EIGHT

The New Package Deal

In repeated conversations with 110 low-income inner-city men parenting outside of marriage, our goal was to understand why so many ultimately fail to be the fathers they aspire to be. Is it that they simply don’t care, as Moyers’s portrait of Timothy McSeed might suggest? We began by asking how these young urban men—whom observers may deem completely unprepared for parenthood—become fathers in the first place. We introduced Amin Jenkins, from North Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, who is no paragon of moral virtue but who also can’t simply be cast in the role of the stereotypical Casanova who “hits”—gets a woman pregnant—and then runs. Amin’s story offers a vivid example of what is actually the typical course of a liaison in the period preceding pregnancy. While few fathers claim to have been in a “real relationship” when their children were conceived, most say they were more or less “together” with their babies’ mothers at the time. For Amin and most others like him, it all begins when two people who meet more or less at random begin “socializing.”

There is little partner search involved—she walks by his stoop or hangs out at his favorite corner store, just a girl on his block, a friend of a friend, or is even his best friend’s “girl.” In short, she is often just the one that he happens to be “with” when a pregnancy occurs. Conception rarely stems from an explicit plan, yet once couples achieve a modest level of cohesion, consistent contraception is rarely practiced. And it all tends to happen so quickly. “Affiliation” is the bureaucratic term often used to describe the tie—replacing terms like “love” or “commitment” that typically appear in American courtship stories.

But whatever the label, these relationships usually have moved beyond mere casual encounters when pregnancy occurs. And Amin Jenkins and his cohorts are far from indifferent to the news of the pregnancy. Shotgun marriage may have faded from the American scene, but the shotgun relationship is for real. Suddenly, with the advent of a pregnancy, mere togetherness is transformed into something more—what men call a “real relationship.” For Amin and many like him, having a baby is not a symbol of love and commitment; instead, pregnancy and birth are often the relationship’s impetus. Amin and his contemporaries work to “get it together for the sake of the baby” but do so almost entirely of their own volition. This is perhaps why surveys show that such an astoundingly high number—eight in ten unmarried mothers and fathers—say they are in a romantic relationship when their baby is born and why such a large majority (73 percent of women and 88 percent of men) predict they’ll stay together and perhaps even marry.1

The numbers don’t begin to suggest the fundamental fault lines that often cause relationships like Amin’s and Antoinette’s to crumble. Tenuous relationships and a lack of sufficient desire to avoid pregnancy typically result in an unplanned conception. Men are drawn in— usually after the fact of conception—by the rare opportunity for a profound connection to another human being, a child of their own. Fathers- and mothers-to-be—young people who often don’t know each other that well—usually work fairly hard to forge a stronger bond around the impending birth. The arrival of the baby often supports further efforts, at least for a time. But the conditions under which these conceptions occur make for very long odds of success.

Why are young men who ought to see parenthood as nothing but trouble nonetheless so eager to be fathers? Andre Green is an unbelievably buoyant fifteen-year-old East Camden youth who is happy—even downright delighted—at the news that he’s about to become a father by a girl with a drug problem, from a short-lived relationship he’s long since left behind. Sonya’s pregnancy is accidental, and Andre’s aunt Charlene’s announcement—“she pregnant!”—takes him completely by surprise. At first glance one might assume that his delight stems from pleasure that he has proven his virility.

But for Andre joy over the pregnancy is far more than a crude expression of masculinity. Indeed, fatherhood is not merely a desired status but an eagerly embraced role. Fatherhood offers the opportunity to connect with a child—an unsullied version of oneself—in an intensely meaningful way. But fatherhood is also a tool, almost a magic wand that youth like Andre can use to neutralize the “negativity” that surrounds them as they come of age in chaotic and violence-charged neighborhoods like East Camden. Though becoming a father while young and unprepared may not be the ideal, young men who choose to embrace the simple acts of parenting a child—changing a diaper or fashioning twists in a little girl’s hair—are accomplishing something positive by their own lights. While columnist George Will once charged that men who have children outside of marriage were a bigger menace to black progress than Bull Connor, Andre seems to think he’s a hero, not a villain.

Not only do young men like Andre Green show a surprising desire to parent their kids, most also say they want to make a go of it with the mothers of their children around the time that their children are born. Given these high hopes, why do most relationships end so quickly? Bear Mallory, a resident of Harrogate, near the infamous North Philadelphia “Badlands,” offers a story that illustrates the complex relationship dynamics for which sudden pregnancy, a strong underlying desire for children, a palpable mistrust of women, and lofty standards for marriage all serve as critical backdrops. Bear and Amber, a young couple who barely knew each other before conception, suddenly discover that they do not share the same values and priorities once the baby is born. Caring for a baby together triggers certain expectations on her part—suddenly he is supposed to be the straight arrow nine-to-fiver that he never was, and he has to be accountable to her 24–7. Men like Bear know that their baby’s mothers expect them to straighten up, keep a job, and arrive home at a regular hour once the baby arrives. But in the end, it becomes hard to make the necessary sacrifices when he didn’t choose her; he ended up with her because a baby was on the way. Furthermore, it is the baby, and not her, whom he is really attached to.

It may not be surprising that most fathers we spoke with are deeply cynical about marriage, yet it is striking how many still aspire to it nonetheless. The imagined bride, though, is not just someone to raise the kids and share the bills. Instead, these men say they long for, and must hold out for, a “soul mate” as a marital partner. Problem is, their baby’s mothers—the women they are trying to forge a “real relationship” with—are more often viewed as the former than the latter. Thus, high standards for marriage cast the real relationship in a profoundly unflattering light—Plain Jane must suddenly compete with the contender for the Miss America prize.

