… We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples, and doing more to encourage fatherhood – because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one.
Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America. It is this kind of prosperity – broad, shared, and built on a thriving middle class – that has always been the source of our progress at home. It is also the foundation of our power and influence throughout the world. — President Obama, 2013 State of the Union address
The brief chastisement of absentee dads that President Obama ticked off during last night’s State of the Union address quickly became the sound byte and retweet heard ’round the country. Which is fine. Because if there are fathers who were watching who are completely uninvolved (or underinvolved) with their children — and they are absent because marriage or remaining present and engaged presented financial impediments, then they may’ve needed to hear that. I’m all for taking any parent to task who’s willfully refusing to pull his or her own weight.
I also won’t pretend that single mothers don’t appreciate statements like this; it validates the experiences of those whose partners are not invested in parenting. Perhaps it even makes them feel as though they alone aren’t being “blamed” for their single parenthood.
But as I’ve learned through the research I’ve done and the stories I’ve solicited since starting Beyond Baby Mamas, there are fewer completely absent fathers and men who are unwilling to “stick around and raise the children they’ve conceived” as there are well-intentioned men for whom parenting proves more complicated than they initially anticipated. From the incarcerated dad to the father whose long-term unemployment makes financial contributions impossible to the father who tried marriage, learned that it wasn’t sustainable, and struggled to recalibrate effectively after divorce, there are many reasons — other than garden variety callousness or indifference — that fathers aren’t as involved with their children as they could be.
Let’s not pretend that the “it takes a real man to stick around and be a father” memes aren’t just as much as act of shaming as the “should’ve kept your legs closed and/or made him put a ring on it” memes are for mothers.
None of this is to say that incentives that encourage fatherhood are unnecessary or in any way ill-advised or that incentivizing marriage for low-income partners is a bad idea necessarily. But to couch those intentions in warmed over assumptions and criticism is counterproductive.
Few bother to fully investigate the root causes of father un- and underinvolvement. Few allow for the fact that those causes are varied and can’t necessarily be fixed by shaming a man into “doing better” or tossing him a monetary bone.
Consider the case of Obama’s own father, married three times with a number of children for whom his emotional and financial investment was decidedly limited. Was it because he wasn’t “man enough to stick around” in any of these three family structures or were there mitigating circumstances — perhaps different ones, in each of these cases?
I certainly agree with the president that stronger families lead to a stronger America. I just question whether or not challenging the manhood of fathers who, for whatever reasons, struggle to be what society considers “good” at the gig is gonna be enough to get us there.
