NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Bennett (2001, 93–94).

2. Cosby (2004).

3. Lawrence (2007).

4. Such fathers do exist, and paternity denial, while relatively rare, is more common among very young men who father a child, at least according to our data. Waldo Johnson’s in-depth interviews in Chicago and Milwaukee also show that denial of responsibility for a child is fairly rare. See Johnson (2001, 2002) as well as Parke and Brott (1999). For an ethnographic portrait of young men who do deny paternity, see the “Sex Codes” chapter in Anderson (1990).

5. For example, see Corry (1986). Conservative columnist Adam Meyerson (1989) listed the television event as one of the “One Hundred Conservative Victories” during the Reagan years, stating that “conservative wisdom on poverty becomes conventional wisdom as Bill Moyers’ report on CBS, ‘The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,’ blames breakdown of families for persistence of poverty in inner cities.”

6. Fuchs, quoted in Carmody (1986).

7. Cohen (1986).

8. Raspberry (1986).

9. Will (1986).

10. The awards include the National Television Reporting Award and the gold baton from the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University committee for the greatest contribution to the public’s understanding of important issues or news events (Belkin 1987).

11. Landsberg (1986).

12. See Moynihan (1965).

13. See Ellwood and Jencks (2002, figs. 5, 6).

14. See Martin, Hamilton, and Sutton (2010, 8). These trends wouldn’t spark the same degree of concern if unwed partnerships were as stable as marriages. Though half of unwed parents are living together at the time their children are born and 80 percent say they are romantically involved, such relationships are exceedingly fragile—far more so than marital ties (McLanahan 2011). By age five, only about a third (34 percent) of those born outside of a marital union will still share a household with their dad, while 85 percent of children born to marital unions will do so (Manning, Smock, and Majumdar 2004).

15. Figures for college-educated women are 2 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 26 percent for Hispanics, and 27 percent for non-Hispanic blacks. Corresponding figures for high school dropouts are 62 percent for whites, 50 percent for Hispanics, and 87 percent for blacks (unpublished calculations performed by Kelly Musick, 2012). Manning, Smock, and Majumdar (2004) show that by age five, the odds of disruption are 14 percent for white, 16 percent for Hispanic, and 25 percent for black children.

16. There are important exceptions to this generalization. Two demonstration projects, one conducted by Public Private Ventures and the other by the Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation, were quite revealing. See Achatz and MacAllum (1994) and Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992). Excellent recent qualitative studies on the subject portray black inner-city fathers as caring parents desiring involvement with their progeny. See Hamer (2001), Waller (2002), and Young (2004).

17. Some of the earliest statistical portraits of these men appear in a volume by Lerman and Ooms (1993).

18. See Hofferth et al. (2002).

19. Our fieldwork began in 1995; we lived in East Camden for two and a half years. We concluded our interviews in 2002. Between 2002 and 2012 we conducted multiple follow-up visits to each of the neighborhoods in the study.

20. Historical data on Camden is from Phil Cohen’s website (2012).

21. See Gillette (2005, 30, 56).

22. See Dorwart (2001).

23. See Gillette (2005, 43).

24. Ibid., 48.

25. Ibid., 84–86.

26. Winker (2007).

27. Gillette (2005, chap. 3).

28. Median income has grown somewhat since 1999, while public assistance receipt has declined. According to the 2000 census, median income in 1999 was just over twenty-three thousand dollars, and 16 percent of households received public assistance. Poverty, however, has increased among families with children: the percentage of families below poverty level was 33 percent citywide, while 39 percent of households with children under eighteen were in poverty, along with 52 percent of single mothers. See U.S. Census Bureau (2012).

29. See Ventura and Bachrach (2000, table 4).

30. The Kensington and Fishtown sections of Greater Kensington lie to the northeast of Center City Philadelphia and are predominantly white. Pennsport and Manayunk are also white and, while gentrifying, have suffered the effect of decades of deindustrialization and still contain some of the more economically struggling white families in the city. The neighborhoods west of Kensington Avenue contain most of Philadelphia’s Puerto Ricans, along with a sizable number of poor African Americans. Just to the west, the neighborhoods of North Central and Strawberry Mansion are overwhelmingly black. West Philadelphia offers a number of poor black neighborhoods to study; we chose Mantua and Mill Creek, just north of the University of Pennsylvania, and Kingsessing, which lies southwest of University City. Finally, we incorporated the South Philadelphia neighborhoods of Point Breeze, which is almost all black, and Grays Ferry, which still has white working-class holdouts but is in the process of rapid racial turnover.

31. Of Philadelphia’s roughly 567,000 households, just under 45,000 claimed SSI and 42,000 got cash welfare benefits in the prior year, while 90,000 received Food Stamps.

32. These figures are for 2008–10. See U.S. Census Bureau (2012).

33. “Local Area Unemployment Statistics” (2012).

34. See Bishaw and Semega (2008).

35. Shelley (2012).

36. Due to language difficulties (very few of the Hispanic men we encountered spoke English fluently, and neither of us speak Spanish) and limited funds, we chose not to interview Puerto Rican fathers for this study.

37. We targeted neighborhoods that were at least 20 percent poor in 2000.

38. For a description of this method, see Edin and Lein (1997) and Duneier (2011).

39. Two of our interviewers were African American and the rest were Caucasian. We used both men and women as interviewers.

40. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

41. See Murray (2012).

CHAPTER ONE. ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER

1. All names are pseudonyms, often chosen by the respondent. Street names, addresses, places of employment, and other potentially identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality, but we have substituted streets, addresses, and employers in the same neighborhoods and with similar characteristics. For ease of reading, we have not shown ellipses or bracketed interpolations in our respondents’ quotes. Quotes with ellipses and brackets intact can be viewed on the University of California Press website (www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520274068).

2. The Absalom Jones disciplinary school is a pseudonym.

3. Other qualitative research on teens navigating troubled neighborhoods argues that boys exhibit more risky behavior because their patterns of leisure offer greater exposure to the immediate neighborhood (Clampet-Lundquist et al. 2011) and to older peers (Harding 2009).

4. “Strawberry Mansion Neighborhood” (2011).

5. See Edin and Kefalas (2005). From 2006 to 2010, 86 percent of female teens and 93 percent of their male counterparts reported using contraceptives—condoms are by far the most common—at last sex. In the same period one in five sexually active girls (20 percent) and a third of sexually active boys (34 percent) reported that they used both a condom and a hormonal method of birth control the last time they had sex (Martinez, Copen, and Abma 2011).

6. We know of no survey data that assess the context of parental relationships at conception other than whether the couple is married at the time. But the four-year in-depth qualitative study of a subsample of unmarried Fragile Families survey couples offers some information in this regard (Edin et al. 2007). In wave one of the study, interviewers asked detailed questions about the nature of the relationship prior to the focal child’s birth. They devoted much of the fourth-wave interview, which occurred in 2004, to asking parents about the circumstances surrounding the conception of all their children, including those conceived with other partners and those occurring before and after the focal child’s. They also queried parents about miscarriages and abortions and the circumstances surrounding these conceptions. Parents who stayed in the study through the fourth wave—70 percent—reported 202 pregnancies. The mothers in the study said that only one in five conceptions was in the context of a casual relationship (where the couple is not clearly “together”), while for fathers, the figure was about one in three (34 percent). Another 17 percent of mothers’ conceptions—and 11 percent of fathers’—were within stable relationships, but the couple was struggling. The remaining pregnancies—64 percent (nearly two-thirds) of mothers’ and 55 percent of fathers’—occurred in stable relationships. A closer look at the texture of these relationships, revealed through qualitative analysis of these parents’ relationship narratives, shows that the nature and quality of these “stable” relationships prior to the couple’s first conception together are often quite similar to Amin’s. In other words, they are neither casual nor serious from the father’s point of view. Mothers are more likely to view these relationships as serious than fathers are.

7. “Kensington Neighborhood” (2001).

8. The corner of Hagert and Jasper and the intersection of Emerald are both now occupied by Cavco, a company manufacturing vinyl windows and steel doors; William Beatty’s Mills has been converted into spaces for income-qualified artists; and the Weisbrod and Hess Brewery is now the Philadelphia Brewing Company.

9. “Kensington Neighborhood” (2001).

10. The area’s Hispanics and Asians who are practicing Catholics typically worship at Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, just across Kensington Avenue in West Kensington. This area has seen its other large parishes close; Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Bonaventure, and Saint Bonafice closed in 2006.

11. Test scores are available at the U.S. News education website (2012). Kensington High is now divided into several small schools, all of which qualify among the worst schools in the city in on-time graduation rates. See “On-Time Graduation Rate” (2010). Overall, students in the Kensington neighborhood are among the most likely to drop out in the city. See Neild and Balfanz (2006).

12. This is a common pattern in our data; an early unplanned pregnancy is terminated, but then closely followed by a pregnancy taken to term. We do not know for sure why this is so, but our best guess is that this is a reflection of the strong underlying desire to have a child, even when the circumstances are not ideal.

13. See also Roy, Buckmiller, and McDowell (2008).

14. For data on hooking up, especially on college campuses, see Bogle (2008); England, Shafer, and Fogarty (2008); Glenn and Marquardt (2001); Hamilton and Armstrong (2009); and Manning, Giordano, and Longmore (2006).

15. See also Hamer (2001, 94).

16. Other researchers have also noted the use of these terms. One in-depth assessment of their meaning comes from Allen’s (2009) ethnography of a mixed-income housing development in Chicago.

17. Hanging out on the stoop, an occasional outing to a bar or a club, a window-shopping trip to a hot venue such as the Gallery in Center City or the popular South Street strip, and fantasizing about shared children are what usually constitute romance. See also Edin and Kefalas (2005).

18. How typical are the men we talked to of other disadvantaged young fathers living in urban areas across the United States? Most surveys tell us little about the relationship contexts of unmarried men at the time a child is conceived. One exception is the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a survey of about four thousand unmarried couples who had a child between 1998 and 2000. This survey, nationally representative of births in large cities, asks all unmarried new mothers and fathers—not just low-income couples in high-poverty neighborhoods like ours—how long they had known each other before the birth. The typical young unmarried couple knew each other for less than a year before their first child was conceived. This figure is for mothers giving birth before age twenty-five. For those mothers twenty-five and older, the average is much longer, 2.4 years. Most disadvantaged men, however, bear their first child with a partner who is under twenty-five (Edin and Tach 2011).