Marriage, these men say, requires absolute trust and utter commitment that will not waver in the face of real life challenges such as a drug addiction, a prison term, or the loss of a job.2 Ernest Williams, from the Kingsessing section of Southwest Philadelphia, believes only a “crazy love” can produce this rock-solid, extravagant devotion. Exhibit A is his son’s mother, who has stuck with him through thirteen years of substance abuse, prison spells, and a multitude of infidelities—the evidence necessary to prove her love. Juxtaposing these ideals with the deep conviction that most women, at their core, are heartless mercenaries who won’t continue to love if a man doesn’t continue to “do” creates very low rates of marriage, at least in the prime family-building years.

The old-fashioned “package deal”—where the adult relationship takes priority and men’s relationships with the children come second— has been flipped. The fact that it’s now mainly about the baby and the mother is seen principally as a conduit to the child is what is at the heart of the relationship’s fragility. When fathers are far more sure of their commitments to a child than to the mother of that child—when they tell themselves, as they so often do, that their relationship with their child ought to have nothing to do with their relationship to that child’s mother—they are even less willing to do what it takes to turn their lives around. Though the level and visibility of their deviant activity may decline for a while, most continue to “drink and drug,” to remain “out there” with other women and get swept up in criminal activity.

Most noncustodial fathers end up contributing very little to the support of their children over the eighteen-year span for which society holds them responsible. This leads to the question of how these men—who really want the kids—view the obligations that the fatherhood role typically carries. Almost no one among the fathers we spoke with believes that good fathers should “leave everything to the mother.” Good fathers, they say, should provide. But the definition of good provider is unexpectedly broad. First, in the terms used by one father, he must be “all man” and provide for himself, not relying too much on his mother or his girlfriend. Though this point may seem obvious, it was often made explicit in our men’s accounts, presumably because for many it is no easy feat. Second, he must mollify those in his current household by paying some of the bills. If he is living with a girlfriend, it’s some share of the bills plus a little something for her kids now and then. After settling these accounts, he can offer his nonresident children some portion of what remains. This sharply abridged sense of financial responsibility—“doing the best I can . . . with what is left over”—is what drives both men’s sense of obligation and their financial behavior.

When asked to name an ideal father, men cited the 1950s television icon Ward Cleaver with surprising frequency, despite the fact that the series ended in 1963, before most of our fathers were born.3 The hero of Leave It to Beaver, Ward, provides the archetype of what good fathers ought to do: serve as a role model and provide. But even with his steady-as-a-rock job, Ward had to draw on more than his financial resources to ably fulfill his responsibilities as a father. He also had to marshal biographical resources—his own fine example—to serve as a role model to Beaver and Wally.

For Will Donnelly, an ex–drug dealer from Fairhill whose past is littered with rich illustrations of what he desperately hopes his kids won’t be like, biographical resources are in precariously short supply. Men like Will deploy another version of “doing the best I can”; when the moral authority to serve as a model and guide is lacking, they can appropriate an alternative form of authority—“I’ve been there, and, believe me, you don’t want to follow that path.” Will offers up the past as a cautionary tale and prays that his kids will take heed of his negative example.

American society tends to assess the unwed father’s moral worth with a single question: how much money does he provide? But the men that we interviewed in Philadelphia and Camden vehemently reject the notion that they should be treated as mere paychecks. Instead, they desire, and even demand, at least a slice of the “whole fatherhood experience” in exchange for a portion of their hard-earned cash. When mom acts as gatekeeper or when a child refuses contact, even this relatively weak breadwinner norm can be eroded or nullified. Returning to the story of Ernest Williams reveals that while unwed fathers offer strong lip service to the importance of serving as provider and role model—the more traditional aspects of the fatherhood role—they have radically redefined fatherhood to sharply elevate the softer side of fathering: offering love, preserving an open line of communication, and spending quality time. According to the image of the hit-and-run father, children are mere notches on a belt; fatherhood is just a status and not a job description. We are not claiming that men who take such a cavalier view do not exist—they do, and we interviewed several who fit that description. But treating a child as a mere status symbol is not how Ernest thinks a father should behave; he reviles men who fit this description—men like his own dad, who had tried to renew his fatherhood card with a drive-by hello and a five dollar bill once each year.

For Ernest a good father can be described in one word: friend. Men who fail to either pay or engage in the relational side of fatherhood are mere “daddies,” and such men are almost universally derided (even by those who fit this description themselves). Then there are the drones that send money but aren’t otherwise engaged. They are on a slightly higher plane than a daddy, but certainly haven’t earned the rank of “real father.” Fatherhood is a relationship, not merely fulfilling the obligation to bring home the bacon or dispense discipline and wisdom from a distant authoritarian pedestal.

Too often though, a father’s good intentions aren’t fully realized; so our final questions are how it is that these men so often fail, how do they cope with these failures, and how do most nonetheless manage to deem themselves successful fathers. For the Fishtown roofer Ray Picardi, an excess of blackberry brandy and the inevitable eviction from his girlfriend’s home—plus the violent fights that his subsequent visits ignite—spell the termination of his relationship with his firstborn son. Dealing with Regina, and her enraged family, becomes too much for Ray to handle. Ray has now clearly shrugged off any sense of responsibility for his older child.

What keeps fathers like Ray from staying involved? Often their own behavior is the cause. Substance abuse, criminal behavior, and a lack of financial wherewithal to even purchase a treat—ice cream, for example—are all common barriers. In these situations, fathers often withdraw from pure shame. But the mother is also often implicated; she may choose to play the role of gatekeeper and prohibit the father from seeing his child, sometimes, but not always, for good reason. And the child’s disposition is also important; how much trust is a child willing to extend to a father who may have already failed again and again and broken repeated promises?

