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Journal Article Paternal involvement in the lives of their children has a positive influence on child and family outcomes, including breastfeeding rates, sleep training, nutrition and exercise, and developmental outcomes. Much of the research on paternal involvement, however, focuses on Caucasian fathers of middle and high socioeconomic status (SES). Within an urban, primarily Latino, lower SES community, we seek to involve and empower fathers through education on common child rearing topics.
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Journal Article We identify multiple predictors of five types of father involvement in 167 low- to moderate-income two-parent Mexican American families with fifth-grade children. Analyses show that fathers' egalitarian gender attitudes and mothers' education are associated with higher levels of father involvement. Fathers are more involved in monitoring and interacting with children when families place more emphasis on family rituals, they are more involved in supervising children when mothers are employed more hours, and they perform more housework when mothers earn more and the family is under economic…
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Journal Article In this analysis, we explore how low-income African American fathers build understandings of successful manhood in the context of community-based responsible fatherhood programs. Drawing on life history interviews with 75 men in Illinois and Indiana, we explore men's attempts to fulfill normative expectations of fatherhood while living in communities with limited resources. We examine the efforts of community-based fatherhood programs to shape alternative African American masculinities through facilitation of personal turning points and "breaks with the past," use of social support and…
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Journal Article Following divorce or separation, father-child contact is deemed an important influence on child development. Previous research has explored the impact of sociodemographic and attitudinal factors on the amount of contact between fathers and their children following a union dissolution. This article revisits this important question using fathers' reports on a sample of 859 children from newly available survey data. Multilevel random intercept models are used to reassess the influence of child- and father-level factors on the amount of reported contact. Results show that the amount of father-…
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Journal Article We examined the activities that low-income, ethnically diverse fathers of sons versus daughters engage in with their children in the preschool years. African American, Latino, and White fathers ( N = 426) from research sites across the United States, were interviewed about their caregiving, play, literacy, and visiting activities when their children were 2 years, 3 years, and preschool age. Fathers of boys engaged more frequently in physical play than fathers of girls, whereas fathers of girls engaged more frequently in literacy activities. Moreover, gendered patterns of father engagement…
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Journal Article We identify and discuss mothers' early strategies to recruit nonresidential biological fathers, intimate partners, male family members and friends, and paternal kin to support the needs of young children in low-income families. Using the concept of kinscription and longitudinal ethnographic data on 149 African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White families from Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study, we developed a model of recruitment that includes three related processes: the search for legitimacy with conventional fathers and partners, the consequences of maternal advocacy…
