Redefining Fatherhood

Nancy E. Dowd

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780814719251
• eBook ISBN: 9780814744031

Most fathers parent less than most mothers. Those fathers who do parent equally or more so than mothers are poorly supported by our society. For children this means a loss of adult care, as well as an ongoing and sharply defined differentiation between fathers and mothers. Fathers are not present in children's lives to a significant degree, if at all, or when they are present, they are often rendered socially invisible. For many men, their parenthood is defined as biological or economic, while a minority of men struggle against the presumption that they are not caregivers.
In Redefining Fatherhood, Nancy Dowd argues that this skewed social pattern is mirrored and supported by law. Dowd makes the case for reenvisioning fatherhood away from genes and dollars, and toward nurture. Integrating economic, social and legal aspects of fathering, she makes the case for focusing on social, nurturing behavior as the core meaning of fatherhood. In this nuanced and complex analysis, she explores the barriers to redefinition, including concepts of masculinity, the interconnections between fathers and mothers, male violence and homophobia.
Redefining Fatherhood offers a progressive view on how men, and society at large, can change understandings and practices of fatherhood.

PART I • CONTEMPORARY FATHERS

CHAPTER 1


The Context of Fatherhood

It’s Father’s Day. This year, we will honor fathers by making them more visible. We will not give them a day off but rather a day on, a day at the center of things. Mothers will be asked to step back, to absent themselves from the lives of their children, so that the roles of fathers can be more clearly seen. What will we see? If mothers are absent, unavailable and invisible, how will children experience fathers? For some children, life will be no different because their fathers are their primary or sole parent. They will continue to be taken to school, to the doctor or dentist, will continue to be cared for at home for the flu or a sore throat, will continue to be shuttled to after-school activities, to be watched in a play, soccer, or t-ball game, to be dropped off at the mall, or helped with homework. They will continue, largely unaware, to be the object of their fathers’ planning, worry, and discussion. These children will call, page, beep, or otherwise communicate; when they fall or are hurt, their fathers will be there or come to their aid.

For another, much larger group of children, life will change to some degree, and perhaps even to a significant degree. Their fathers will have to do the things that their mothers usually do. It will feel like part, or half, or even most of their world has significantly changed. Not only will their own father be taking on work and planning which he usually does not do, but many other fathers will do so as well. Indeed, these children might be surprised to learn that some men they know outside their own household are fathers. The switch to father care might cause confusion, frustration, and nervous surprise. Fathers about to leave on business trips might have to cancel their plans or take their children with them. Fathers may be embarrassed when they don’t know the names of their children’s friends or teachers.

Yet another group of children may simply find themselves alone. Whether unknown, physically distant, or emotionally cut off, these children would have no father available to parent them. Some of them have never known, and will never know, the identity of their fathers, because no legal or social paternity exists for them. Some of them have fathers who are no longer part of their household, and cannot or will not be found. Some of them live in households where the men, although biological fathers or stepfathers, do not know how to parent or feel no desire or obligation to do so. These children are also alone.

Some children might have more than one man caring for them, such as both a biological father and a stepfather. Others might have a stepfather, cohabitant, or boyfriend of their mother caring for them. A few might have male relatives such as grandfathers as their caretakers. Other men, without a biological, legal, or social relationship with children, will be unlikely to do much caretaking as a matter of communal or social practice. If the children need paid caretakers to replace their fathers, it will be difficult to find men with experience or an interest in doing such work. Indeed, fathers who need babysitters will have a difficult time finding teenage or college males with the experience or inclination to care for children. If Father’s Day is celebrated during a school day, after-school programs might be canceled or severely limited for the day, and many elementary and middle schools would be forced to close or alter their lesson plans.

How will men experience this Father’s Day? For some, it will be validating, a time when their positions would be valued and understood, their expertise obvious, their accomplishments recognized. Some might brush off overblown praise by seeing this as simply doing what it means to be a parent. For some, it will be a welcome challenge and expansion of their time with their children. Fathers without legal status who are engaged in nurturing children will be made visible and feel valued for their nurture and care.

For many fathers, however, taking on sole care of their children might well be confusing, frustrating, and difficult. The day will expose their lack of competence, without direction or understanding of what to do; it might even be terrifying, fearsome. For yet another large group, absent from their children, this Father’s Day would be no different from all the other days when they did not connect, care for, or care about their children.

