Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as “deadbeat dads.” Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly—without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship’s demise. They offer keen insight into a radical…
Research suggests that early, more intense engagement in pareting for men has positive long-term effect for both father and child. While many other developed countries have paid leave for mothers and fathers, the United States is an outlier, offering no national policy on paid leave for mothers and fathers. The authors surveyed more than 1,000 fathers employed at 286 different organizations, as well as 30 companies for their benchmarking study. The report covers fathers’ attitudes about paternity and parental leave; benchmarking of company paternity leave policies; global approaches and…
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Journal Article Contemporary norms of fatherhood emphasize the dual demands of breadwinning and daily involvement in child care. Recent qualitative research suggests that working-class fathers find it difficult to meet these demands due to job instability and workplace inflexibility. Yet little quantitative research has examined how employment characteristics are related to fathers’ parenting stress, in comparison with mothers’. Analyses using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,165) show that unemployment and workplace inflexibility, but not overwork, multiple jobs, odd jobs, and…
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Journal Article Mixed methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Fathers Offering Children Unfailing Support (FOCUS) program. FOCUS is a diversion program which is designed to offer an alternative to incarceration for fathers who are noncompliant with child support payments. Quantitative data were collected through a pretest/posttest design (n = 55) and qualitative data were collected through telephone interviews with FOCUS instructors (n = 2) and community key stakeholders (n = 5) and focus groups with FOCUS participants (n = 76). FOCUS appears to be benefiting children by increasing their…
Brief
A two-generation approach to public policies brings together worlds that are often separated (focusing only on children or only on parents) to modify or create new policies that focus on the needs of parents and children together. Two-generation policies reflect strong research findings that the well-being of parents is a crucial ingredient in children’s social-emotional, physical, and economic well-being. And at the same time, parents’ ability to succeed in school and the workplace is substantially affected by how well their children are doing. Two-generation programs and policies are not a…
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Journal Article The authors performed a cluster analysis on data from 270 divorced or separated parents to classify their perceived coparental relationship with their ex-spouse and test if parents' perceptions of their children's postdivorce adjustment differed based on their perceptions of their postdivorce coparental relationship. The cluster analysis resulted in three types of coparenting relationships: cooperative and involved, moderately engaged, and infrequent but conflictual. Despite the expectation that children fare better if their divorced parents' develop a cooperative coparenting relationship,…
The following working paper, authored by FRPN project team members Jay Fagan, Ph.D., and Rebecca Kaufman, M.S.W., reviews and synthesizes attempts that have been made by researchers, policymakers and practitioners to identify outcomes for responsible fathering and to develop measures of those outcomes. The focus of this paper is on two dimensions of fatherhood, fathers’ involvement and engagement with children and fathers’ co-parenting relationships with the child’s mother, and how the outcomes and measures associated with fatherhood programs should be rooted in established theory.
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Journal Article African American men are not commonly thought of favorably as fathers, especially in regard to their children's education. Using an adapted qualitative version of the quantitative fathering involvement scale, which is based on engagement, accessibility, and responsibility, this study investigates how 9 African American men attempt to be good fathers as well as what they do to help their children in school. The findings suggest that African American men can indeed be good fathers and positively influence their children's educational outcomes. The interviewed African American fathers' parental…
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Journal Article This issue of The Future of Children assesses past and current two-generation programs. But it goes much further than that. The editors identified six widely acknowledged mechanisms or pathways through which parents, and the home environment they create, are thought to influence children’s development: stress, education, health, income, employment, and assets. Understanding how these mechanisms of development work—and when, where, and how they harm or help—should aid us in designing interventions that boost children’s intellectual and socioemotional development, strengthen families, and help…
Brief
This brief suggests ways that findings from research on parent education programs can inform fatherhood programs. It summarizes the research on two promising service delivery components (modeling and opportunities for parents to practice skills with their children), describes the two components, provides suggestions for implementing them in fatherhood programs, highlights examples from a small number of programs and curricula that include these components, and provides suggestions for overcoming implementation challenges. (Author abstract)