That these men face obstacles to father involvement should come as a surprise to no one.4 Yet these narratives contain as many examples of fathers who have prevailed despite difficulties as have been crushed by them. How can we distinguish between those who manage to persevere and those who do not? Fulfilling the aspiration to father consistently and well requires both commitment and strong emotional mettle—what we call psychological resources.

Holloway Middleton, from Mantua, is crazy about six-year-old Christine and manages to see her nearly every day, at least until recently. But this day laborer feels he can visit only when he has the “funds” to do something special with his child, like buy her ice cream or take her to the corner store for a treat. Some days he just doesn’t have the resources to do so. But now, a new and even more potent threat is on the horizon: Christine’s mother, Katrina, has found a new man with a steady job, a “big shot” trying to win Christine’s affection and push him out of her life. Just the other day, while slinking around the corner in hopes of catching a glimpse of Christine, he observed the new guy treating his daughter to ice cream. It is painful for him even to describe to us the feelings of utter worthlessness and the haunting fear that he just couldn’t compete. Yet against these odds, Holloway presses on. Similarly, Ritchie Weber’s drug addiction has taken him to hell and back, and even had him sleeping on a slide in the park. Yet he never let a week go by without seeing his son, whom he credits as his “savior.”

Like any distribution across a population, our men’s commitment to the father role varies. Indeed, in those cases where the children don’t have regular contact with their dads, 7 percent of the fathers seem to have failed in the role due to sheer lack of interest. Beyond commitment, though, persistence in the face of mounting barriers to father involvement requires significant emotional strength—the kind that Holloway and Ritchie seem to have. But given the trauma of so many men’s childhoods and the tenuousness of their present circumstances, the strength to “rise above” is sometimes simply lacking.

How do they cope? Ultimately, many find that it’s easier to start fresh than to persevere. While children usually remain with their mothers throughout childhood, men move from one household to another as relationships fail and then form. It is the physical distance from children from past failed relationships that allows the glittering prospect of a clean slate with a new partner and child. And as the work of Robert Lerman and Elaine Sorensen has revealed, across the nation an astonishing proportion of younger men who have had a child outside of marriage—around 70 percent—do manage to be intensively involved with at least one of their children at any given time.5 Meanwhile, fathers enjoying their slice of the whole fatherhood experience in do-over fashion can mentally discount, or simply ignore, their earlier failures as fathers. Having children across several partnerships, what we call “serial fatherhood,” has an almost dazzling allure—it allows men of very limited resources to successfully lay claim to the title of “good father” one child at a time, but this dynamic leaves scores of fatherless children behind.

THE MEANING OF FATHERHOOD

Classic ethnographic explorations into the family lives of the working class and poor in the middle of the past century—what many nostalgically view as the “golden age” of American family life—have depicted men as detached from their children even when living with them. According to these portrayals, lower-class men are even quite distant from their wives, living parallel and peer-driven lives. A compelling portrait of 1950s white ethnic family life in Boston is offered by Herbert Gans in the classic book Urban Villagers, an in-depth exploration of a working-class Italian community in the city’s West End. Here, fathers only rarely even speak to their children, or of them, except when a mother brings some aspect of a child’s behavior to a father’s attention.⁶ A decade later Lee Rainwater’s meticulous examination of black family life in a Saint Louis housing project, Behind Ghetto Walls, notes “a high degree of conjugal role segregation,” where men are expected to provide, but to do little more, especially with regard to the children. Elliot Liebow’s incisive portrayal of lower-class black men living in Washington, DC, in the late sixties, Tally’s Corner, offers the following characterization: “It is almost as if there is no direct tie between the father and the child, outside the tie between the father and the mother.” Fathers in Liebow’s book almost never initiate contact with children and are as likely to respond to their progeny with a slap as an embrace.7

If we accept these portrayals as typical of their time and contrast them to our own findings, the meaning that lower- and working-class men attach to fatherhood certainly seems to have changed. The question is why. In Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s analysis of 165 in-depth interviews with single mothers in the same Philadelphia and Camden communities from which we drew many of our fathers, the women had little motivation to stave off early childbearing, as young women in these environs see children as their chief source of meaning and identity, and other sources of esteem are in short supply.⁸

We make the same claim about the men who we spoke with, and for the same reason. The roles of son, sibling, and kin are often attenuated when young men choose the wrong road. Successful siblings or relatives may shun a black sheep, and even a mother’s love is challenged when a son robs her for drug money, or when he is in and out of prison. “Friend” is a status almost no one can claim—there is simply too little trust to make such relationships work. Instead, “associates,” short-term instrumental or casual relationships, must stand in for friends. “Worker” has limited meaning when all one can claim is one “chicken shit” job after another at the bottom of a labor market where companies may shut down, change owners, and shed workers at the drop of a hat. For some residents of these communities, religion offers a powerful source of meaning, but outside of Alcoholics Anonymous or its sister organization, Narcotics Anonymous—both imbued with discourse about the importance of a higher power—ties to organized religion are rare among our men.⁹ And since succeeding long term in a romantic relationship seems improbable, if not impossible, why not invest meaning and identity in the one status any man can successfully claim if he desires: that of a father?

