The myth of the deadbeat dad

A researcher who interviewed black fathers who don't live with their kids talks about their surprising views on parenting.

By Suzy Hansen

Aug. 9, 2001 | The national controversy over "deadbeat dads" intensified last month when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a man who fathered nine children by four different women to stop having kids until he started supporting them properly. Men, women, liberals and conservatives all feel fairly comfortable in reviling deadbeat dads (that is, fathers who don't live with their kids and don't pay child support), but depriving them of a basic human right -- reproduction -- seemed a little overboard to many, particularly to the three women justices who dissented from the decision. Women, especially those left alone with the financial and emotional burden of parenting, are usually the ones sounding the alarm about absent fathers. The Wisconsin ruling illustrates the conundrum of punishing those who can't or won't face up to the role of daddy. There are a lot of unmarried fathers, too; according to the National Center for Health Statistics, one-third of American children are born to an unwed mother.

Low-income fathers are often singled out for being particularly neglectful. But according to Ronald Mincy, a Columbia University professor of social work, we know very little about how low-income, unmarried fathers behave or what they think about fatherhood. Mincy works with a team of researchers at Columbia's Social Indicators Survey Center who, in partnership with the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University, are conducting one of the first national studies on fatherlessness. Their Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey follows the unmarried parents of 3,600 children -- a representative sample of white, black and Latino couples from 20 U.S. metropolitan areas -- from birth until age 4.

"So far, the data does not indicate that during the first three years of the child's life, most low-income fathers are irresponsible," Mincy said. "Fathers are helping during the pregnancy, making financial contributions and visiting the child. But over time these informal contributions wane as the relationship between the couple deteriorates. The father becomes discouraged and the mother gets annoyed. The father's inability to make financial contributions seems part of that deterioration. Static will be introduced in the relationship that will serve to bar fathers from seeing their kids."

The Fragile Families report fills in many of the gaps surrounding low-income, nonresidential fathers, as will Mincy's new book, "Fathers, Families and Public Policy," due out this fall. In her recent book "What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away From Their Children," Jennifer Hamer looks at how we think about black low-income fathers and, perhaps more provocatively, uses her subjects' own voices to challenge the simplistic image of the black deadbeat dad. As Hamer writes, black unwed fathers "are often publicly portrayed as unemployed, uneducated and unwilling to provide."

Statistics affirm that the majority of black children are daddyless. About 70 percent of all African-American births are out of wedlock and over 85 percent of African-American children will spend some years of their childhood without a father in the home.

These are astounding statistics, but Hamer, now an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, found that hardly anything had been written about fatherhood from the perspective of black men. Armed with recording equipment and at times accompanied by her own son, Hamer visited car washes, housing projects and Wal-Marts in search of low-income black men willing to talk about what it means to be a daddy. She ended up spending hours with 88 men hailing from places like East Texas, Detroit and North Carolina.

Next page: Are these men really "deadbeat dads"?