends on asking the right questions that get at how these goals intertwine and how they might diverge. Studies of poverty policy benefit from a cultural analysis; without one, culturally unaware policies reinforce stereotypes of those forced to live in poverty.54 Polices are cultural products that reflect assumptions about deservingness, responsibility, and a society’s structure of opportunity. Cultural values also shape political narratives and the range of alternatives that policy makers envision.
Earlier generations of poverty scholars were associated with the “culture of poverty” model that explained being poor as an outcome of not having the right values. However, numerous studies of fathering among men in poverty reveal that they espouse the same cultural values of paternal responsibility as affluent fathers.55 More recent poverty scholarship focuses instead on how people respond to poverty using different cultural frameworks and narratives. Cultural concepts are useful for understanding the meanings men bring to and develop within responsible fatherhood programs. Studying fathering frames—the lenses men use to perceive and interpret their parenting—helps us understand how individuals envision what is possible for their lives. Similarly, narratives, or the stories fathers tell that causally link life events, reveal how they make sense of their identities, connections to others, and life chances.
Cultural narratives often involve what sociologist Michèle Lamont called “boundary work,” drawing conceptual distinctions between different kinds of people and practices.56 Individuals draw symbolic boundaries to differentiate themselves from others, create a shared sense of belonging, and make claims to moral worth and responsibility. Sociologist Maureen Waller’s research on the meanings low-income fathers assign to parenting revealed that men draw sharp symbolic boundaries between “good” and “bad” dads by redefining responsible involvement in ways consistent with their abilities.57 Responsible fatherhood programs merge culture and structure by providing resources for the enactment of ideas marginalized men use to claim moral worth as good fathers. Designing effective fatherhood policies and programs requires developing narratives of fatherhood that both resonate with marginalized men and account for the inequalities that constrain their parenting. Without both, there is a risk of reinforcing culture-of-poverty stereotypes and rendering invisible the unequal structural dimensions of fathering.
By focusing on fathers’ narratives and the symbolic boundaries they draw around “responsible” fatherhood, this book seeks understanding of how policy shapes the definition, evaluation, and expression of fathering among men central to political debates and directives about paternal involvement. Responsible fatherhood policies were created to target men who do not live with their children, are not married to children’s mothers, and do not make consistent support payments. The sixty-four fathers described in the chapters that follow are not representative of all nonresident or non-married fathers or those with outstanding child support obligations. Many did live with their children, several were married, and some made regular monetary or in-kind contributions to their children’s households. Still, Christopher and his classmates represent our country’s most marginalized fathers. Analyzing their experiences in DADS allows us to understand how policies intended to facilitate fatherhood might help men who encounter the most social and economic obstacles to realizing their parenting aspirations.
Any full and fair consideration of these men’s fathering narratives and experiences requires an intersectional perspective that sees race, class, and gender as interlocking forms of inequality.58 Their accounts of parenting revealed a lot about how the interplay of economic circumstances, racial discrimination, and gender identity led them to DADS. Only by understanding how the program responded to these overlapping systems of oppression can we make sense of the messages of responsible fatherhood programming. Fathers’ stories also illuminated