Researchers then conducted in-depth intensive interviews with forty-eight of the unmarried couples in the Fragile Families survey about two to three months after their child was born. These researchers asked the new parents a slightly different question: rather than query them about how long they had known each other prior to conception, they asked how long they had been “together.” Here, the modal length of courtship prior to a conception was only six or seven months (Edin, Nelson, and Reed 2011). See also Reed (2008). Finally, in-depth interviews with 165 unmarried mothers in eight low-income Philadelphia-area neighborhoods, conducted at about the same time as we were talking with fathers, also put the median length of the relationship at about half a year (Edin and Kefalas 2005). These studies suggest that the rapid pace with which courtship leads to conception and birth for the men in our study is not unusual.

19. See Augustine, Nelson, and Edin (2009); Edin et al. (2007); Reed (2007); and Roy, Buckmiller, and McDowell (2008).

20. See also Edin and Kefalas (2005); Edin et al. (2007); and Augustine, Nelson, and Edin (2009).

21. See also Davis, Gardner, and Gardner (1941, 127).

22. Men and women in these neighborhoods do not always view their relationships in the same light. For example, in in-depth interviews with a subsample of Fragile Families couples, both mothers and fathers were queried about the state of their relationships at the time of each conception, and mothers were far less likely (34 versus 20 percent) to characterize them as “casual” (Edin et al. 2007). When Edin and Kefalas (2005) asked low-income unmarried mothers living in these same Philadelphia-area neighborhoods how they would describe their relationships with their children’s fathers, they were also less likely to view them as casual than fathers. The large majority of respondents across all these studies, however, did not characterize their relationships at the time of conception as casual but said they were something more.

23. Byron does not say what this illness was, but notes that his father had been sick for several years before his death.

24. Edin and Tach (2011).

25. “Fairhill Neighborhood” (2011).

26. See Harknett and Knab (2007).

27. The Fragile Families study—the survey of nonmarital births to couples living in large cities—offers additional support for the idea that an unmarried couple’s relationship is often galvanized by pregnancy. First, the survey reveals a surprisingly high rate of couple cohesion at the time of a typical nonmarital birth—more than 80 percent of mothers (and even a higher percentage of fathers) say they are “romantically involved” with their child’s other parent, and eight in ten fathers think there is at least a fifty- fifty chance they’ll marry the mother of their child (the mothers usually agree with this prediction). Roughly six in ten couples giving birth outside of marriage cohabit at some point between the time of conception and the child’s first birthday—some of these couples live together before conception, but a good number of them enter cohabitation “shotgun,” yet arrangements such as these are usually a strong signal that the couple has some desire to stay together and parent their child cooperatively (Bendheim-Thoman Center 2002b).

28. David is referring to his daughters who visit occasionally as well as to Julian.

29. See the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (2007).

CHAPTER TWO. THANK YOU, JESUS

1. The results of a qualitative study of forty-seven young unwed fathers participating in a child-support demonstration project in the early 1990s bear some similarity to our own; however, more of their respondents reacted negatively to the news, perhaps because the sample was exclusively made up of fathers under twenty-five (Achatz and MacAllum 1994). The Fragile Families survey does ask mothers whether the birth was intended, but as we show, happiness and planned pregnancies are hardly synonymous.

But there is some evidence that offers a guide to how typical our fathers’ responses might be. The in-depth four-year study of forty-eight unmarried couples from the Fragile Families survey we mentioned in the notes to chapter 1 asked both the child’s mother and father to describe the circumstances surrounding each conception they could recall, including those ending in termination or miscarriage. For each new child that was conceived, they asked how the respondent had reacted to the news of the pregnancy. Strikingly, an equal proportion of fathers’ conceptions in this study—75 percent—were greeted with a happy response or a somewhat ambivalent but accepting response. Ironically, the mothers said that they reacted to the news of a conception positively only 58 percent of the time (Edin et al. 2007). Both this study and ours have limitations: the in-depth interviews of forty-eight couples did not include fathers who were not romantically involved with the mother at the time of the birth—this probably excluded nearly one in five fathers (83 percent of mothers in the Fragile Families survey claimed romantic involvement when the baby was born)—and uninvolved fathers are presumably the least likely to respond positively.

It may also be true that the recruitment strategies we deployed in Camden and Philadelphia missed those men for whom fatherhood was least salient, though, as we show in chapter 6, our rates of father involvement by child age are only slightly higher than those reported by mothers in the Fragile Families survey and about as high as fathers’ reports. Even given these drawbacks, the in-depth study of the forty-eight Fragile Families couples and our study both suggest that a significant proportion of disadvantaged unmarried men might well greet the news of a pregnancy with some level of expectancy.

2. See also Fosse (2010).

3. Men who said they expressed ambivalence were typically very young, had no source of income, were struggling with an alcohol or drug problem, or had relationship “complications.” But men with happy responses had these problems too.

4. One might wonder about the retrospective nature of these accounts. These characterizations of pregnancy reaction, however, are nearly identical to those captured by the in-depth qualitative study of forty-eight unmarried fathers in three cities—a subsample of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. As noted above, these men were first interviewed, and asked this question, two to three months after their child’s birth and report a preponderance of happy responses. See Edin et al. (2007).

5. Edin and Kefalas (2005) find that mothers living in these same neighborhoods agree with these characterizations of pregnancy intentionality, though more men place pregnancies in the “just not thinking” group and fewer men describe their pregnancies as “semiplanned” when compared to women. A similar gender divide was also documented by Edin et al. (2007).