One allure of fatherhood for men is that it is a biological fact that cannot be denied. A man who fathers a child has at least someone who, in one man’s words, “can’t deny me.” When ex-partners, like Holloway’s ex-girlfriend Katrina, challenge this assumption by letting another man—a new boyfriend—play the daddy role, especially when they give the new guy the “title,” men read this as a signal that they’ve been judged as so worthless that she’s willing to nullify their basic rights as dads. It is even worse when children join in the fray. Recall that Jeff Williams, from North Central Philadelphia, says his nearly grown daughter, Jacina, is offering the proverbial slap in the face when she reminds him that her mother’s boyfriend “does” for her more than Jeff has done. He asserts, “irregardless, if this person is doing something for you or not, he can’t fill my shoes. . . . If I give you a million dollars or I give you a penny, I’m still your father.” But few men try and claim that they’re a “father” (rather than a “daddy”) based purely on a biological tie.

Two key themes about the meaning of fatherhood emerge from our conversations with these men. First, think back to the seemingly inexplicable rush of enthusiasm Andre Green, at only fifteen, felt when he first learned Sonya was pregnant. There is no evidence that he wanted a child at the time, or that the two planned the pregnancy, yet the prospect of fatherhood was deeply compelling. When surrounded by the “negativity” of a chaotic family and neighborhood environment, young men like Andre often ache to play a positive social role. They long for a chance to be consumed by a set of activities that are good—unsullied—something to take pride in and something that their own fathers didn’t manage to accomplish. “I want to be a real father to my kids,” Andre says. “I want to not only make a baby but I want to take care of my baby.”

But Andre’s youth and his history as a “straight arrow”—no drinking, drugs, or crime and regular church attendance and good grades—make him a standout among the young men we spoke to. Far more common than the desire to merely “counteract the negativity” of one’s external situation—one’s family and neighborhood—is the yearning to also purge one’s own negative past. Amin, the black sheep in Betty Jenkins’s fold, had squandered much of his life in disciplinary schools, detention centers, and prison. His son, Antoine, was the “mini me” who might someday achieve what Amin felt he could not. Having a child is a chance at redemption, albeit intergenerationally. Recall Albert Saunders, a line cook at Bennigan’s who graduated at the top of his high school class but never went to college. The father of a toddler, he tells us fatherhood is like watching “a better image of me” at work.

THE DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION OF FATHERHOOD

In 1978 sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote a seminal paper, “Remarriage as an Incomplete Institution,” that attempted to explain why rates of dissolution were higher for remarriages compared to first marriages. He concluded that subsequent marriages did not have the requisite institutional support that offered couples ready-made solutions to common problems such as child discipline. Those who remarried had to make up the rules as they went along, an ad hoc form of family life that rendered second unions significantly more fragile. Twenty-six years later he followed with the essay “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” In it he proposed that even first marriage was becoming deinstitutionalized—less bound by widely accepted norms.10

Unwed fatherhood is the least institutionalized family role of all, argued David Blankenhorn in his 1995 polemic, Fatherless America: “[Unwed fathers] never signed on to anything. . . . They never agreed to abide by any fatherhood code. They do not have—they have never had—any explicit obligation to either their children or to the mothers of their children.”¹¹ Blankenhorn blames rising rates of fatherlessness—which he views as the critical social problem of our time—on the breakdown in the basic dictate of family life: put the marital relationship first, and then the kids.

The logic behind Blankenhorn’s claim is simple: law governs marriage, and the paternity of children born within marriage is assumed. Divorces are costly to obtain (and they also used to be hard to get) and are adjudicated through courts. They are also still often the source of considerable personal anguish and social shame. And though the role of the father postdivorce may be less clear than in marriage, divorced dads clearly know—it’s spelled out on paper—what their responsibilities are, though compliance with the child-support orders that result is far from universal. Furthermore, the court automatically assigns visitation rights when levying child-support obligations.

Now consider the case of the unwed father. When his child is born, if he wants to claim the child he must go to the hospital and sign paperwork to claim paternity. What does he get in return for his voluntary admission that he is the father? Usually nothing but the booby prize: his name is now available to the state’s child-support apparatus when his child’s mother chooses to make a claim on his resources.12 Though some jurisdictions employ a presumption of joint custody, most assume that the unmarried mother is the primary custodian. When the child-support enforcement agency levies an unmarried father’s financial responsibilities he may merely receive a letter in the mail that assigns a dollar amount based on his earnings or the state’s minimum monthly payment standard, whichever is greater.

Visitation agreements are usually not an automatic part of the process, as they are in divorce. Securing visitation rights usually means taking his child’s mother to court. And while the United States spends millions to enforce child-support orders, most states do virtually nothing to ensure visitation agreements are honored. Thus, even if he manages to get visitation, he may have difficulty seeing his child. In a startling reversal of the way gender typically operates in American society, unwed childbearing seems to offer mom, and not dad, all the power: “it’s her way or the highway,” in the words of one father.¹³

According to Cherlin’s analysis, the problem lies in the fact that the institutions regulating the family have not yet caught up with the sweeping changes in American family life; this certainly seems to be the case with unwed fatherhood. But there is some evidence from our fieldwork that fatherhood outside of marriage is gradually becoming more institutionalized among men in terms of informal norms. There was remarkable agreement among the men we spoke with about how to define the role of father and what the most critical elements of that role are.

