Doing the Best I Can serves as an interesting piece, to be read alongside and/or as a companion to Promises I Can Keep. They’re absolutely telling the same story from different angles about the same sort of people. It tells a tale of absent fathers primarily through the lens of a skills gap. These people want to be good fathers, but they are bad at romantic relationships, bad at steady jobs, bad at holding their own lives together. They have children young, because they want kids! Much more under the cut.
TL;DR: To fix absent fathers in low-income urban communities (and it’s interesting and important that the researchers don’t seem to observe a large racial divide, once you’re urban and poor that’s most of the issue, though their areas of study don’t include any obviously Hispanic men in the chapters I’ve read: black men do slightly better, actually, and the authors argue that they’ve transitioned to the new social order better because the black community deals with this problem so much more frequently), teach them how to date. Fragile relationships with mothers are the primary cause of paternal abandonment of children.
This quote is my favorite from the excerpt on their website. ‘We ask Lacey, a black 42-year-old who works as a cook in a restaurant in North Philadelphia, “How did you see your future before you became a father?” “I didn’t have no future,” he replies. “I didn’t care. I lived for the moment.” We ask, “Did you think you would live to see 42?” “No. Nobody did,” he admits, and then adds, “Nobody expected me to be there to see 17.” Lacey now lives with his fiancée and daughter and the nine-year-old child whom he gained custody of a year ago. He gets up at 5 a.m. to ensure he’s on time for his 7 a.m. shift, works 40 hours a week, never touches anything stronger than beer, and spends most of his leisure time with family—visiting with his 18-year-old daughter and her kids, offering advice to his 17-year-old son, or spending time with his fiancée and the two little girls who live in his household. “I spend as much time as I can with my family,” he says with satisfaction.’
Lacey is the success story of the “have kids, grow up” model. He’s someone who was forced to grow up by having kids, and did grow up. But many people don’t.
Part of what seems to be a major difference is speed. Marrying someone after knowing them for three years is what I think of as rapid, and if I was going to have kids I’d want to wait another year or two. This isn’t uncommon: I know a couple who have been together six years, since high school and they’ve graduated college, who aren’t married. Choosing one’s partners is critical: I laugh at how similar @cymae-mesa and I are (seriously, it’s kind of scary, SCOTUS fandom is common but the Ex Urbe fandom is tiny). But work goes into it, in a way that I consider very normal.
When I’m getting into a relationship I think about introducing someone to my friends, which interests of mine they share and in what ways they share them, I think about what sort of role in each other’s lives we want to play, I think about how long I expect my predictions to hold for, and of course I’m looking for emotional and social chemistry. That’s to start dating on a regular basis. Marriage is for importing humans, so it requires conversations about how you prefer to live in space, moving, and everything involved in a relationship, of course. Having a child requires conversations about religion, faith, family, education, stability, life goals, and a host of other things. In Boston, at the high end, in a city already somewhat selected for my preferences, there were many people I would have happily dated. Let’s call it 400, a shade under .01% of the population.
‘Few men even mention, much less discuss, any special qualities
of their partners or any common tastes or values that drew the two
together. Usually, the girl lives on his block, hangs out on the stoop
near his corner, works at the same job, is a friend of his sister’s or the
girlfriend of a friend, and is willing to “socialize” with him.’
“There are many things David says he loves about Winnie. Her culinary skills get first mention: “What’s the saying, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? She’s a good cook. That’s the truth.” And besides, he adds, “She’s a good housecleaner—she keeps the house clean. We work our problems out together. Most of the time she’s pretty cool.” But what quality does he treasure even more? “She takes care of the kids—she’s very firm—she’s there for them. That’s what I love about her the most.”
Other highlights
Intensive involvement, as they code it, means seeing your children once a week, or once a month or more on a schedule. I’m 23, and I speak with my family more often than that, because we’re close.
Finances are very wrapped up in self-conceptions of fatherhood, and being a financial contributor is seen as key. Gender is absolute, as portrayed in this book. Low income urban men and women live very different lives, with different priorities, opportunities, everything.
The number of men who drop out of school so that they can start providing for their children instantly, instead of waiting the year or two to finish that stage of education, is staggering to me. Dropping out of college with one year left, high school with one year left, so that you can get a job? Access to credit seems like such a problem here, but at the same time it’s obvious how much support families provide, surely there’s a way to solve this? Live fast, die young, women in these stories are having kids at literally half the age of women I know have kids.
“Two-year-old Rahmere’s reluctance to treat [his father] as more than a visitor, even after four months of spending weekends together, suggests hesitation as well.”
It’s interesting to see how decisions aren’t being made. They don’t talk about having kids, both parties just stop using protection (and using protection when in a committed relationship is a sign that you don’t trust the woman you’re with not to be sleeping around actively. There is no suggestion that anyone ever gets tested for STIs.) They decide to get an abortion, or don’t. The relationship becomes more serious after the pregnancy, and lasts that way for about a year after childbirth (the poly advice I’ve seen is that NRE can last up to 18 months).
“They (the men) focus less on whether all their children have an engaged father and more on whether they are successfully accomplishing fatherhood in some manner with any child at a given time“ is a really important takeaway. People want to be parents! But these men are terrible at it. They also don’t see themselves as responsible for their kids, rather they want to be fathers. Responsibility is a good thing for them to think that they feel.
@transgirlkyloren @worldoptimization @gruntledandhinged this seems relevant to y’all.
Disclaimer: In chapter 1, the authors always mention when an employer is Jewish, and that’s the only fact mentioned other than social connection, if any. I’m not sure what the deal is here, but it smells like antisemitism. It seems to go away in later chapters?