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Journal Article Social service organizations face significant challenges involving fathers. This study presents the findings of a project between a maternal and child health program and a school of social work aimed at enhancing the organization’s capacity for engaging fathers in services. Results revealed that staff expressed a willingness to engage fathers but felt unprepared to do so. In detailing their experiences with the organization, fathers discussed the ways in which they had been engaged and their recommendations for improving those efforts. We conclude by advocating for the adoption of a bottom-up…
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Journal Article The entry into fatherhood is a major life course transition involving the acquisition of new adult roles and responsibilities. This transition is rarely planned for young fathers, and may involve a range of challenges, not least their capacity to provide materially and financially for their child. Drawing on a Qualitative Longitudinal study of young fathers in the UK, this article charts their very different pathways through education, training and employment, showing how these are shaped by a constellation of life circumstances. The implications for policy are considered in the light of a…
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Journal Article Recession-related increases in men's child care are well documented, but supporting evidence describes the last several decades of the 20th century. Changes in family life and in the association between families' economic conditions and the macro economy provide reason to question the continued existence of a “recession effect.” This article evaluates the frequency of married and cohabiting fathers' engagement in the day-to-day tasks of child care during the so-called Great Recession, using data from male respondents to the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth. Results indicated an…
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Journal Article Father involvement is a salient predictor of children’s cognitive development and recent studies suggest that African American and Hispanic fathers, who are highly involved, have children who enter school more poised to succeed. Little is known, however, about contextual barriers to positive father involvement in ethnic minority families. This study examined prospective relations between fathers’ work characteristics (i.e., total work hours per week, job satisfaction, and work shift) and children’s cognitive development in preschool (i.e., reading and math scores). A total of 2,340 children…
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Journal Article In this article, we test how out-of-home placement affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing we provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in out-of-home care from 1995 to 2005, we find that having a child placed in care is associated with up to a 4 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. Having a child placed in out-of-home care appear to aggravate conditions that likely…
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Journal Article Child maltreatment rates are strongly linked to adult male behavior, suggesting that labor market conditions, by influencing male behaviors, can influence maltreatment rates. Using the unemployment rate as the sole measure of labor market conditions, past studies generally conclude that employment conditions do not systematically influence child maltreatment rates. By contrast, this study found that state-level child maltreatment rates were statistically significant and inversely related to the state-level employment rates of men, aged 20 to 34 yrs old. It also found that the interaction of…
