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Key Words fatherhood, fertility, family, children, poverty
Abstract This article reviews recent literature on low-income fathers, including the transition to fatherhood for young unmarried fathers and levels of father involvement among married, cohabiting, and nonresident low-income fathers. I discuss predictors of father involvement as well as available evidence concerning their effects on children's well-being. Although mounting qualitative evidence argues that unmarried low-income men may be more favorably disposed to fatherhood than previously recognized and that such intentions may greatly influence subsequent fathering behavior, studies of fertility intention remain largely separate from those of father involvement. I propose that subsequent research should also pay greater attention to the effects of fatherhood on low-income men.
INTRODUCTION
Once it was customary to begin an article on fathers with a complaint over their relative absence in the sociological literature (and with some hard feelings over mothers getting all the attention). Such grievances are no longer warranted. In the past 15 years there has been a groundswell of attention paid to fathers and issues related to fatherhood, not only in our own field but also in demography, psychology, economics, social work, and anthropology. Quantitative and qualitative studies of fathers and their effects on children's well-being are being published at an accelerating rate, and theoretical work on fathering-while certainly lagging behind empirical work-is developing in fits and starts.
The expanding number of articles, monographs, and edited collections dealing with fathers has been largely spurred by the treatment of fatherhood as a social problem. The growth in single-parent households over the past several decades has meant that an increasing proportion of fathers do not live with their offspring, pay any or adequate child support, or maintain contact with their children. It is ironic, then, that we are just now learning more about what fathers do and how this affects their children at a time when American men are spending less of their lives as resident fathers-and to fewer children-than ever before (Eggebeen 2002).
Given this general concern over the state of fatherhood, why do I choose to focus here on low-income fathers? There are four basic reasons. First, there are several recent and fairly comprehensive reviews of the literature on involvement among fathers in general (Lamb 2000, Marsiglio 1995b, Pleck 1997)...