This is particularly true for our African American dads, whose descriptions of the ideal father were more richly articulated and uniform than those of their white counterparts. And there is additional evidence for a more institutionalized role for the unwed dad among blacks than among whites as well. Black men seem to have a language whites lack for the not-quite-real relationships that end up making them a dad. And our black fathers are more involved than the white fathers are with their children, especially when the kids are younger. This is not too surprising: when nearly three-quarters of all black children, compared to only about three in ten whites, are born outside of marriage, norms governing this arrangement are almost certain to grow more quickly among African Americans than among whites.14

What is perplexing, however, is why views among women—black or white—haven’t seemed to change as well and why the battle between the sexes is so bitter.¹⁵ “I’m not just a paycheck! I’m a father!” he attempts to assert. “What have you done for us lately?” she retorts, rubbing the invisible missing lucre between her index finger and thumb. The traditional nature of the legal system, our child-support bureaucracies, and policy makers at both the state and federal level who have created “deadbeat dad” laws with requirements the courts have no choice but to enforce might be stoking this battle.¹⁶ Virtually every legal and institutional arrangement governing these father’s lives tells them that they are a paycheck and nothing more. Unless he has a visitation order, no institution will help to ensure that a father will even be able to see his child. At least in practice, a mother like Antoinette can simply abscond with a child without offering a forwarding address, leaving a father like Amin utterly powerless. Nor is there any guarantee that the unwed dad who doesn’t live with his child can have any influence over his children’s upbringing. At every turn an unmarried man who seeks to be a father, not just a daddy, is rebuffed by a system that pushes him aside with one hand while reaching into his pocket with the other. Even unwed dads who live with their children and pay a share of the bills are still technically subject to child support in many jurisdictions.17

A REDEFINITION OF FATHERHOOD

Allow us to recap very briefly the history of the family scholars typically tell.¹⁸ When most of America’s families lived on farms—41 percent of workers were employed in agriculture in 1900, 16 percent by the end of World War I, but only 4 percent by 1970—fathers had wide-ranging influence over the family.¹⁹ Since the family itself was the basis of production, men’s work, like women’s, was “inside the home.” Fathers didn’t disappear for hours each day, returning at dusk with the proverbial bacon; instead, the whole family was engaged in raising, tending, and then slaughtering the hog, curing or otherwise preserving the meat, and cooking and consuming it at breakfast time. Fathers were their children’s vocational instructors—especially their sons’—charged with training their offspring to take their place in the productive order. And while this period in American family life was no picnic, fathers could hardly be distant, at least physically, from their children.

But when the glories—and higher wages—of the assembly line began to entice more and more white men from the family farm, a father’s role in family life diminished. The history of black men is somewhat different, of course; when the boll weevil and the cotton gin put a merciful end to the sharecropping system of farming, black families traded rural life for the dubious joys first of the southern industrial town and then of large northern cities, where they were consigned to a liminal existence working in the shadow of the manufacturing economy.²⁰ In either case fathers in the industrial age were increasingly relegated to a single task—breadwinning. And it was a weighty job, taking fathers out of the home eight or more hours each day.²¹ Throughout the war years and beyond, the rewards to at least one form of low-skilled employment—manufacturing—grew considerably.

Then came a force powerful enough to tear apart the burly working-class neighborhoods of Greater Kensington and North Philadelphia; the humble hardworking pockets of the South, West, and Southwest sections of the city; plus virtually all of the once-pulsing Camden: an unprecedented decline in the wages of the non–college educated. Any number of powerful social forces have been blamed for this drop in pay—supply-side factors, deindustrialization, a demand for skills driven by technology, waning union strength, and a stagnant minimum wage.22 The Philadelphia metropolitan area felt the groundswell of one source of this change—the decline in manufacturing—much earlier and much more deeply than the nation as a whole.

Neighborhoods like Whitman, where Dave Jones’s longshoreman father once worked long hours but brought home an ample family wage, offer powerful testimony of this change. Falling wages and rising home prices mean that it now takes two solid earners just to stay in Dave’s modest row home—never mind the summer weekends he spent as a child on the Jersey Shore, courtesy of his father’s ample overtime on the docks. Meanwhile, even men raised in the city’s poorest predominately white neighborhood, like Kensington-born Will Donnelly, often find they must cross the color line of Kensington Avenue and venture into the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to the west, the location of the city’s most dangerous, and highest poverty, tracts, if they wish to live in a modest home like the one they grew up in. Byron Jones, from Mantua, and Amin Jenkins, who grew up in Grays Ferry, both had mothers who toiled all their working lives as housekeepers for wealthy West Philadelphia Jewish families, sure that their labors would bring prosperity for the next generation, yet their sons have certainly not reaped the promised rewards.

About the time that breadwinning became more difficult for men at the bottom, marriages began failing in droves—among those married in the late 1980s and early 1990s, divorce rates were roughly twice as high for those without a college degree as for those holding a college diploma. Increasingly, these men stopped marrying altogether, at least during the prime family-building years.23 And their rate of nonmarital childbearing exploded. Meanwhile, Murphy Brown notwithstanding, hardly any in the middle class are now bearing children outside of marriage, and since 1980 fewer and fewer have been divorcing.²⁴

Consider the strong correlation between earnings and marriage rates. For those in their thirties and forties in the top 10 percent of annual earnings, a group that saw real earnings increases over the past four decades, 83 percent of men were married in 2010 (down from roughly 95 percent in 1970). For men at the median (whose earnings have declined by about 28 percent), only 64 percent were married by the end of this period (down from 91 percent). For men in the bottom quartile, where earnings have fallen by a whopping 60 percent, only half are married, compared with 86 percent four decades ago. Most of the decline in men’s marriage rates over the past forty years is due to the increase in men who have failed to marry—like most of our fathers—and not to those who have divorced. At least some of the rise in nonmarital childbearing is probably due to these changing economic circumstances.²⁵ But Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have argued that culture—specifically, culture-wide changes in the meaning of marriage—is also a crucial part of the story.²⁶

