We hear a great deal about fathers. Dead-beat dads, absent fathers, distant fathers, participant fathers, new fathers, and changing fathers feature in academic and popular discussions. The impact of fathers on children, their influence for good or bad, their central importance, or their insignificance are investigated, assumed, argued over, and mobilized in highly politicized debates. But very few of the participants in these debates have examined what men themselves say about being fathers, about what fatherhood means to them, about what they do and do not do, and about how they explain the place of fatherhood in their lives. What...

To be a father is to reconcile competing ideals, demands, and responsibilities: time spent with children against money earned, the kind of house you live in against the length of your commute, your responsibility as a husband against your responsibility as a father, and within yourself the reconciliation of being simultaneously your father’s son and your own son’s father. To be an adequate father is to put together a “package deal” of work, marriage, home, and children.¹ Not every father is married or works outside the home, but every father constructs, for himself and for others, a story about his...

Fatherhood is one of the four elements that make up the package deal (fatherhood, marriage, employment, and home ownership). The elements are interconnected and mutually dependent. As a complex whole, they can be viewed from a number of different perspectives. An analysis of men’s lives from the perspective of employment, for instance, would examine how fatherhood, marriage, and housing are affected by the structure of work and the employment opportunities available to men. It would also examine how men’s employment prospects, experiences, and histories are affected by being (or not being) fathers, husbands, and home owners. In this book, I...

When I asked men about their parents, they talked mostly about their fathers, but when I asked them about becoming fathers, they talked about their wives. What emerged from my conversations is that, for the men I talked to, the father–child relationship could not be described or thought about independent of the relationship between husband and wife. Some of the paradoxes of men’s relations to their children may be understood by appreciating the relative positions of men, women, and children, and specifically the crucial linking or mediating role of women.

Appreciating the linking role of women is not to...

In the United States, one thing that almost all men do is “work.” For men in the United States, participation in the labor force dominates their lives and their identities. Men’s labor force participation is long term, consistent, full time, and almost universal. In every year since 1960, more than 95 percent of married men aged twenty-five to forty-five have been in the labor force.¹ Men spend many hours daily at work or in work-related activity. Work and money are dominant topics of men’s conversations. Men’s prestige, their value to others, and their self-worth are measured by their identity as...

Home ownership is the defining aspiration and sign of membership for the middle class in the United States. Home ownership is also one of the four elements of the package deal. Homes are worked for and worked on—they are both valuable and valued—but home ownership also ties people into a system of employment and consumption that has profound contradictions. Homes, the sites of class reproduction as well as individual reproduction, are the places where aspirations and desires come face to face with circumstances. The tensions and complexities of family life are there revealed.

If the four elements of...

The men I talked to tried to achieve the package deal by assembling the elements of marriage, fatherhood, employment, and home ownership. They talked about success in achieving the package deal as an accomplishment for which they could take credit as individuals or as part of an autonomous married couple. I have, as a counterweight to their individualist ethos, stressed the importance of social situation and circumstances to understanding the pattern and variation of these men’s lives. The time and place of their coming of age, patterns of economic change, and accidents of birth have all been crucial.

Achieving the...

The importance of fathers for children has been both minimized (Stephenson 1991) and exaggerated (Blankenhorn 1995; Popenoe 1999). Research reveals a more nuanced picture (Amato 1998; Belsky 1998; Furstenberg 1998; Harris, Furstenberg, and Marmer 1998; Marsiglio et al. 2000), but the debate over the importance or irrelevance of fathers will not be decided by research, no matter how careful and controlled. This debate taps into fundamental cultural notions of what life is about. The family is one of our basic moral metaphors, and the appropriate place of the father in the family is a key marker of moral positions (Lakoff...