Black Single Fathers: Choosing to Parent Full-Time

TL;DR: This paper used the narratives of African American, single, full-time fathers to explore the motivations precipitating their choice to parent, finding that their main motivations centered on fulfilling a sense of duty and responsibility, reworking the effects of having had weak or absent fathers themselves, and fulfilling an already established parent-child bond.

Abstract: This ethnographic study uses the narratives of African American, single, full-time fathers to explore the motivations precipitating their choice to parent. While the fathers had in common a number of demographic characteristics, such as full employment, residence, and support systems, which factored into their timing of and ability to take full custody, none of these are salient in their own narratives expressing why they wanted to be full-time fathers. Instead, their main motives centered on fulfilling a sense of duty and responsibility, reworking the effects of having had weak or absent fathers themselves, wanting to provide a role model for their children, and fulfilling an already established parent-child bond.

Summary

METHOD AND SAMPLE PROFILE

• Combining the qualitative research principles of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) with limited quantitative data, this research focused on identifying key elements in the process buttressing the choice to become full-time fathers.
• Fathers are admitted to the study based on their racial identity and custodial status.
• About five of the fathers had legal custody—that is, custody adjudicated by the courts.
• Several themes emerged asmore important considerations than others.

THE CHOICE OR DUTY TO PARENT

• Defining choice and weighing the individual pushes and pulls of the decision to parent is a murky area.
• Four of the fathers experienced a period of time when they did not have custody of their child, and three of those four fathers were able to use that time to complete a college education and find stable employment, whereupon they requested custody.
• Moreover, for these men the choice to conceive and give birth to a child is not a decision separate from the one to raise a child; rather, the former implies the latter.
• Nevertheless, he says, “People compliment me for having custody, but I don’t really warm to the compliments too much, because they are complimenting me on something that I felt was my responsibility to do.”.
• And it’s not like she just abandoned him on some wayside station.

BREAKING A CYCLE OF BAD DADS

• Striking among the findings here is the role played by the fathers’ experiences in their families of orientation in their motivation to father full-time.
• Rather than re-creating that paternal motif in their generation, many of these men found their lack of a nurturing father to be a consciously motivating factor in their own parenting experience.
• It was like, you know, I’m not going to do what my father did to me.
• Then the next time I saw himwas at his funeral.
• Another father had his son’s friend living with them as well, and two fathers spent a significant part of their timementoring other young children through community or school programs.

PROVIDING ROLE MODELS FOR CHILDREN

• Asmentioned earlier, one of the fathers had had some conflicts with law enforcement as a juvenile; two others had siblingswhowere “living the street life” or in jail.
• His daughter has had some behavioral problems in the past year, and he feels he was not as understanding and responsive to her needs as he was to his son’s, perhaps because he assumed his son would have been more likely to experience problems than his daughter.
• But with my son, I knew that a lot of things are going to bring him down, as far as being a black male.
• So I’ve always tried to prepare him and kept him with me, where he would learn from me.
• While this desire to be a rolemodel for their children wasmore often expressed by fathers of boys, girls represented a slight majority of custodial children (seven of a total of thirteen custodial children).

JUST FULFILLING AN ESTABLISHED DREAM OR BOND

• For some of the fathers, taking custody just seemed the natural thing to do, given a long-held desire to be a father, to enact an image they had held of the perfect family, and/or to fulfill the close relationship they had with their children.
• She was very ill through the whole pregnancy, and she had a hard time in labor.
• Larry says that those years of working on the relationship with his kids effected a bond that motivated him to take custody.
• As I look back on it, I think that was how the authors bonded.
• Most previous studies (Chang and Deinard 1982; Greif 1990; Ihinger-Tallman, Pasley, and Buehler 1995; Marsiglio 1991b; Morgan, Lye, and Condran 1988) of single custodial fathers indicate that gender plays a role in father custody (see Furstenberg et al.

AVAILABILITY OF RESOURCES

• In the choice to parent, the availability of resources is often a major, though not always a conscious, consideration.
• Several studies (Lerman 1993) have found that employment didn’t make black men more likely to marry; rather, it made them less likely to become fathers prior to marriage.
• Most of the fathers also had a residence in place when they took custody.
• But once my baby was born and they seen the responsibility that I was taking for her, they didn’t mind at all.
• The remaining fathers live within five miles of some of their family members and call on them for assistance to one degree or another.