Public intellectuals from the right like Charles Murray tell one version of the culture story, which points to a decline in the adherence to core American values among those at the bottom. In Murray’s version the middle class has held firmly to marriage and other vital virtues, while the bottom 30 percent has abandoned them en masse. It is undeniable that the less educated are marrying far less than they used to—we’ve described the dramatic decline. But is this due to a change in their values vis-à-vis those of the middle class? Indeed, Murray’s own data show that those in the bottom 30 percent of thirty- to forty-nine-year-olds in the white distribution—the group his story centers on—reveal that they have retained more, and not less, traditional views about marriage than those in the upper 20 percent, even as the class gap in behavior has widened.27

An alternative story, told by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas and based on interviews with low-income single mothers in Camden and Philadelphia, is that poor women have, in fact, embraced a set of astonishingly mainstream norms about marriage and the conditions under which it should occur—they revere it but hold it to an exceedingly high standard. These authors see rich and poor alike responding to a new cultural definition of marriage, one that deemphasizes the instrumental value of the institution but has, at the same time, raised the bar on the level of assets and earning power—not to mention the relationship quality (read: “soul mate”)—required. Accordingly, those in the upper-middle class aren’t willing to marry until they’ve launched their careers, they’ve put childbearing off until their thirties, and they are choosing spouses with the same class credentials as their own. Meanwhile, Edin and Kefalas write, “those at the bottom of the class ladder today believe that a wedding ought to be the icing on the cake of a working-class respectability already achieved.”²⁸ Due to challenging circumstances, however, the less advantaged are less likely to be in relationships that clear the new bar.

We seek to explain fathering, and not marriage behavior, and also invoke culture as a partial cause. Yet for our purposes it is not very illuminating to point to inner-city fathers’ deviant values as the primary source of what we’ve observed, as so many public intellectuals from both sides of the political divide have done. Instead, we direct our attention to a culture-wide shift in the meaning of fatherhood that has accompanied changes in the meaning of marriage—a shift that began in the 1970s and has profoundly affected all Americans. We argue that men on all rungs of the ladder have responded to the shift, but their reactions have been conditioned by their position on the ladder and especially by the growing distance between the bottom and top rungs.

Let’s begin with the middle class. Family historian Robert L. Griswold argues that the emergence of the “new father” ideology among the middle-class “gray flannel suits,” to use Barbara Ehrenreich’s phrase, was a response to a massive shift in the composition of the labor force.29 The dramatic rise in their wives’ employment, writes Griswold, threatened to topple husbands’ role and source of authority in the family.³⁰ Meanwhile, the followers of feminist Betty Friedan were urging and even demanding that husbands do more than merely take out the garbage and conduct the odd tire change—and the compositional shift in employment lent strong legitimacy to their call. Suddenly, these fathers were thrust into the nursery to master the diaper change and were told it was imperative to develop deep, empathic, and expressive relationships with their offspring.³¹

Middle-class men have clearly responded to the call of the new-father ideal. Time-use diaries show that between 1965 and 2003, husbands tripled the amount of time spent caring for their children.³² But fatherhood’s “softer side” has not replaced the more traditional aspects of the role among the middle class. For them new responsibilities have come alongside the old. In 2007 married men still brought home the lion’s share—about two-thirds to three-quarters, depending on the husband’s education—of the household income.³³ And married women still do the large majority of the housework and child care, though men’s relative contributions have grown.³⁴

Now let’s turn to those near the bottom of the income distribution. Men like ours, both black and white, have responded to new fatherhood in a wildly different set of circumstances than their middle-class counterparts.³⁵ From the early fifties to the year just preceding the Great Recession of 2007, industrial employment fell from about a third to just 10 percent in the United States as a whole. But this is a mere foreshadowing of what happened in Philadelphia. The year 1953 marked the city’s postwar manufacturing height, with more than 350,000 manufacturing jobs employing fully 45 percent of the total labor force. By 2007 only 30,000 of these jobs remained and provided employment for only 5 percent of workers.³⁶ Wages for the unskilled more generally fell precipitously as well and for a number of reasons, as we’ve indicated earlier. Economist David Autor writes that this fall in the rewards for work, for such a large portion of the population, is unprecedented in the United States.37 By the 1970s, when the new-father ideology first came on the scene, the job prospects of those with no credentials beyond a high school diploma, including in Philadelphia and Camden, were already in free fall.

What is most surprising about our story is not that such changes would undermine lower-skilled men’s role in the family but that, while those affected by this massive economic shift have been shying away from the role of husband—like the mothers in Edin and Kefalas’s story, they hold marriage to such high standards that they often can’t manage to achieve it—they haven’t fled from the role of father, at least not by their own lights. Instead, if our interviews are any guide, men at the bottom seem to have developed an unbelievably voracious desire to take on the ideals propagated by their middle-class brethren—indeed, given the timing of their labor market woes, the new-father role emerged just in the nick of time to offer an alternative way to engage with their progeny.

But for men at the bottom the tasks associated with the new father have replaced and not merely complemented the more traditional aspects of the role. It is their children’s mothers who are the chief breadwinners—most men fully expect women to bear the ultimate responsibility for providing for the children. Hyatt-employee Maurice, for example, tells us outright that he explicitly chose a “strong independent black woman” because he believed she could raise his children on her own if she had to. Mothers are also usually the ones who set the good example. The rare woman who behaves like so many of our fathers have done—drinks to excess or does drugs, runs around with several different sexual partners, or sells narcotics—is often scorned by both men and women alike. Will Donnelly depicts one such woman in his neighborhood in very graphic terms, saying, “She’s the type of person you’d like to shoot like a sick horse.”

