PRACTICE AND POLICY LECTURE SERIES - DECEMBER 2009: FAMILY INSTABILITY AND COMPLEXITY: VIEWS FROM THE BOTTOM

Connie Schlittler:  and it doesn't look like fall right now. I think we finally slid into winter and, again, Kathy Edin brings with her ice. I don't know what that is. She was here two years ago -- it -- almost exactly to this day and we had a terrible ice storm, but we're glad it was much more moderated today, Kathy. Glad you're here. 

I'm Connie Schlittler. I'm the chief information officer for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. This is our third year of doing the the lecture series. We have a great lineup for the spring, which will start in January. See, we are optimists around here. Chad Wilkerson will be talking about the state's economy and what we're looking at in terms of the recession, time frames. He's an economist here in Oklahoma City. So please come in January. I think it'll be something that all of us will be very interested in. 

As the legislature starts coming back into session in February, they're going to have to make some decisions based on those kinds of projections. Today we have David Kimmel. He is a site administrator for Family Expectations. This is part of the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. I think what's nice about David being here -- he's going to introduce Kathy Edin -- it's really this nice blend of theory and the interviews and the research that Kathy has done -- has really resulted in the Family Expectations program, and trying to implement some of the things that she has learned. 

So you'll see this nice partnership between what he's -- what David does with families who are expecting children and some of the work that Kathy's done really interviewing these same families, making the decisions they have made about marriage and their future for their children. So, he is currently -- this is very interesting, I didn't know this about David Kimmel -- he is a marriage and family life pastor for Rock Assembly of God in south Oklahoma City. So, that's very good. 

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, 2001, which is a great school and we're glad you represent OU. Come on up, David, and let's -- join me in welcoming David.

David Kimmel: I appreciate that, Connie, very much. I have the privilege of introducing Dr. Edin today. You have her biography there with you. It is very short compared to all the things that she has done, and we could probably fill it with just the things she's done for the state of Oklahoma. She has been with us now with the research advisory group for quite a few years, and she continues to come back and she always comes back with new information. 

As you read what she's done, the books that she has written and the ones she is currently in process of, especially the new one with fatherhood, I think that is very exciting and it's information that I think will be very helpful to all of us. At Family Expectations we've recruited, now, well over about 1,500 unmarried couples into the program, and that's Kathy's special area of expertise with unwed mothers having children, why they do what they do, the decision-making process that they use. And so, we are really going to -- we're looking forward to what she has to tell us, today. I would say that she is a great friend to the state of Oklahoma, and we are really honored to have her here today, and would you help me welcome Dr. Kathy Edin to the podium.

Dr. Kathryn Edin: All right. Well, I love what I do and I love what I've been doing in Oklahoma since 2002. I know some of you and I'm glad to meet the rest of you. You probably know this, but you might not know that you know it. You might not know the extent of it. As it turns out, we've been gathering better and better data that compare the U.S. to other countries over the years. And it turns out that currently Americans, American children by the time they reach the age of 15, are less likely, and in fact far less likely, to live with both biological parents than children in any other rich nation. 

Now, this is partly because we marry a little bit less, although that's true in western Europe, as well, but it's also because our cohabitations are notoriously fragile. In fact, cohabitations in western Europe are as stable as our marriages. Americans seem to be very into partnerships. We're also the country with the most rapid re-partnering patterns. So we love to be in partnerships. We have very high standards for our partnerships, our partnerships break up a lot, and because of this our children are more vulnerable than children in any other western industrialized nation by far. O.K. 

Not only this, but new data from a nationally representative survey of unmarried couples with children now shows that the degree of complexity these children face is almost mind-boggling. By the time the average non-marital child reaches the age of five -- O.K., and this is despite the fact that about 80% of non-marital couples are together and think of themselves as a couple at the time of their -- by the time a child reaches five, that child's mother will have gone through two to three partnership transitions. We are just now charting the number of partnership transitions, and this is irrespective of income or race, by the way, of the fathers. 

But if their partnering transitions are as rapid as those of the mothers we're talking about five to six partnerships for the average five-year-old child, and half-siblings that paint a portrait of complexity that is both internationally unique among rich nations -- no other nation has this kind of complex family form, mostly at the bottom of the income distribution. Right? Because that's where non-marital births happen in the U.S. It's also unique historically within the U.S.. Even during the Great Depression we didn't see this kind of family complexity.