RACIAL AND GENDER STEREOTYPES

• The issue of stereotypes of black men was raised by the interviewer.
• Most said it did not play a significant role in their decision at the time.
• Alex, father of one-year-old Alex Jr., said, “I see that image out there, but I don’t feel that I’m doing this to prove that image wrong.
• But in a larger sense I’m doing it for every man out there that’s in this situation.
• Or that could be if he only, you know, took it upon himself to say, “Okay, this is theway it is—I’m going to handle my business,” as opposed to searching around for reasons not to do it.

DISCUSSION

• While this sample is neither random nor large enough from which to generalize, the goal of qualitative research is to capture the complex assumptions, meanings, and motivations that guide the decisionmaking process.
• The intent of this studywas not to test theory but rather to build theory from the ground up, explore new territory in the growing field of fatherhood, give voice to a previously unheard from group of fathers, and provide a sense of how they choose to parent.
• An increasing number of black men are adopting children, particularly boys (Anonymous 1994).
• Kotre (1984) made the point that one cannot rewrite one’s own history, so one is compelled to rewrite it in a new generation.
• By proactively taking custody of their children, by being there for them, they can be the intervening agent who halts or even reverses the consequences of a previous generation’s mistakes, consequences both for themselves and for their children.

NOTES

• The rate of teen pregnancy has been declining among African Americans in the past few years, and one of the main contributing factors in the apparent rise in the proportion of nonmarital births among African Americans is the increasing tendency to postpone marriage among African Americans and the subsequent declining fertility rates among married black women.
• The declining rate of fertility among married black women means that nonmarital births form a larger portion of all births.
• Dowd (1997) estimated that 41 percent of father-custody families are remarried men.
• Throughout this article, all the names of fathers and children are pseudonyms.
• Only one of the fathers had been belowmajority age—sixteen—at the time of the birth of his first child; eight of them had been in their twenties and thirties.

Full text

http://jce.sagepub.com
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
DOI: 10.1177/0891241602031004002
2002; 31; 411 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
ROBERTA L. COLES
Black Single Fathers: Choosing to Parent Full-Time
http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/4/411
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Journal of Contemporary Ethnography Additional services and information for
http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:
http://jce.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/31/4/411 Citations
at SAGE Publications on February 18, 2009 http://jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from

JOURNALOF CONTEMPORARYETHNOGRAPHY /AUGUST2002Coles/ BLACKSINGLE FATHERS
BLACK SINGLE FATHERS
Choosing to Parent Full-Time
ROBERTA L. COLES
Marquette University
411
ROBERTA L. COLES is an assistant professor in the
Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at
Marquette University. Her research interests are in
war discourse analysis, race and ethnicity, and fam-
ily. Some of her work has been published in Sociologi-
cal Quarterly, Sociological Spectrum, Journal of
Aging Studies, and Cultural Studies/Critical Method-
ologies. Any comments or questions can be addressed
to the author at Roberta.coles@mu.edu.
“ ...rather than
re-creating that
paternal motif in
their generation,
many of these men
found their lack of
a nurturing father
to be a
consciously
motivating factor
in their own
parenting
experience.
”
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31 No. 4, August 2002 411-439
© 2002 Sage Publications
at SAGE Publications on February 18, 2009 http://jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from