Men’s circumstances play some role in the degree to which pregnancies are planned. Typically, men who planned a child were somewhat more likely than those with a semiplanned pregnancy to have been stably housed and employed and to have established a somewhat stronger bond with their partner. Conversely, some of the men who were “just not thinking” about the possibility of conception, or had an accidental pregnancy, were also more ambivalent about the suitability of their circumstances for raising a child. Some were only seasonally employed or feared an imminent layoff or job loss. Others were struggling to overcome drug or alcohol problems or had been relying on drug sales or other criminal activity to get by.

There is some evidence that fathers’ pregnancy intentions might affect their fathering behavior. In one analysis using the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort study, men who did not want the pregnancy are less likely to exhibit paternal warmth following the birth, whereas men who wanted the pregnancy sooner than it occurred are more likely to exhibit nurturing behaviors (Bronte-Tinkew et al. 2007).

6. In both our study and in another that assessed men’s responses in regard to the degree that a given conception was intended, planned pregnancies were more common among subsequent conceptions with the same partner (Edin et al. 2007).

7. “Oral Contraceptives” (2003).

8. These conceptions are underreported, both in this study and in surveys, either because the fathers did not know about the pregnancy or because the pregnancy is made less salient in fathers’ minds, due to social stigma or some other factor, by the fact that it is not brought to term.

9. Thomas’s second child was conceived while he and Laurie were on a one-week hiatus—a fallout over his cheating—around the time when their child, Gina, turned two. Thomas thought nothing of the one-night stand with his neighbor Nikki until nine months later while in jail awaiting trial on a charge of attempted homicide. “I got a letter from Nikki with a picture, and it said, ‘This is your son.’ That was a bomb. That was not planned at all.” That news was also explosive for Laurie, and the beginning of the end of their relationship.

10. In the Fragile Families survey, nearly all unmarried fathers said they were planning on active involvement in their children’s lives (Center for Research on Child Wellbeing 2007).

11. As we have shown, in a study of forty-eight fathers with a nonmarital birth in 2000, a subsample of fathers responding to the Fragile Families survey, the rate of “happy or accepting” responses was nearly identical to our own (see Edin et al. 2007). Their female partners’ responses, however, were far less favorable (only just over half were “happy or accepting”). We know of no a priori reason why fathers should be subject to more social desirability bias than mothers.

12. Single mothers in these neighborhoods report similar sentiments (Edin and Kefalas 2005).

13. Frazier put the gym up for sale in 2009.

14. Lacey’s narrative suggests he was guilty of this crime, a drug-related killing.

15. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

16. See Colimore (1995b).

17. See Jennings and Lewis (1995).

18. See Rhor (1995a).

19. See John-Hall (1998).

20. See Jennings (1997).

21. See Jennings and Rhor (1996).

22. See Rhor (1995b).

23. See Colimore (1995a).

CHAPTER THREE. THE STUPID SHIT

1. See the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (2007).

2. For many fathers we spoke to, hope for reunion with their children’s mothers is a common refrain, even after years of separation and other partners, particularly if their children’s mothers are somewhat better off than they are.

3. For a couple-level analysis of breakups among unmarried parents that features the role of infidelity, see Hill (2007).

4. For a review of this literature, see McLanahan and Beck (2010).

5. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

6. Here, we break with Liebow ([1967] 2003), who claims that the street-corner men he studied base their expectations of family life on the experiences of those around them. Our men, and the women in these neighborhoods (Edin and Kefalas 2005), are clearly far more optimistic about each other and about their future together than the experiences of others in the neighborhood would warrant. This is what social psychologists call “optimism bias.” See Armor and Taylor (2002) and Weinstein (1980).

7. For further discussion of how couple tensions may be submerged during pregnancy, see Edin et al. (2007).

8. Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? is the title of a work of African American literature by Haki Madhubuti (1991).

9. Similar to the period prior to pregnancy, straight talk between couples is rare at this stage, so each must ascribe meaning to the other’s actions in absence of real communication—another instance of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

10. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

11. See Gibson, Edin, and McLanahan (2005).

12. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

13. These relationships are not necessarily causal. Waite and Gallagher (2000) compile an impressive array of associations between marriage and a wide array of positive outcomes for both men and women. Sampson, Laub, and Wimer (2006) use a unique data set and innovative methods to demonstrate a causal relationship between marriage and crime. Duncan, England, and Wilkerson (2006) do the same for men’s binge drinking and drug use.

14. See Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie (2006).

15. Paul, a thirty-four-year-old black father of a four-year-old child lives in a prison halfway house and is looking for a job. He believes that today’s women seem eager to dispense with men altogether—all they want out of men is their sperm. He bemoans modern times, where women’s incursions into the labor market make them more able to survive on their own, a condition he feels they are appallingly eager to capitalize on. “You have a lot of women that just want to have the baby and have no intention of staying with the man.” Paul points to advances in modern technology—sperm banks and test-tube babies—as proof of his assertions. “That is why these sperm banks is popping up everywhere, and these test-tube babies. Women believe that they don’t need a man.”

16. For a discussion of the impact that this ideology had in working-class men’s notions of fatherhood a generation ago, see Townsend (2002).