So, what I'm going to talk about today is what goes on at the bottom in communities among young men and young women that produces some of these highly unstable, highly complex families that you all work with every day -- and see the -- followed up. I'm going to draw mainly today from data from low-income, non-custodial fathers. I've written -- spent most of my career writing about low-income, non-custodial -- or low-income, custodial mothers. But just for fun today we'll spice it up and we'll talk about the father's point of view. 

Now, in 1991, Frank Furstenberg and Andy Cherlin, two famous family scholars, coined the term the "package deal," and they did so to explain the fact that so many divorced dads, many of middle class origin, of the 60s and 70s and 80s tended to drift out of their kids' lives after divorce. To quote Furstenberg and Cherlin, "For many men marriage and parenting are a package deal. They're tied to their children and their feelings of responsibility for their children depend on their ties to their wives. It's as if men only know how to be fathers indirectly through the actions of their wives. If the marriage breaks up the indirect ties between the father and the children are also broken. 

So that's Furstenberg and Cherlin on marriage and divorce, but a few years earlier, in 1967, the famous book by Eliot Liebow about low-income unmarried parents made the same claim. Liebow writes, "the frequency of contact between the father and child clearly depend more on the father's relationship with the mother than on his relationship with the child himself. It is almost as if the men have no direct relationship with their children independent of their relationship with their mother." 

We are going to make the argument today -- I'm going to make the argument today that from father's point of view, the package deal is dead. And, in fact, they have repackaged the package deal dramatically in ways that lead to disaster. For the fathers I'm going to describe to you today, white, black and Latino, drawn from four cities, the mother -- sorry. In the old days the package deal held sway, I think there's evidence for this, and the mother-father relationship was what was viewed as central. It is what bound men to their obligations to their children, obligations they would otherwise ignore. 

So, to explicate this new theory of fatherhood I'm going to argue as operating in low-income and minority communities, today I'm going to draw data from two sources. The first is the Philadelphia Camden father study. If you've read the book Promises I Can Keep, you've read the mother's side of this same story. We went into several communities in both Camden and Philadelphia. These are part of the same metropolitan area, the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Spent six years hanging out in five low-income communities, interviewed over 100 black and white men multiple times about their views of fatherhood and family life and their other life experiences. 

And I'm also going to draw from the TLC 3 study. If some of you know about the "Fragile Families and Child Well-Being" survey, you know that it's a nationally representative birth cohort study of non-marital births that occurred in 2000 in 20 large U.S. cities. This is a random sub-sample of the "Fragile Families" survey in three of the 20 cities. We met the couples literally in the delivery room, as they were having their children. They're 48 couples. And we followed them intensively along with their new partners until their children reached four years of age. 

So we'll kind of be moving between these two data sources. And I'll argue based on the views our fathers shared, that they fundamentally -- at least tried, attempted to repackage the package deal. For the men we studied, the father-child relationship is typically what is viewed as central. It is what binds men to couple relationships. Some of you might find this very surprising. You might have thought that fathers don't care about children. This turns out not to be true. And the father -- the mother-father relationships may not have otherwise been formed or maintained if it had not been for the accident of a poorly planned pregnancy and birth. 

Now, if you spent any time in low-income communities, particularly low-income African-American communities, you've probably heard the phrase "mama baby, daddy maybe." How many of you have heard that phrase? O.K. We've kind of made a play on that phrase, "daddy baby, mama maybe." This is a fair representative of -- representation of the world view that our fathers hold about family and it has big effects, as we'll show later on. 

Now, for those of you who know Philadelphia and Camden, these are the African-American neighborhoods we studied. We actually lived for three and a half years in this very dark -- right where the Camden arrow is pointing there. We actually lived in that community sort of acting as old-time social anthropologists for two and a half years in preparation to do this study and I can talk about Camden more. I'm going to show you some pictures of Camden in a minute. 

Here are the white neighborhoods in the Philadelphia metropolitan area: Kensington and South Philadelphia. They are not as poor as the African-American neighborhoods, but they are very, very poor amongst all white poor neighborhoods in the U.S. They're some of the poorest. You see communities like this in rural Oklahoma. You see them in cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. O.K. The other three cities we are drawing data from are Milwaukee, Chicago and New York. 

We don't have any rural couples, here. We don't have any couples from Oklahoma, but colleagues of mine have been doing research in Oklahoma and I'm sure you can tell me that many of the patterns we're going to be describing here are probably true of the families you serve, as well. So, just to take you where we went, I'm going to show you some pictures of one of the white neighborhoods we studied. This is Kensington in Philadelphia. This neighborhood was the epicenter of textile production in 1900. 