This ethnographic study uses the narratives of African American, single,
full-time fathers to explore the motivations precipitating their choice to
parent. While the fathers had in common a number of demographic char-
acteristics, such as full employment, residence, and support systems,
which factored into their timing of and ability to take full custody, none of
these are salient in their own narratives expressing why they wanted to
be full-time fathers. Instead, their main motives centered on fulfilling a
sense of duty and responsibility, reworking the effects of having had
weak or absent fathers themselves, wanting to provide a role model for
their children, and fulfilling an already established parent-child bond.
F
or decades, in the popular media as well as in academic litera-
ture, African American men have seldom been viewed in the
context of a family. At best they are treated as a neutral sociological
construct—the black male—or worse, as an unattached danger to soci-
ety (Cochran 1997; Gadsden and Smith 1995; Madhubuti 1990;
Mirande 1991; Rutherford 1988; Staples 1986). While an increasing
number of studies have looked at married or cohabiting black men in
two-parent families (Ahmeduzzaman and Roopnarine 1992; Allen
1981; Bowman 1993; Bright and Williams 1996; Fagan 1998; McAdoo
1981, 1988a, 1988b, 1993; McAdoo and McAdoo 1994; Mirande
1991; Taylor, Leashore, and Toliver 1988; Wade 1994; for instance)
with respect to their child-rearing values, provider role, or gender rela-
tions, most recent studies (e.g., Barnes 1987; Christmon 1990;
Furstenberg, Morgan, and Allison 1987; Furstenberg and Harris 1993;
Hawkins and Eggebeen 1991; Lerman 1993; Lerman and Ooms 1993;
Marsiglio 1987, 1991a; Miller 1994; Mott 1990; Rivara, Sweeney, and
Henderson 1986; Robinson 1988), and the burgeoning number of gov-
ernment programs on “responsible fatherhood” as well (Johnson and
Sum 1987; Pirog-Good 1993; Savage 1987), have concentrated on sin-
gle black men who are nonresident fathers. This focus, along with the
high rates of divorce, cohabitation, and teen and nonmarital births
among African Americans as a group, has led to a close association
between the terms “black father” and “absent father” (Dowd 1997).
1
Fortunately, a number of these studies (Danziger and Radin 1990;
Seltzer 1991; Taylor et al. 1990; Wattenberg 1993) have indicated that
412 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / AUGUST 2002
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author wishes to thank the men who generously gave of their time for this
study and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms. This study was funded by a grant
from Marquette University.
at SAGE Publications on February 18, 2009 http://jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from

the lack of marriage or coresidence with the mother does not necessarily
indicate parental noninvolvement, as might be inferred from the term
“absent.” Indeed, while recent research on fathers in general indicates
that fatherhood is turning out to be a much more varied and complex
arrangement that defies simplistic categories, no study has looked at
single African American men who parent full-time. One would think
they are nonexistent, but most data indicate that they exist at a higher
rate than white single dads.
Eggebeen, Snyder, and Manning’s (1996) study of National Survey
of Families and Households data indicates that single-father families
represented 15.5 percent of all single-parent families with children and
that single-father families are increasingly formed by fathers who are
young, have never been married, and have low incomes and fewer chil-
dren. In each decade from 1960 to 1990, they found nonwhite children
more likely than white children to reside in father-only families.
Eggebeen, Snyder, and Manning’s reading of census data indicated that
by 1990, 3.3 percent of white children would be in father-only families,
while 5.6 percent of black children would be. However, 1992 census
data showed that 3.4 percent of black children seventeen years old or
younger lived in father-only households, compared to 3.3 percent of
their white counterparts (Diverse living arrangements of children 1993).
The confusion of these numbers is frequently exacerbated by the use
of a myriad of terms—single father, unwed father, father only, lone
fathers, father custody, and male-headed families—without distin-
guishing among them. For instance, father-custody families can include
fathers who have remarried,
2
and since white men have higher rates of
remarriage than black men, the percentage of white single-father cus-
tody may be overstated (Zill 1988).
In any case, the proportion of African American single-father fami-
lies seems to be at least as high as, or higher than, that of white single-
father families. Nevertheless, the glut of studies focusing on single-
father families, whether qualitative or quantitative, has focused on
white fathers (see Barker 1994; Bartz and Witcher 1978; Chang and
Deinard 1982; DeFrain and Eirick 1981; Gasser and Taylor 1976;
George and Wilding 1972; Gersick 1979; Greif 1982, 1985, 1990; Greif
and DeMaris 1989; Hanson 1981, 1986; Hipgrave 1982; Katz 1979;
Keshet and Rosenthal 1976; Mendex 1976; Orthner, Brown, and Fergu-
son 1976; Robinson and Barrett 1986; Risman 1986; Rosenthal and
Keshet 1981; Santrock and Warshak 1979; Smith and Smith 1981; and
Coles / BLACK SINGLE FATHERS 413
at SAGE Publications on February 18, 2009 http://jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Tedder, Libbee, and Scherman 1981). Not one has focused on African
American single fathers with custody of children.
Despite the fact that African American men tend to be disadvantaged
in terms of education, employment, income, and health in comparison
to white men (Davis 1999), it appears that they are as likely or more
likely to take on the task of single parenting. Hence, with the cultural
turn in societal expectations for men to increase their domestic duties, it
is important to begin to determine (1) what factors enable and motivate
such men to choose to be single custodial fathers, (2) how they parent
and the effects on their children, and (3) what benefits and disadvan-
tages attend to the fathers themselves. This article addresses the first of
these questions. How did these fathers decipher their ability to choose,
weighing their own free will against perceived or real constraints? To
what extent do past experience and present circumstances mesh together
or constrain one another in the individual’s decision-making process?
METHOD AND SAMPLE PROFILE
Combining the qualitative research principles of grounded theory
(Glaser and Strauss 1967) with limited quantitative data, this research
focused on identifying key elements in the process buttressing the
choice to become full-time fathers. In addition to tracking some quanti-
tative factors (education, income, age, etc.), I analyzed the qualitative
data for emergent themes regarding the motivations and reasoning
behind the decision.
Given the relatively small percentage of black men in the U.S. popu-
lation and the even smaller percentage of single custodial fathers,
recruitment for this research has been a challenge. A sample of ten
fathers was obtained through so-called convenience methods, primarily
word of mouth. This sample was recruited mostly in Milwaukee and
Madison, Wisconsin, through various local organizations, such as
schools, neighborhood centers, adoption agencies, parenting resource
centers, churches, and Islamic centers; single-father Web sites (one of
the fathers has a personal Web site, in which he details his parenting
experience); the fathers themselves (snowball sampling); and advertis-
ing in local alternative newspapers and radio stations. The participants
are the first ten respondents in an ongoing ethnographic study of Afri-
can American, single, full-time fathers. While future respondents are
414 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / AUGUST 2002
at SAGE Publications on February 18, 2009 http://jce.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What is the reason why black men are less likely to marry?