17. See Furstenberg and Cherlin (1994, 118).

18. See Liebow ([1967] 2003, 89).

19. Hirschi (1969) was not the first to articulate this idea. In 1957, for example, Toby (1957) advanced the idea that youth delinquency could be explained by a low “stake in conformity.” Hirschi has since moved away from control theory and points to self-control as a critical mechanism in explaining delinquency and crime. See Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990).

20. Attachment is the emotional element of the bond. Involvement is the level of participation in conventional activities—this is the active element. Beliefs involve worldviews—to what degree does an individual embrace the conventional values and norms? Commitment is the rational part—it involves decisions, not emotions. Hirschi’s (1969) theory predicts that when these four types of bonds are strong, men will conform.

21. See Sampson and Laub (1993).

22. Attachment to the child may be strong, but strong attachments are effective because they carry sanctions—the attachment is something of value that one could lose. Because babies or even toddlers aren’t aware of how their father behaves when he’s out of the house, men have several years’ leeway before they can do much to damage this bond—so long as they stay involved.

23. See also Edin and Kefalas (2005) and Gibson, Edin, and McLanahan (2005).

24. Such claims have a long history; the 1960s-era black street-corner men Elliot Liebow studied often said they had “too much dog” in them—they were just too manly—to live up to the norm of fidelity (Liebow [1967] 2003, 78).

25. One might assume that such men use multiple women for material gain. Though a few of our fathers say this, it is relatively rare. Edin and Lein (1997) show that women seldom have the resources to support men other than by offering them shelter and that most reject men who don’t contribute, claiming “I can do bad by myself.”

26. Convincing a woman to give over her phone number requires considerable game; in the courtship ritual that is endemic to neighborhoods like Boy Boy’s West Kensington, women typically withhold their numbers and ask for the man’s number instead, so they can assess whether he has the wherewithal to have a phone and whether somebody else—another woman—might answer it.

27. Anderson (1993, 77) has noted this dynamic as well. He writes, “When encountering a girl, the boy usually sees a challenge: he attempts to ‘run his game.’” See also Jamie Fader’s (forthcoming) ethnography of young men released from a juvenile detention facility. In one couple she followed, his proclivity to “talk to other girls” and record their numbers in his cell phone was a frequent source of conflict. In retaliation, his pregnant girlfriend threatened to move away and not give the baby his last name.

28. See Oppenheimer, Kalmijn, and Lim (1997).

29. Paul explains the pragmatic logic of this key criterion as follows: “The jobs that you are going to get is not going to be that good. So I really think that, say I am making eight dollars an hour, and she just sitting home and doing nothing. If she went out and got a job making eight dollars an hour, now we are looking at sixteen dollars [an] hour, and now we can base what we are going to do on that sixteen dollars instead of just that plain eight dollars.”

30. Nathan Fosse’s in-depth interviews with African American, low-income men in Boston highlight the special role of sexual mistrust. Few of his men thought a man could trust a woman to be faithful, and they felt that this justified their own infidelity. He writes, “nearly all respondents describe high levels of mistrust, viewing monogamous partners as an exception to the rule. Daily experiences of violence and betrayal lead to the expectation of infidelity in their partners, even as they engage in long-term heterosexual relationships” (2010, 137). Our men often harbor similar suspicions, and this is part of the reason why paternity denials are as high as they are (9 percent).

31. Furstenberg (2001) argues that marriage is a “fading dream” among inner-city residents. While it is true that marriage is becoming less common in this population, our evidence suggests that many still hold on to the dream.

32. On sources of dissolution among unmarried couples, see Tach and Edin (forthcoming); Osborne, Manning, and Smock (2007); and Lichter, Qian, and Mellott (2006). On the importance of economic factors on unmarried couples’ transition to marriage, Carlson, McLanahan, and England (2004) found that men’s employment encouraged marriage among unmarried parents one year after a child’s birth. See also Gibson, Edin, and McLanahan (2005); Gibson-Davis (2007, 2009); Watson and McLanahan (2009); Smock and Manning (1997); and Smock, Manning, and Porter (2005).

33. A closer look at each of the stories we’ve featured—especially the stories of Amin, Donald, and Bill—suggests that in some cases, blaming their lack of commitment on a woman’s flaws, namely her mercenary nature, may be little more than whitewash for their own significant shortcomings. Yet the perception that women can’t be trusted, which is an article of faith in many men’s narratives, doesn’t have to be true to influence their behavior.

34. See Bzostek, McLanahan, and Carlson (2012).

35. See Jones (2009, chap. 4).

36. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

CHAPTER FOUR. WARD CLEAVER

1. Another exception is when they feel that complying with the law and paying official support will put them in a better position to obtain or enforce visitation rights. See also Achatz and MacAllum (1994) and Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992).

2. For an analysis of this dynamic among divorced couples, see Weiss and Willis (1993).

3. Men don’t qualify for many types of government assistance because they don’t often have custody of their children. Custodial parents who meet income guidelines are eligible for housing subsidies, short-term cash welfare, a generous Earned Income Tax Credit, and other benefits that lower their living costs or subsidize their incomes. Poor men without custodial children are sometimes eligible for modest short-term cash benefits from welfare, plus in-kind benefits such as food stamps. If they work, they are also eligible for a very small Earned Income Tax Credit.

4. Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992, 50) discuss how the challenges of forming a new family can interfere with financial support of children from past relationships.