For some fathers, making visible their care will create a double bind. Visible fathering might be perilous or threatening to their job security. An open acknowledgment of their caring and nurturing, and of the demands that their children make, or conflicts with meetings, erratic schedules, and long-distance travel could threaten their employment or hinder their advancement.

And then the next day things would return to normal.

To begin thinking about fatherhood, we must expose the context within which we operate. In order to measure where we are against what we think fatherhood ought to be, we need to know how fathers function and what fatherhood looks like. What we know tells us a number of significant things about fatherhood. First, fathers’ patterns of nurture are starkly asymmetrical as compared to those of mothers. A small proportion of fathers are sole or primary caregivers, or coequal caregivers. A larger proportion are secondary parents. Sadly, a substantial number of fathers are largely absent as nurturers and fail to provide economic support as well. Second, the life patterns of fathers are significantly different from those of mothers. Men are more likely to be “serial fathers” parenting a succession of children as they enter and leave households. Mothers are more often “linear mothers.” Men are more likely to nurture the children with whom they share a home. Third, there is a strong correlation between male nurturing and the strength and health of men’s relationships with the women with whom they share children. Men rarely parent alone. Finally, the nature of men’s nurture is neither unique nor essential. Fathering has significance for children because nurture and care has significance for child and adult development.

Our state of knowledge about fatherhood is provisional and tentative. Most of the work on fatherhood has been done only since the 1970s, when various disciplines began to examine the role of fathers. Even today, researchers disproportionately study mothers. Demographic information also reflects interest in the patterns and life course of women and children, but not of men and children. Designing policy without adequate information about current conditions or the effects of reforms may lead to perverse consequences if premised solely on theoretical assumptions or models. While we need to know more, existing patterns are the premise for social and cultural redefinition of fatherhood.

BASIC PATTERNS

Fatherhood is a common life experience for nearly all men. Almost 90 percent of men marry, and nearly 90 percent of these become fathers (Snarey 1993:32). Most become fathers by normal reproductive means, although with an infertility rate of 15 percent, some use reproductive technologies while others adopt (Snarey 1993:224). Many men become fathers outside marriage. Nonmarital births account for 30 percent of children born each year, although some of these parents marry or cohabit. Men may also connect with children as stepparents, in legally formal or informal relationships. Most become first-time parents in their twenties or early thirties (Dobrin et al. 1996; Lerman 1993:32). Fathering a child, defined as creating a child, is a common experience for men.

Fathering in the sense of nurturing children, however, is not a common experience for men (Mackey 1985). Researchers agree that currently two patterns of fatherhood predominate. First, there is a growing, but small, proportion of men who are significantly involved in the nurture of their children. Second, there is a dominant mode of fatherhood which involves minimal or no caretaking, with no other connection or contribution to the children (Dowd 1997a; Furstenberg 1992; Gerson 1993; Radin 1994). These two patterns of abandonment and involvement coexist. The pattern of involved fathers, however, is not one of coequal or equal coparenting. The best estimates are that truly coequal fathers either within marriage or in postdivorce families account for a mere third of highly involved fathers (Gerson 1993:181).

Certainly an increasing number of fathers are engaged in the care of young children. These arrangements are often viewed as necessary to replace a mother when she does wage work. The arrangement is rarely viewed as an independent obligation or desire on the part of the father. Also included among involved, nurturing fathers are single fathers, men who are the sole or primary parent of their children. Although numerically small, they are nonetheless a dramatically increasing proportion of single-parent families. While most single-parent families are mother-headed, recent figures show that 17 percent of all single-parent families are father-headed (Bureau of Census 1998b:1). Four percent of working fathers are single parents, compared to 23 percent of working mothers (Levine and Pittinsky 1998:21).

The dominant pattern of fatherhood, however, is one of abandonment or lack of connection. This pattern has persisted and grown with the increase in nonmarital births and with the high rate of divorce, but it cannot be explained simply by those two phenomena. Currently, the number of children whose fathers are not present in the home is 23 million, compared to 8 million in 1960 (Horn 1997). Forty percent of all children do not live with their fathers and, more distressing, it is estimated that the rate will rise to 60 percent for children born in the 1990s (Horn 1997). Forty percent of children in father-absent homes have not seen their fathers at all during the previous year. Only one in six sees his or her father at least once a week (Horn 1997). Only one-quarter of nonmarital fathers visit their children consistently beyond age four (Lerman 1993:45). On the other hand, many men who do not live in the same household as their children still parent them; disconnection and abandonment are not automatic by virtue of not sharing the same household.