For our men, time spent with children, whether skillfully fashioning a daughter’s hair (Andre Green) or teaching one’s son to pee in the bushes (Bear Mallory), is viewed as priceless and a treasure any man would naturally want to claim. The opportunity to express love and have rich conversations with children is a gift—not just to the children but for the fathers as well. These are the moments, fathers say, that truly make life worth living—not the womanizing or the ripping and running, nor repetitive days of work or the heady risks of crime.

It is almost as if engaging in the softer “relational aspects” of the role is a must-have for men trying to forge meaning and identity in an economic age that has left the unskilled worker behind. Relating to children—not hanging on the corner with peers—is the vital ingredient that adds zest to life.38 And even in these challenging neighborhood environments, visiting family is what fathers often want to do with their free time. Consider Fairhill’s Lacey Jones, for example. Released from prison just one year ago, this African American prep cook with three children by three different mothers—an eighteen-year-old daughter with two children of her own, a seventeen-year-old son, plus a live-in nine-year-old daughter—glories in his present routine. “I go in the restaurant and . . . go through the daily hassles of cooking in a restaurant. Then once I’m off, I . . . generally go home and like to spend some time with my younger daughter or visit my son. I talk to my older daughter on the phone, talk to my grandson on the phone. I try to spend as much time as I can with them. ’Cause there was a time when I couldn’t spend it. A good week is when I spend a lot of time with my family.”

In sum, declining marriage rates among the less educated, the corresponding rise in nonmarital childbearing, and lower-skilled men’s desultory participation in the child-support system all hint that a seismic shift has occurred in lower-skilled men’s ability and willingness to shoulder the traditional breadwinning responsibilities of the family. According to our story, at the bottom end of the skills distribution we see not just a withdrawal but a headlong retreat—it is nearly a dead run—from the breadwinner role.

For our men, the Ward Cleaver norm—assuming 100 percent of the financial responsibility—has been replaced by a “doing the best I can” ethos of financial provision. Meanwhile, however, unskilled men’s revolt in the breadwinning domain has been matched by an unexpected incursion.39 Our men’s response to the societal condemnation often levied at them is the loud proclamation: “I’m not just a paycheck!”—the “just” implying that they insist on being something more. Just as our fathers are shrugging off much of the obligation to support their children financially, they are trying to lay claim to a new set of roles that in the industrial age were viewed as a mother’s exclusive domain: love, communication, and quality time.

These fathers now want roles more like conventional mothers’ roles. Meanwhile, mothers have been forced by sheer necessity to take on more of the traditional father’s tasks. A cynical interpretation of this attempted role swap is that it excuses the men from financial and moral responsibility—that they’re trying to claim a poor man’s version of the Disneyland Dad, one that reduces a father to a buddy while skipping the harder tasks of providing financially and setting a good example. While that charge can’t be dismissed entirely, a more forgiving interpretation is that rather than backing away from their responsibilities altogether, men are choosing to emphasize those aspects of the father role they can most reasonably fulfill.⁴⁰ Whatever interpretation one chooses, one fact is inescapable: men in this segment of society couldn’t flee, or even try to flee, from the breadwinner role and attempt to “elect” instead to invest in relational fathering but for the massive decline in their propensity to live with their children—an outgrowth of the changes in the meaning of marriage. We can see this in our data; the live-in fathers look much more like their middle-class counterparts—combining breadwinning with nurturing—than their male friends and neighbors who live away from their kids.

Still, the upside of this refashioning of fatherhood is that given their economic and social conditions, which seriously limit their ability to play traditional roles like breadwinner, unwed dads may have hit on a definition of fatherhood that will allow them to find some productive way of contributing to their children’s lives despite limited means. Listening to the father-son narratives of Ernest Williams or Ray Davies—who are far from exemplary parents—it is still hard to imagine that their children are worse off for their fathers’ involvement. And if we attend to men’s own coming-of-age stories, some contact may be better than none even if the man in question isn’t exactly a gem. So many of our fathers claimed they had never recovered from the absence of their biological fathers, even if their mothers had worked hard to compensate for the loss.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of validating men’s attempts to engage in the softer side of parenting is not for the children, but for the men themselves. Criminologists who have studied the trajectories of men headed for trouble in their youth point to a variety of life-course events that can serve as turning points: a steady job, entry into the military, marriage, and parenthood.41 While romantic relationships seem to have little of this transforming power—presumably because of the limited stake that fathers have in them—fatherhood just might.

Readers will probably be surprised by our claim that most men at the bottom—regularly portrayed by the media, as well as some social scientists, as heartless players who merely hit and run—are actually eager to claim fatherhood and to engage in at least some aspects of the role. But one need only note the extraordinarily high rates of voluntary paternity admission at the hospital, despite the specter of child support, to at least give some credence to our claim. And why not? After all, for generations women have found intense meaning and identity in the everyday tasks of parenthood, and society has given them immense social honor for doing so.⁴² It is also true that one’s children are beguiling, fresh, and hopeful, at least in their younger years. By the time men become fathers—even if they are relatively young—many are already beginning to tire of the “rippin’ and runnin’,” perhaps because they began to engage in these misdeeds at such a tender age. Many acknowledge that when they extend into adulthood, extreme forms of adolescent male behavior are exhausting at best, life threatening at worst, and ultimately not that fulfilling. While some younger men are not quite sure they are ready to put street life entirely behind them, others are quite eager to try and settle down somewhat, if it offers a chance to establish a meaningful connection with a child.