For instance,Wilson (1987) has argued that black men’s marriage rates are low due to high unemployment, since both the men and the women see the men as unable to perform the provider role. 

Q2. What is the common type of assistance given to fathers?

The two fatherswith the youngest children also are men who work second- or third-shift jobs, and they receive themost assistance (about forty hours of child care per week) from familymembers. 

Q3. Why did the fathers take on a full-time parenting role?

because of the biological differences betweenmen andwomen and theway their society has structured gender roles, men have more of a choice than do women as to whether to take on a full-time parenting role once a child is born. 

Q4. What is the rate of teen pregnancy among African Americans?

The rate of teen pregnancy has been declining among African Americans in the past few years, and one of the main contributing factors in the apparent rise in the proportion of nonmarital births among African Americans is the increasing tendency to postpone marriage among African Americans and the subsequent declining fertility rates among married black women. 

Q5. How many of the nine fathers took custody of their children?

Excluding the adoptive father in this sample, five of the remaining nine fathers had continuously coresided with their children since birth; that is, upon divorce or separation from the mother, they immediately took custody. 

Q6. What are the common family member assisters?

Mothers and sisters are themost common family member assisters, but aunts, grandmothers, brothers, and uncles play an occasional role as well. 

Q7. What did the fathers say about parenting?

at least four of the fathers here used language that indicated that they also saw parenting as a duty and that self-imposed standards, rather than circumstances, were more likely to have constrained their choice, impelling them to take on the responsibility. 

Q8. What is the main reason why black men are less likely to marry?

In particular, the higher level of unemployment among black men has been debated as a factor in determining their lower marriage rates. 

Q9. What was the reason for Larry to take custody of his daughter?

Larry waited until he was settled in a two-bedroom apartment to get custody of Erica, and he currently is hoping to be able to move to a larger apartment or house to be able to take his son as well. 

Q10. What does he think of the decision to parent as a single father?

Ray, divorced father of ten-year-old Kyle, realizes that his choice to parent as a single father could garner him more kudos than is usual for single mothers. 

Q11. What did the fathers say about taking custody of their children?

”For some of the fathers, taking custody just seemed the natural thing to do, given a long-held desire to be a father, to enact an image they had held of the perfect family, and/or to fulfill the close relationship they had with their children. 

Q12. How many children did the fathers of girls have?

While this desire to be a rolemodel for their children wasmore often expressed by fathers of boys, girls represented a slight majority of custodial children (seven of a total of thirteen custodial children).