It was literally the workshop of the world. It produced more textiles than any other place on the planet. Today, literally all of those textile mills have closed. This is one of the most common businesses in this neighborhood of Kensington. This is another very common business, the used clothing store. This is a particularly nice one. I shopped here myself. Here is a typical housing unit. Interestingly the first floor has been boarded up, but a family is living in the second floor and fixing up the unit. 

You can build houses like this in Kensington right now for about $40,000. So if you're house hungry, go to Philadelphia. This is very common in this white neighborhood of Philadelphia. These are informal murals, usually for kids killed before their time often in gang-related and drug-related violence. This is also known as the drug hot spot on the East Coast. You can get some of the best heroin between Washington and Boston right here in Kensington. So it's a very violent neighborhood. But as you can see, in some ways it looks quite idyllic. This is a summer afternoon with kids playing. 

You can see the flowers along the sidewalks. In the mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods of Philadelphia you would not see this kind of idyllic street scene, in part because they are poor. Here you see one of the shuttered factories in the distance and a kids' playground in the foreground. These park benches where the kids are sitting are places for courtship in this neighborhood where there are few institutions where couples meet. Another abandoned factory. This again is the main thorough of Kensington Avenue. 

You can see the pawn shop once again. And another shuttered factory just reminding us of the neighborhoods past. So now we're going to move across the river to Camden, New Jersey. By 2000 this was America's poorest city. In 1990 it was its poorest small city. It is also currently America's most dangerous and violent city. It was also, when we began our field work. What you see here is the RCA Victor building. This was also a manufacturing giant at the turn of the century. Campbell's Soup was located here and so on. Almost all of this manufacturing activity has moved south or overseas. This is an informal mural for a kid who was killed by a stray bullet. Only the good die young. 

You see these all over the place with Teddy bears and balloons and so on. O.K. Another memorial to a slain youth, Steph, who was killed in gang-related violence, and you can see the rate of abandonment in Camden is very high. This used to be the main shopping thoroughfare of Camden. None of these businesses are now open. They've all been closed down. In 2000, the state took over the city's finances because there was so much corruption, but they haven't done any good and now the governor of New Jersey is thinking about giving Camden back the power to govern itself, because the state has proved unable to govern it. 

Another informal mural. Here we see a young mother with her son and her younger son in the stroller. Some neighborhood youth having a good time, probably should have been in school. I think this is 2:00 in the afternoon. Another street corner. Behind these two women, you can see some low-rise public housing projects, but stoops like this are where couples often meet each other in the courtship process. So let's begin with the pre-pregnancy period. How do these families become so stable and so -- unstable and so complex. 

We gathered life histories from all of the fathers we interviewed and detailed relationship histories for each of the relationships they were involved in that produced children. What was striking about these narratives was how notably succinct they were. The couple meets, begins to affiliate and then comes up pregnant. What's noticeably absent in these narratives is much discussion of what drew the two together, what the shared interests and values were that made the couple intrigued with one another. 

A very common feature, in contrast, is the very ambiguous nature of the tie, and this is most evident in the language used to describe these relationships. You rarely hear the terms "fall in love" or even "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," although that may come later. Instead the most common terms used to describe these relationships are "associate," "affiliate," "communicate," "kick it," "talk to each other," "get with each other" and "end up together." "Then one thing leads to another and she comes up pregnant." 

Let's hear from John. "Actually she was dating a friend of mine and somehow she wanted me. But that was my friend's girl, so I didn't want to have nothing to do with it. But then my friend heard some shit and started talking shit saying he would kick my ass." I apologize for the profanity. "So I was like, whatever.
Then I will be with your girl. Eventually I just got stuck with her for a little while." 

Now, John has not found the ideal match. Instead he just got stuck with the woman who became the mother of his five-year-old child. Amin tells us, "Well, my youngest son's mother, I met her at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. She was attractive to me when I first saw her and I made my approach and we began to socialize and communicate, and from there we began to affiliate, and at some point in time we became intimate and my son was born." So, for Amin, attraction leads to affiliation which leads to intimacy which mysteriously leads to my son being born. 

Now, in many narratives you get a sense of inevitableness about this process, but also a sense of naturalness, like this is just how it goes. Now, it's worth saying that most couples that end up having a child together are indeed together at the time of conception. There are very few pure one-night stands. Despite this ambiguous nature of the language used, fathers have little trouble pinpointing when the point of togetherness began. 

