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Journal Article In his new book, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, James Q. Wilson argues that "in much of the Western and Caribbean worlds, marriage is in trouble." Wilson reports that the results have been devastating, especially for children. He calls for cultural and institutional changes that would strengthen marriage. Meanwhile, in a recent edition of The American Prospect, Janet C. Gornick argued that feminists are not opposed to marriage, and that feminists and conservatives should be able to find some common ground. For example, both would like to strengthen fathers' ties…
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Journal Article This article documents the changes in men's experience of living with their own children. Data are drawn from seven Current Population Surveys (1965-1995) to identify trends in the likelihood of living with children, cohort differences in the experience of living with many children or with preschool age children, the timing of living with children, and variations in patterns by race and level of education. The data indicate that men's experience of living with children declined dramatically across cohorts. Residency with children decreased by 66 percent for men aged 20 to 24 and by 57 percent…
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Journal Article This study documents the opinions of twenty low-income fathers about their participation in a Responsible Fatherhood program in a large urban area. The program offered life skills training, job readiness and placement assistance, mental health counseling and other services to help fathers become involved in their children's lives and to comply with child support orders. Formal services were provided for six months, with opportunities for follow-up maintenance groups. The fathers who participated in the study were at various levels in the program, from entry to ongoing support. Four focus…
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Journal Article This study examined the association between fathers' alcoholism and other risk factors such as parental depression, family conflict, infant temperament, and parent-infant attachment. The quality of parent-infant interactions was hypothesized to be a proximal mediator of the associations among alcoholism and other risk factors and attachment. The participants were 223 families (104 nonalcoholic families and 119 alcoholic families) with 12-month-old infants recruited through birth records. Infants in families with two parents with alcohol problem had significantly higher rates of insecure…
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Journal Article This journal issue focuses on fatherhood and addressing the needs of fathers in social work practice. It begins by discussing the dangers facing fatherhood in the United States, and identifying fathers whose parenting roles could be at-risk. The need for a special approach to reach fathers is emphasized, and a holistic approach is described that that builds on fathers' strengths, is culturally sensitive, considers many system levels of intervention, and promotes a broad base of support for fatherhood. Social movements supporting fatherhood are summarized, and pertinent fatherhood literature…
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Journal Article Recognizing that most poor families are single-parent families, the federal welfare reform law of 1996 emphasized the responsibility of both parents to support their children. In addition to strengthening the child support enforcement system, the law included several provisions designed to decrease childbearing outside of marriage and to promote two-parent families. This article focuses on the important role that fathers play in children's lives and how public policies have affected childbearing and father involvement. Key observations are: Compared with children living with both biological…
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Journal Article This paper argues that the determination of legal parenthood should fundamentally be about identity; that is, it should be seen as providing an answer to the question: to which family does this child belong? The paper approaches the issue by, first, noting that the determination of legal parenthood has become one of the most contentious issues in family, and that this has ironically happened because of the combination of greater certainty in the determination of biological paternity, and greater instability in family relationships. The historic strategy of using the stigma against…
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Journal Article Drawing upon data from the What About Fathers study, a qualitative in-depth interview study with 510 low-income noncustodial fathers in three U.S. cities, Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, and Rechelle Paranal, in their Institute for Policy Research working paper, Fatherhood and Incarceration as Potential Turning Points in the Criminal Careers of Unskilled Men, examine the effect of incarceration on men's involvement with their children, as well as the effect of fatherhood on their criminal careers. (Author abstract)
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Journal Article Propositions from identity theory suggest that interactional and affective commitment to a role identity affects the psychological centrality of that role identity. In turn, the centrality of one's role identity translates into role performance. This conceptual model was tested with a sample of 186 fathers in first marriages with at least one child 18 years or younger. The results showed that fathers who perceive their wives as evaluating them positively as fathers were more likely to report higher levels of involvement in child-related activities and place greater importance on the father…
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Journal Article The authors use an ecological framework and grounded theoretical analysis to explore the circumstances in which working-class and low-income custodial African American fathers gain custody of their children; their transition from part-time to full-time parents; and the role of support networks in enhancing or inhibiting these men's parenting. Twenty-four men from an impoverished Midwestern urban area participated in the study. The findings suggest that these men, and perhaps others sharing their demographic profiles, generally become parents by default and are often reluctant to take on a…