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Journal Article This study examines the role of biological and social fathers in the lives of low-income African American adolescent girls (N= 302). Sixty-five percent of adolescents identified a primary father; two thirds were biological and one third were social fathers. Adolescents reported more contentious and less close relationships with biological than with social fathers. Multivariate regression analyses indicated that daughters' perceptions of anger and alienation from fathers was related to greater emotional and behavioral problems for adolescents, whereas perceptions of trust and communication…
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Journal Article The role of the father or father figure is critically important to the task of taking our African American boys from boyhood into manhood. The vacuum of this required fathering role has had a devastating impact on our urban communities and it is time that we fill this role. In America today no other community has been harder impacted by the growing trend of father absence than the African American community. Statistics have been quoted that the percentage of father absence homes is as high as 60%. However, these statistics do not reflect the number of fathers who are physically present in the…
Almost one-third of all children and 70% of African American children in the U.S. are born to parents who are not married. At the time of children's births, almost all unmarried fathers have contact with their infants, but this connection drops over time. This study presents a study of 55 unmarried low-income African American couples in the early months after the birth of a child. The study considers the implications of the quality of parents' couple relationship, as well as of parents' demographics, personal resources, and family structure for understanding variation in fathers' involvement…
