Abstract
Discussions of fatherhood and masculinity in sociology are dominated by middle-class suburban conceptions of what it means to be a father and a man. We talk about the pillars of modern masculinity enumerated by scholars like Nicholas Townsend: men should support their wives and children, own a home, protect them. But these ideals leave out many men. For men born into poverty, who become fathers as teenagers, who don’t have a stable relationship with the mother or mothers of their children, these ways of displaying masculinity are near impossibilities. So how do men cut out of our dominant narratives of what it means to be a good dad understand their role as parents?
In Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering, California State University sociologist Jennifer Randles looks into how these men—often branded “deadbeat dads”—define and redefine their understanding of themselves and their role as fathers through in-depth interviews and focus groups with clients and staff of a government-funded “responsible fatherhood” program she calls DADS, serving poor Black and brown men, most of whom are noncustodial parents. In addition to parenting and relationship classes and support groups, they receive high school equivalency classes and job training that pays just enough to let the men justify going every day.
In Randles’s telling, the work of the DADS program is to create a plausible alternative masculinity for these men, a way to assert their identities as fathers and men outside the role of financial provision. To do so, it stresses the nebulous concept of “being here,” even when “here” is not actually anywhere physically near their children. “Being here” can mean spending time with their children, or spending time in the DADS program itself, or choosing not to engage in behaviors that are likely to get them incarcerated or killed.
Such programs might make these men feel better about their role as fathers, but Randles notes that they don’t have much of a material impact on the social or economic prospects of these men. The jobs one can get with a high school equivalency degree are better than those one can get without it, but neither is likely to get these men to the point of self-sufficiency, much less to that of being able to engage in their fantasies of being traditional providers.
So what do the clients get out of the program? They learn to redefine fatherhood and masculinity around what they can offer to their children, which, often, is the mere fact of their masculinity. DADS presents fathers as an irreplaceable part of the family, saying that men teach lessons to their children about what it means to be a man or a woman that can’t be taught any other way. Suffice to say, this sort of gender essentialism has little basis in research. Even the men Randles interviews see the holes in this approach when they talk about the lessons they learned from their mothers or grandmothers or coaches. Essentially, the clients are being told that all they have to offer their children is their own masculinity, and that’s enough. This is a fiction, and a transparent one at that, but it is enough to help these men build an identity.
The program also offers the men a place to bond over their struggles with parenting and to reinforce these new foci of their gender expression. Masculinity is performed, and the ways in which men choose to perform one aspect or another of their gender identity is driven by what is recognized and rewarded by the people around them. In Randles’s telling, the support groups of other men altered their behavior, pushing them to behave more responsibly, as they came to believe that was what fatherhood and masculinity required of them.
Randles’s work isn’t showing how effective DADS and programs like it are, but rather how deep the need is for some kind of validation for these men, some social script about their fathering other than “deadbeat dad.” U.S. society still largely defines fatherhood in terms of financial support, but DADS takes advantage of the plastic nature of masculinity to reframe what it means to be a good father. The men in the program learn that being a good father—and, by extension, a good man—means giving time and effort and love and providing a masculine role model to their children, regardless of whether money is involved.
This is not to say that financial provision doesn’t play a vital role in how these men see themselves as fathers: earning money means that they’ll get to see their children more, that they can afford to buy them formula and diapers. While the program teaches that time and effort are just as important as money, the clients see money as the price of admission to fatherhood and tell Randles that they won’t be able to see their kids without it.
This brings up one of the limitations of Randles’s analysis: centering the men means leaving out the perspective of the women and children they describe. Randles recognizes this, questioning, for instance, the extent to which the mothers of the children are withholding access to them unless the fathers provide money. But the viewpoints of outsiders are irrelevant to what Randles is really interested in, which is how the program changes how the men view themselves.
Randles also brings in some compelling auto-ethnographic components. We might expect an educated white woman to have problems connecting with the poor Black and brown men at the DADS program, but Randles writes about how her pregnancy with her first child—which became increasingly obvious over the course of her time in the field—put her in a position where the men were eager to explain parenting to her, giving her an opening.
Reading Essential Dads, I started off skeptical, for all the reasons laid out previously: the program presents an outdated understanding of masculinity, it’s trafficking in gender essentialism, graduating from the program probably won’t help these men much anyway. But it became clear how important this program was to the men taking part—how much the fraternity of other fathers, how much the promise of respect, mattered to them. “Being here” is a concept so nebulous as to be objectively meaningless; but subjectively, it was helping these men reshape their lives. At the end of the book, Randles reveals that DADS lost its funding and shut down shortly after she finished her work there. On reading this, I felt for the clients and staffers who couldn’t believe that this one lifeline was being taken away from them.
Above all else, Essential Dads is an example of the importance of qualitative work in policy research. The most important outcomes of the DADS program weren’t in concrete outcomes, the cost-benefit analysis that dominates discussions of whether to cut or renew a program; they were in the dignity and hope and reframing that it provided the men involved in it. A survey might be able to measure some of that; but in the absence of the sort of qualitative work Randles carries out, a researcher wouldn’t even know to ask about it.