The presence of a father in the household of children does not guarantee active and significant nurturing. Physically present fathers may have very little contact with their children. Contemporary parents in general spend roughly 40 percent less time with children than did parents in the previous generation (Horn 1997). In two-parent households, mothers still dominate in the care of children and the fathers’ nurturing contribution is often insignificant or meaningless (Dowd 1989a and 1997a). In single-parent households, women are far more likely to be the custodial parent. Approximately 1.6 million men were custodial parents in 1992, compared to 9.9 million women (Bureau of Census 1995a:1).

The basic caretaking patterns of American fathers are remarkably similar to fathers in other cultures. One review of a hundred and eighty-six societies describes fatherhood as consistently characterized by economic providing, serving as a role model, protecting family members, and functioning as an authority figure. While capable of nurture and caregiving, fathers consistently did less direct child care work than mothers (Bruce, Lloyd, and Leonard 1997). Across cultures, fathers tended to engage more with older children, and more with sons than with daughters. Fathers rarely provided more than a few hours of care per day, and on average always less direct care than did mothers. The level of a father’s involvement was strongly correlated with his relationship with the child’s mother and increased when both parents shared the same household.

A significant proportion of American men do not even support their children economically. Thus, even if economic support is viewed as caretaking, it does not radically change the picture of disengaged fathering. Here again, American fathers mirror the patterns of other cultures (Bruce, Lloyd, and Leonard 1997). Men are more likely to support children when they are married. They are also more likely to support their children when their income is higher, although fathers with a college education are less likely to support their children than high school dropouts. Other characteristics associated with higher support levels are race (because of its high correlation with income) and the financial needs of the provider.

In 1988, the average child support payment received by custodial parents constituted 7 percent of family income, or roughly $2,700 annually (Bureau of Census 1992a:10). Men paid a higher percentage of their income as child support than women. Higher child support is associated with greater labor force participation by the recipient. The addition of support, if reliable and steady, provides the financial resources to fund child care, which in turn permits custodial parents to work (Veum 1993).

Fathers benefit less frequently from child support, but the economic consequences of nonsupport or nonpayment are generally less dramatic for them. The most common reason for a father not being awarded child support is his failure to pursue an award or his refusal to accept one (Bureau of Census 1995a:2). For fathers who do have awards, child support represents a less significant proportion of their income than for mothers who have awards—7 percent for men versus 17 percent for women. Men are also less likely to have support actually paid to them. Mothers’ overall incomes remain lower than fathers’, generally half that of custodial fathers. Not surprisingly, then, the poverty rate for mothers is two-and-a-half times that for fathers, and more than four times that for married couples with children (Bureau of the Census 1995a:2–3).

The inadequacies of child support and the declining availability of welfare contribute to children’s high poverty rate. Nationally, one in four preschoolers lived in poverty in the mid-1990s. The rate varies from one in ten in New Hampshire and Utah, to four in ten in Louisiana (Li and Bennett 1996:84). The rate for children of all ages is approximately one in five (Bureau of Census 1996b:3). Poverty rates are higher for female-headed families and families of color. An exit from poverty is unlikely for both groups of families (Bureau of Census 1996b:5). Welfare programs have not made a serious dent in this regard, although one in seven Americans participates in a means-tested assistance program, including 33 percent of Blacks, 10 percent of whites, and nearly 30 percent of Hispanics. Nearly 25 percent of all children receive some benefits, and most frequently they live in female-headed households (Bureau of Census 1996c:1). The median length of time for which they receive benefits, however, is less than three-quarters of a year (Bureau of Census 1996c:1; Li and Bennett 1996:84).

Some men do not support their children economically not because they are unwilling to pay, but because they are unable to do so. Real wages have fallen, fewer jobs pay a living wage, and a large proportion of the youngest men in the population, aged eighteen to twenty-four, earn poverty-level wages (Kimbrell 1995:109). The most destitute are homeless men, whose average age is thirty-five, and only a quarter of whom are employed full- or part-time (Kimbrell 1995:281). A single income is usually insufficient to support a family. From 1960 to 1988, for example, average household net income declined by 6 percent while mortgage payments increased from 14 percent to 44 percent of an average homeowner’s gross income (Snarey 1993:13). The inability of men to support or adequately support their children is strongly race-related.