So what does "together" mean? It means more than a casual encounter, because termination requires a break-up. Now, college students at Harvard and at OSU and at OU probably talk about hooking up. Maybe they talk about it a little less here than up north. Hooking up doesn't usually require a break-up. These relationships are more than mere hook-ups, yet they're less than real relationships. Despite this fact, though, few can really be said to be courting and, in fact, that whole term "courtship" is probably not completely accurate here. There's very little evidence that they're actively searching for a life partner or even an ideal mother for their future children. 

In fact, if I had to sum it up, the partnering process is more haphazard than discriminating.  Bruce says -- this is everyone's favorite quote -- "You see, I've been running around with different girls, but every time I had any kind of relationship, there's no babies born. So I didn't believe in safe sex. And next thing I knew this girl, Debbie, she was pregnant. After we got together for about four months, she comes and says, 'Bruce, I am seven weeks pregnant.' I said, 'I am shooting blanks. You can't be pregnant.' Then we went for a DNA test and that's when she found out that I was the father and she was the mother." So, here, is as typically the case, a family unit is formed through a pregnancy brought to term via a relationship that is neither casual nor serious. 

Now, let's hear from Tim. "I was hanging out at a friend of mine's house and her and a couple of her friends were there, and she used to go out with my friend." You see this girlfriend poaching is quite common. "My friend was trying to get back with her and I ended up getting with her. We were only together for about two months and she was getting pregnant. I didn't mind at all." So Tim, quote, ends up getting with his baby's mother. There's no language of choice in this quote. Yet, he, quote, "didn't mind at all" when pregnancy occurred only two months into the relationship. So much for courtship. 

Now, it is important to emphasize, here, and I think this is actually kind of hard for middle class people, maybe in particular middle class men -- I'm married to a middle class man and maybe he's inaccurate in this respect, but he tells me this is maybe a little bit hard -- thinking back for you that are men in the audience about your own early -- late teens and early 20s. For the men in these communities, children are often actively desired at those ages. If I would say to your typical college freshman that I have in my classroom, gee, I -- you know, aren't you excited about becoming a father? You know, they would faint dead away in the aisles. 

But this is often a very common fantasy and dream among young men in these communities, and it's true among the young women, as well, of course. So children are desired in general, but, as we'll see, seldom planned. Yet, attempts to avoid pregnancy fade as couples move from affiliation or socialization, in Amin's terms, to togetherness. Then, once she decides to take the pregnancy to term, and that is usually thought of as her choice, the bond coalesces into more of a relationship, often with dramatic fits and starts. O.K.? 

Now, when a couple's having problems during the pregnancy period, this can often be explained away by references to hormones. In fact, the most unbelievable situations are explained away by these young couples, by simply saying, oh, yeah, that's just hormones. Well, yeah, he cheated on me, that's just hormones. Or, she said she hates me and kicked me out, well, that's just hormones. O.K.? 

Let's listen to what David says. "When I was first with Debra, I had a girlfriend on the side, too." And this is to the point of the pregnancy being the galvanizing event that turns togetherness into a relationship. O.K.? "She's someone that I met at an NA meeting." That's Narcotics Anonymous. "We got close and we were helping each other with our addictions. One thing led to another and we got intimate. Me and Debra would get into an argument. She'd tell me to leave. I'd go stay with Cathy." And by the way, I am not the Kathy in this quote. 
We asked him, so how did you end up with Cathy? "Debra got pregnant. And I had to do what was right. Stand by Debra." So in David's case, which women he chooses is determined by who gets pregnant first with his child. 

Now, you have to pay careful attention to the sequence of events in Monte's narrative, which comes next. "I had just come out of a juvenile institution. I think I had just turned 17. I didn't meet her first. I met her friend, and I started going with her friend. And then one day she came around and we started talking and then I went with her and left her friend. And me and her got together and started having kids together, and then we got closer and closer. And then we started living together." 

So, for Monte, getting close -- getting together is followed by having kids together, which is followed by getting closer and closer, which is followed by "then we started living together." This is a quite typical sequence of events. 

Attraction and a moderate level of couple cohesion lead to pregnancy and then birth. And this is when the real relationship commences. It is the outgrowth of the pregnancy, and not its impetus, and this is the critical class difference between marriages for -- relationships formed outside of marriage and those formed inside of marriage, because, after all, marriage takes all the planning in the world.  Getting closer and closer for Monte, and most of the other fathers we talked to, is what one accomplishes after the child is conceived and brought to term, not before.