5. Liebow ([1967] 2003); see also Rainwater (1970, 186–87).

6. Even after breakups men often try to maintain these bonds, but the mother often sees little sense in promoting an ongoing tie to a man who is not her child’s biological father, especially if a new partner, who also seeks to play daddy, comes along.

7. Rainwater (1970).

8. Mothers sometimes report that they splurge for these extras as well, in part because they are trying to demonstrate to the community at large that they are good parents. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

9. This dynamic was evident in Rainwater’s (1970, 313) study of life in a federal housing project among young men who had births outside of marriage.

10. This abridged sense of financial responsibility, despite lip service to a fifty-fifty ideal, is also discussed by Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992).

11. Edin and Kefalas (2005).

12. See Waller (2002) and Hamer (2001). See also Waller (2010); Jarrett, Roy, and Burton (2002); and Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992).

CHAPTER FIVE. SESAME STREET MORNINGS

1. These days the school ranks near the bottom of all the high schools in the entire state (630 out of 639), and only a handful of its students test as proficient in reading, or science, or math. See “Bartram John” (2010).

2. These data come from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System Crime Base (2012).

3. Brandywine School is a pseudonym.

4. Ernest says, “My mother has supported me from the time I was born to now. When I was down and out, man, when I was at my lowest point, my mother was there. When I was in jail, there was only one person that would accept my collect calls, my mother. There was only one person that sent me money orders, my mother. You know what I mean? My mother is just tremendous.”

5. Participants in the Parent’s Fair Share child-support demonstration used these terms differently (Johnson, Levine, and Doolittle 1999). “Daddy” referred to the expressive aspects of the parental role while “father” referred to the more instrumental aspects.

6. On the difference between “fathers” and “daddies,” see also Furstenberg, Sherwood, and Sullivan (1992).

7. See Parke (1996).

8. Waller (2002). This is a clear break from Liebow’s famous argument that it is lack of money that drives fathers away from their children (Liebow [1967] 2003). This made sense in Liebow’s day when fathering equaled providing; clearly times have changed.

9. Erikson (1959).

10. For excellent reviews of the literature that calls for expanding scholarly conceptions of father involvement to include generative components, see Hawkins and Palkovitz (1999) and Snarey (1993, 1997).

CHAPTER SIX. FIGHT OR FLIGHT

1. Both of these schools have since closed.

2. Sampson and Laub (1993).

3. “Bullwork” is a slang term for hard manual labor.

4. Ritchie suspects that Kate had become addicted to drugs and was trying to regain her sobriety during this time.

5. For patterns of visitation among formerly married fathers, see Cheadle, Amato, and King (2010).

6. This is due in part to a sharp falloff in the percentage of fathers who remain in a romantic relationship with the mother (Edin, Tach, and Mincy 2009). For estimates of levels of father involvement over time by union status using both mothers’ and fathers’ reports, see McClain and DeMaris (2011).

7. See McClain and DeMaris (2011) for figures over time.

8. See Carlson, McLanahan, and Brooks-Gunn (2005); Lerman and Sorensen (2000); Sorensen and Hill (2004); and Yeung et al. (2001). But our black men are somewhat more connected and our white fathers somewhat less connected than mothers’ reports in the Fragile Families survey shows, likely because our white fathers are more disadvantaged than the white portion of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing sample. See table 6 in the appendix for a comparison of mother’s reports in the Fragile Families survey compared to those of the fathers in our study. Unlike the Fragile Families survey, we limited our sample to men whose earnings in the prior year were less than the poverty rate for a family of four.

9. Coley and Morris (2002), McClain and DeMaris (2011), and Mikelson (2008) have all noted the discrepancy in mothers’ and fathers’ reports of involvement. McClain and DeMaris (2011) estimate that for men with our sample characteristics, the discrepancy ranges from a third of a day to two-thirds of a day per week.

10. A small portion (8 percent) seemed to be hampered not so much by external circumstances but simply by a lack of desire to stay involved.

11. Even fathers’ supportiveness during pregnancy exerts a long-term influence on whether fathers remain engaged (Cabrera, Fagan, and Farrie 2008) or stay in a coresidential relationship with their children’s mother (Shannon et al. 2009). There is also a long-term link between father residence during early childhood and the quality of the father-child relationship in the fifth grade. Father-child relationship quality is in turn directly linked to children’s social adjustment but not to their behavioral problems or peer relationships (Cabrera et al. forthcoming).

12. See Tach, Mincy, and Edin (2010) for data on the falloff in father involvement following the mother forming a new partnership.

13. See Hill (2007) for a discussion of sexual mistrust and infidelity with past partners.

14. Note that Katrina’s new man had already lost the connection to his own children from prior relationships. This is not uncommon for low- income, inner-city men who take on the father role for another man’s child (Claessens 2007).

15. Ironically, despite men’s attempts to reject the old-fashioned package deal, it gets enacted nonetheless because of the critical role their relationship with the mother plays in ensuring they have access to their children.

16. Edin and Kefalas (2005) find that mothers use restraining orders with surprising frequency to keep fathers away. Sometimes this is because the father poses serious risks to her or the child. At other times, though, retaliation is the main motive.

17. One paper utilizing the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study finds that fathers with temperamentally difficult children are less involved than fathers with easier children (Lewin-Bizan 2006).

18. Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (2007). This figure is based on mothers’ reports. Fathers’ reports put the figure higher, but fewer of them are interviewed.