Researchers frequently note that voluntary payments of child support correlate positively with visitation (Veum 1992). However, the rate of visitation is less frequent than the rate of child support payment (Veum 1992). Men who have never been married are more likely than divorced fathers to visit but not pay support. More than a third of fathers who neither visit nor pay support have remarried. More Black fathers than white fathers, and more high school dropouts than high school graduates, visit but pay no child support. Fathers who both pay child support and visit are most likely to be employed. Those who paid child support usually worked more than two thousand hours per year and had three times as much annual income as those who did not pay support. Those who do not pay child support have a tendency to work less and have low earnings. Finally, among those who visit, nonpayers of support are more likely to visit daily while payers are more likely to visit once a week. Nevertheless, child support payments and visitation are closely related, whatever the degree of visitation (Veum 1992).

SERIAL PARENTING

The lifetime patterns of men’s fathering suggest a pattern of serial parenting rather than linear, lifelong parenting (Furstenberg 1992; Jacobsen and Edmondson 1993; Marsiglio 1997; Seltzer and Brandreth 1994). Men parent the children who reside with them and thus may parent more than one set of children over their life course. Rarely does a man parent several groups of children differently and simultaneously. The data suggest a “social fathering” pattern which may change or modify the perception of fathers’ disengagement. At the same time, the quality of this fathering may be less engaged and less socially supported.

Men’s serial parenting is indicated by a number of studies on family transitions that point to diversity and fluidity in fathering patterns. This includes transitions in and out of fatherhood, as well as the fathering of children both within and outside the father’s household. A 1991 study examining the economic status of children found that nearly 10 percent of the families studied had experienced a transition in family form during the previous three-year period (Bianchi 1995). About 6 percent of the children who began the period with two parents had an absent father by the end of the study; nearly 3 percent of the children who began the period with an absent father had a mother who had either remarried or reconciled with their father by the end of the study. Only about 3 percent of the children had an absent mother and lived with their father only during this period (Bianchi 1991:2). The breakdown differed by race: just over a third of Black children lived continuously with both parents during the period as compared to over two-thirds of white children. Among Hispanic children, two-thirds lived continuously with both parents during the study period.

When fathers moved out of the household, family income dropped dramatically. Although children in two-parent families and single-parent families had stable or increasing incomes, because single mothers earned so much less, half of the children nevertheless were in poverty (Bianchi 1995). When a father departs the household, the decline in income is attributed to the loss of his income to the household. Children who lost their fathers often came from households that were less well off to begin with (Bianchi 1995). Coincidentally, fathers’ labor force attachment declined when they left a two-parent household. In two-parent households 81 percent of the fathers worked, whereas only 67 percent of the absent fathers worked. The amount of earnings provided to children was nearly a third greater for those fathers living in two-parent households. Earnings were not easily replaced by mothers. Working mothers often increased their hours of work but for meager returns. Mothers not in the workforce were frequently unsuccessful in entering the workforce or in working fulltime (Bianchi 1995).

The high rate of family transitions coupled with the custody patterns for single-parent households translates into complex fathering patterns. Looking at the composition of children’s households it is apparent that fathers frequently nurture their children (if they do so) from a separate household, or legally (or otherwise) stepparent children with whom they share a household. Fifteen percent of all children live in a blended family. Living with a half-sibling is the most common blended family form, followed by living with a stepparent, and finally with a stepsibling. Blended families are equally common among two-parent and single-parent families, reflecting the more common blending of children but not necessarily of parents (Bureau of Census 1994a).

A 1994 report found that approximately 75 percent of American children lived with two parents and 24 percent with one parent, and a very small percentage lived with neither parent (Bureau of Census 1994a). Half of all American children lived in a family composed of two biologically related parents and biological siblings. The other half lived in a household which might include a single parent, stepparent, grandparent, another relative, or nonrelatives. Of children who lived in mother-only families, 20 percent lived with an adult male as well. In father-only families, children were twice as likely to live with an adult female. In both single-mother and single-father households, about 20 percent of adults lived with an adult of the same sex, most commonly a relative, usually a grandparent. Thus, children in two-parent families commonly lived in a blended family, while those in single-parent households frequently had a father or mother figure in their household.

Family patterns are sharply racially differentiated: white children were nearly twice as likely as Black children, and considerably more likely than Hispanic children, to live in the traditional nuclear, biologically related family (Bureau of Census 1994a). These differences are not so dramatic if we focus on children in two-pare...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Contemporary Fathers
• Part II Fathers In Law
• Part III Redefining Fatherhood
• Epilogue
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author