That said, while nearly every man claims he wants the whole fatherhood experience, the tasks these men actually end up performing in their children’s lives are more like those of a favorite uncle—the man who can be counted on to spring for the diapers or tennis shoes when things get tight, show up on the weekends for a visit, attend the birthdays and special events, and dispense earthy wisdom won from his misspent youth.43 This is especially true when a father no longer lives with his child, or when he comes back into the life of an older child with whom he had lost contact. But the favorite uncle is not the role that any man thinks is ideal—men often level a powerful self critique for not being able to provide the “real family” that they feel their kids ought to have. But what they see as a real family—a lifetime marriage—seems to most an impossible goal, at least in the near term. We ask Montay Smalls, who grew up in East Camden, what marriage involves. This neighborhood handyman replies, “Being a good husband—you don’t be with nobody else but your wife. . . . I’m not saying that therefore you gotta cut your friends loose but as far as having sex with them, yeah, you gotta cut that loose. You and her have to have everything up-to-date as far as bills, financially, you know, with the kids tooken care of and situated.” Then he tells us, “But it’s impossible; that’s an impossibility.”⁴⁴

In the end, though, these men’s bold attempt to refashion fatherhood often fails because it is too bold and too out of synch with what mothers and the wider culture demand. While middle-class men have moved at least somewhat toward androgyny in the domestic sphere, taking on both traditional and some new-father tasks simultaneously, lower-class fathers have tried to bargain for a wholesale reversal of gender norms, and—ironically—their partners and the wider culture often judge them as “deadbeats” precisely because of it. The combination of “approach” (embracing fatherhood’s softer side) and “avoid” (assigning the traditional responsibilities mostly to the mother) is part of what propagates father failure.

The new package deal—which men hold to like religion—is the new-father ideology taken to its extreme. Viewing the world through this lens renders the partner little more than a black-and-white one-dimensional figure, while the child emerges fully 3-D and in living color. The accidental pregnancy is how men must enter the family scene—the vehicle through which those who feel they really can’t afford, and might never be able to afford, to do fatherhood in the right way can still enter into this story, and with a noble narrative: “I’m no irresponsible impregnator! I stepped up to the plate though the pregnancy wasn’t even planned.”

Serial fatherhood—where a man’s children are spread across multiple partners—offers more chances to claim the whole fatherhood experience, and it lowers the bar by enabling selective fathering. Eventually, the inner-city father hopes he will manage, through this pricey form of trial and error, to finally father at least one child well. Meanwhile, due to this family-go-round, children are highly likely to lose hold of the time and resources of their biological dads. Subsequently, they may be exposed to the confusion of new parental figures who come and go, and they will likely accumulate half siblings along the way.45 Kids are amazingly resilient, but the rate of family change among children of unwed fathers has become so rapid, and now leads to such complicated family structures, that kids might have a hard time adjusting.⁴⁶ And if children are placed on a father-go-round where no one man is ultimately responsible for their long-term well-being and care, who will make the investment to see them through high school, through college, and beyond? Leaving it all to the mother seems like a poor bargain for American women and children.

Actions speak louder than words. The way in which our social institutions, and the culture at large, treat fathers speaks volumes about the value we ascribe to men’s parenting roles. We now take great pains to ensure that fathers fulfill their financial obligations—through a child-support system that attaches wages, strips those in arrears of their tax returns and professional licenses, and even puts nonpayers in jail in some jurisdictions. We do not disagree with the impulse behind these efforts—after all, it is critical to children’s well-being that the bills get paid. Yet despite significant toughening up of child support, getting fathers to pay what the state thinks they ought to has still proven enormously difficult. Most children born to unwed parents still receive only a fraction of what is owed to them, and there is probably not much more that policy can do to improve the situation.47

The need to address unskilled men’s economic woes is obvious. Even the most well-crafted efforts to shift disadvantaged fathers’ values with regard to marriage and enhance their relationship skills have not kept many more unmarried fathers in their children’s homes—and none have prompted more marriage.⁴⁸ When men cannot predict whether they will be employed from one week to the next, they will find it extraordinarily difficult to contemplate marriage. They’ll find it hard to set up housekeeping with their child’s mother or maintain a common household. Ironically, though, we’ve argued that this same uncertainty weakens men’s motivation to stave off having children until they are economically ready to provide for a child: why muster the effort to avoid pregnancy when being appropriately “situated” is viewed as a contingency that may never occur?

Policy makers and practitioners have put forward any number of “solutions” to economic and behavioral problems of such men—from offering substance-abuse treatment to anger-management courses to more standard approaches such as investing in their human capital or supplementing their wages through substantial tax credits such as those now available to custodial single parents who work.⁴⁹ While such efforts are no doubt vital, we call for a broader and more sweeping set of changes.

Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. Imagine if America’s social institutions realigned so that men’s parenting efforts were treated as a resource with real potential value. If we truly believe in gender equity, then we must find a way to honor fathers’ attempts to build relationships with their children just as we do mothers’—to assign fathers rights along with their responsibilities. While some low-income fathers are violent or potentially harmful to their children, such problems are far from universal, and it is wrong to characterize a whole class of men in this way, particularly when we don’t do the same for middle-class, predominately white fathers.

Taking a bold new approach to unmarried fatherhood has risks, but it also has large potential payoffs. It is possible that if men gained greater satisfaction from parenting, they might also find the strength to stay involved even in exceedingly hard times, as Ritchie Weber has done. Ongoing involvement, in turn, might stave off additional childbearing with new partners and leave fewer children on the father-go-round. And perhaps most important, if society helped unwed fathers to build quality, long-term relationships with their children, these bonds might help turn fathers’ lives around. How one might implement this approach is still unknown, but in reading these pages, it is hard to conclude that continuing on America’s current path is the wisest course.