CHAPTER SEVEN. TRY, TRY AGAIN

1. Morris (2009).

2. The mother is Marty’s age, and the two had used drugs together in the past.

3. The mothers’ story has been told elsewhere. See Edin and Kefalas (2005), Stack (1974), Ladner ([1971]1995), and Bell-Kaplan (1997).

4. Tach, Edin, and McLanahan, 2011.

5. David had witnessed all five of his children’s births.

6. Jamie Fader’s (forthcoming) ethnography of young men in Philadelphia who had been released from a juvenile detention facility included one respondent, Sincere, who said that he longed for a “mini-me, a part of me that’s never been bad.”

7. Another of Fader’s (forthcoming) respondents, James, said the following of fatherhood: “You have to leave your mark on this earth.”

8. See Cherlin (2009a).

9. See Carlson and Furstenberg (2006); Meyer, Cancian, and Cook (2005); and Tach, Edin, and McLanahan (2011).

10. See Tach, Edin, and McLanahan (2011). For international comparisons, see Andersson (2002).

11. Lerman and Sorensen (2000) included men who had a nonmarital birth but had then married the mother of that child as well as those who did not marry her (see table 8 in the appendix). Our sampling strategy excluded men currently married to their children’s mothers. When we recalculated Lerman and Sorensen’s figures to also exclude such men, we still found relatively high rates of involvement. For men in their late twenties and to their midthirties, 53 percent see at least one of their children at least once a week—while nearly two-thirds (65 percent) report visiting one of their nonmarital children at least monthly. And these figures leave out those men who are playing the father role for children who are not their own—quite a common occurrence among men in our sample. In short, while not all fathers are engaged with their children on a regular basis, most are (see table 9 in the appendix).

12. One analysis reports that annual visitation among men whose children were living with never-married mothers shows an increase from thirty-three to forty-nine days between 1987 and 1997. See Huang (2006).

13. See Tach, Edin, and McLanahan (2011).

14. See Tach, Mincy, and Edin (2010).

15. This shared experience makes it especially remarkable that Kelly is referred to only as a “friend.”

16. The women in these neighborhoods have a parallel, though not identical, story to tell. For generations women have had to barter their charm and other assets for economic security through marriage. And in past generations women often married up—they married men with better education and higher earnings than theirs. Perhaps this is why women hold out more hope for marriage—they are waiting for the proverbial young guy in the nice car to come around. Meanwhile, there are the easy gets—the men they happen to have children with—who are seldom anything like the Mr. Right they were envisioning.

If our men are correct, and they might not be, the women in their lives are ready to walk away at any moment should the guy with the nice car suddenly appear. Women who do remain “on the market” while simultaneously trying to forge a relationship with their children’s dad—what men sometimes refer to as “gaming”—can still claim the virtue of fidelity, but there is a hint of mental cheating here, and men take strong exception to this. Men find it hard to shake the suspicion that they’re being gamed, even in the best of their relationships.

CHAPTER EIGHT. THE NEW PACKAGE DEAL

1. See Bendheim-Thoman Center (2002a) and Sigle-Rushton and McLanahan (2002a, 2002b). Fathers’ response rates are lower than mothers’ are, leading to an upward bias in fathers’ reports. When only mothers with a partner who was surveyed are considered, the levels of relationship optimism are about the same for men and women.

2. See Giddens (1993).

3. In 2007 Time magazine ranked Leave It to Beaver as one of the hundred best TV shows of all time. See Poniewozik (2007).

4. Though average levels of father involvement decline as children age, fathers typically stay at one end of the father-involvement continuum or another over time with a given child (Ryan, Kalil, and Ziol-Guest 2008). This analysis does not assess, however, the degree of continuity in a father’s behavior across children.

5. See Lerman and Sorensen (2000).

6. See Gans ([1962] 1982) and Liebow ([1967] 2003).

7. See Rainwater (1970, 156) and Liebow ([1967] 2003, 89).

8. Edin and Kefalas (2005).

9. See Wilcox (2010, fig. 19 on p. 48).

10. See Cherlin (1978, 2004). Scholars have extended the deinstitutionalization metaphor to describe other new family forms such as cohabitation. See Nock (1995) and Brown and Manning (2009).

11. See Blankenhorn (1995, 134–35).

12. See Mincy, Garfinkel, and Nepomnyaschy (2005). Nearly seven in ten nonmarital children had a legal father by 2000 and six in seven paternities are established in the hospital when the father voluntarily claims responsibility for the child (ibid.).

13. Mignon Moore’s (2011) study of black working-class lesbian couples with children also shows that a power imbalance ensues when one partner gave birth to the children in the household and the other did not. The former demands, and is granted, more decision-making power in the domestic sphere (see chapters 4 and 5).

14. See Martin, Hamilton, and Ventura (2011, 8).

15. Edin and Kefalas (2005) have written about this battle between the sexes from a woman’s point of view.

16. For example, the Bradley Amendment prohibits retroactive modifications of child-support orders or forgiveness of arrears even for men whose nonpayment is due to incarceration or unemployment. Recall that this amendment was part of that late 1980s crackdown on deadbeat dads that occurred after Bill Moyers’s The Vanishing Family TV special was aired in May 1986. Thus, along with the public outcry and success of the broadcast, there was also targeted congressional action.

17. For an appraisal of how family law has changed in light of the huge changes in family structure and American attitudes toward alternative family forms, see Cherlin (forthcoming).

18. See Griswold (1993) and Mintz and Kellogg (1988).

19. Dimitri and Effland (2005).

20. For an excellent history of low-skilled men’s work in Philadelphia, see Licht (1992).

21. Americans now work more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world except for South Koreans. See Fleck (2009, table A-1).

22. Martina Morris and Bruce Western (1999) offer an excellent review of the sources for the increase in earnings inequality in the United States. They argue that shifts in labor supply cannot explain declining pay for non–college workers. On the demand side, they write that “the penalty for not having a college degree has risen dramatically. While some have taken this as evidence of a technology-driven shift in demand for higher skilled workers, workplace studies suggest that the impact of technological change may be polarizing rather than simple upskilling. Demand was clearly restructured during this period, however, through both deindustrialization and the return to market-mediated employment relations. The empirical findings regarding the impact of this economic restructuring on inequality are mixed, but the complexity of the measurement issues here plays a greater role in obscuring the view. National labor market institutions, in particular unions and the minimum wage, have also had an impact. While institutions are among the most contested explanatory factors for labor economists, they enjoy some of the most consistent support in the evidence. All of these dynamics, finally, are subject to the pressures of ‘globalization,’ as the flows of capital, goods, and people across national boundaries modify the effective supply of and demand for specific kinds of labor, the resulting strength of traditional labor organizations, and the role of the monetary system in national politics.”

23. See Graefe and Lichter (2008).

24. See Ellwood and Jencks (2002) and Martin (2005).

25. Greenstone and Looney (2012).

26. Edin and Kefalas (2005) review this literature in chapter 7 of their book and argue that both cultural and structural factors must be considered in any attempt to explain changes in family composition. See also Cherlin (2004).

27. See Murray (2012, chap. 8). For a discussion of why behaviors might be different than espoused norms in the lower class, see Rodman (1963).

28. See Edin and Kefalas (2005, 202).

29. See Ehrenreich (1983).

30. We will not attempt to chronicle the reasons for the rise here—other scholars have already covered this ground. For examples, see Goldin and Katz (2002), Mincer (1962), Neumark and Postlewaite (1998), and Smith and Ward (1985).

31. See Griswold (1993, chap. 11). Wilcox (2004) finds that conservative evangelical Christians and, to a lesser extent, mainline Christians, are especially likely to practice “new fatherhood,” when compared with religiously unaffiliated peers.

32. See Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie (2006). Women also increased their time spent in caring for and interacting with their children—it doubled in this period. But the amount of time American men are spending in households with children has declined rather markedly as well. Some form of selection is clearly at work: presumably, those who find family life the most congenial are engaging with their children perhaps as never before, while those who do not find it appealing leave the family or avoid fatherhood altogether (ibid.).

33. College-educated men’s wives brought in a median 26 percent of the household income (Taylor et al. 2010).

34. See Lee and Waite (2005) and Fisher et al. (2007).

35. We can only speculate how these new cultural notions of fatherhood were transmitted across the classes. But it’s not hard to imagine how the dads at the bottom of the class distribution came across the new-father ideal. For quite some time now, through favorite family television shows from the Brady Bunch (which first aired in 1969) to the Cosby Show (debuting in the mid-1980s), new-father images have permeated popular media.

36. See Licht (2012).

37. In the past three decades alone (from 1979 to 2007) employment to population ratios for white male high school dropouts have declined by 10 percent nationwide, and for those who have jobs real wages have fallen by 16 percent (see Autor 2010, fig. 8b and app. fig. 1b).

38. Robert L. Griswold (1993, chap. 11) also points to the therapeutic culture that has arisen around new fatherhood.

39. In terms of child development, “very little about the gender of the parent seems distinctly important” (Lamb 2010, 5).

40. This insight is not ours alone. See Waller (2002) and Hamer (2001).

41. See Sampson and Laub (1993).

42. See Edin and Kefalas (2005).

43. Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of American men, Gerson (1993, 224–25) describes how men deploy the “mother’s helper” strategy to avoid the “dirty work” of parenting while embracing the roles of playmate and friend. Cherlin (2009b) uses the similar term “kindly uncle” to describe the role of stepfathers in their stepchildren’s lives. Like our portrayal, Liebow ([1967] 2003, 45) also depicts unwed fathers in his 1960s study playing the “favorite uncle” role and taking on little financial responsibility.

44. It seems plausible that the wish to experience fatherhood reduces the desire to prevent unplanned conceptions as men move from one relationship to another (and remember that it is prevention that requires intentional behavior) and may thus be a primary force behind multiple partner fertility—a family-go-round that puts children on a dizzying father-go-round that is almost surely deleterious to their well-being. It is certainly true that the ability to accomplish “good fatherhood” through selective, serial parenting is predicated on having children by multiple partners and reduces the cost of having children for fathers as long as they can evade the child support system.

45. See Tach, Edin, and McLanahan (2011).

46. Two studies (Fomby and Cherlin 2007; Osborne and McLanahan 2007) found that the greater the number of transitions that parents had in and out of coresidential unions and, in the second study, romantic relationships of significant duration, the more behavior problems their children displayed. Cavanagh and Huston (2006) showed that more parental transitions lowered children’s competency in interacting with peers at school.

47. See Grall (2009, table 4).

48. See Wood, Moore, and Clarkwest (2011).

49. See Berlin (2007).