I'm going to show you some statistics on the rate of accidental pregnancy at the end. So what happens when the baby comes? Well, the birth introduces sharp and violent contradictions into the couple relationship.

First, you see a lot of increased effort on the part of the fathers, motivated in part by the desire to form an ideal family unit. These fathers desperately want kids. They see kids as a critical social resource. They want access to kids. They dream of having a perfect family unit and they want to have a direct relationship with the child. They're not satisfied with a package deal notion of only indirect relationship with the child through the mother. They want a direct relationship. 

But at the same time, when they're showing increased effort and they're trying to form this ideal family unit, they recognize that they face nearly impossible odds. First, they're deeply fatalistic about their ability to sustain the partner role for long because of the behavioral and economic demands that role implies. That's true in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Milwaukee, in New York. It's probably -- and this was, of course, earlier in the decade -- it's probably certainly true now with the recession. 

They're also deeply mistrusting of women. The literature writes a lot about how women mistrust men, but men mistrust women, too, and we'll give you some sense of that from the data. And these men are utterly convinced that they'll be dumped if they fail to continue to provide or tow the behavioral line. 

So, on the one hand, they have a motivation to galvanize a relationship more, because they want that relationship with their child and they recognize the mom is the conduit to the child, but on the other hand, they're convinced they'll fail. So their efforts are distinctively half-hearted and even self-defeating in tone. 

With few exceptions men insist -- and we call this the first big lie -- that their relationship with the child ought not be contingent upon their relationship with the child's mother. They voice an outright rejection of the package deal. In fact, many told us that their relationship with the child's mother is totally irrelevant to their relationship to their child. 

They want the whole fatherhood experience and think they can have it without staying in touch with the mother. Yet, on the other hand, due to legal and economic realities, they still know the mother has power over the child and in the end will be their conduit to the child. Now, this puts the woman in a very powerful position. 

I'm going to share with you next the story of Lavelle. Lavelle we came to know very well. He attended the same church we did in the small city of Camden. Lavelle got pregnant with Bonita, Big Bonita -- his daughter's named Little Bonita -- really in a rare one-night stand. And didn't even know he was a father until Little Bonita was almost two years old and Big Bonita came by demanding child support. As you will see in a minute, Lavelle falls in love but possibly with the wrong woman. 

In fact, I guess we call her -- yeah, falls in love with the wrong woman. He doesn't fall in love with Big Bonita. Instead he falls in love with Little Bonita, but he decides to stay with Big Bonita. And she's quite a tough character, because he wants the relationship with the child. And, in fact, at several points in our four or five years of knowing Lavelle he admits to us outright that the relationship is all about Little Bonita. O.K.

This is one of the most stable couple relationships we observed in our six years in the field. He says, "I would have had to get visitation to see her" -- that's Little Bonita -- "which is why I'm still with the mother, because she wants to play it off like a package deal. You can't go here without me. You can't take her there without me. You can't go here without me. First, I said, O.K., then I'm going to go get visitation so I can take her when I want to take her. It's difficult negotiating with Toya" -- sorry, I called her Toya in this book --"about Little Toya. She feels she gave birth to her, so it's her way or the highway." 

Now, across the income distribution couples are formed in part because of shared interests and values. Our couples, however, speed so quickly to conception that they often find post-birth that they have little or nothing in common. In fact, in the TLC 3 study, which is the most representative study we have, the average time from first date to first conception leading to a live birth is seven months, and in the father study, the modal number of months between first date and first conception leading to a live birth is either six or seven months.  Very, very rapid courtship. 

For a time, the child can become the vital shared interest that can bring a measure of emotional closeness if only for a time. Now, for those of you who are familiar with the "Fragile Families and Child Well-Being" survey, you know that at the magic moment of birth 80% of mothers and fathers say they're together, and most plan to marry each other. Part of what's driving that magic moment is this baby has given the couple something in common, something to focus on. 

Tony -- we asked Tony, how do you think the birth of Alyssa affected your relationship. He says, "Um, I think in the beginning it brought us a lot closer together, it's just being with this little baby, that's just a part of both of us. It was amazing." Bucket said -- we asked Bucket, how did you get along during the rest of your pregnancy -- "We had a good time, man. While she was pregnant I couldn't go nowhere. Shoot. She wanted me to do this, wanted me to do that. I was like a puppy anyway. I waited on her. I did certain things she wanted me to do. I was glad, man." We then say, how did the birth of your child affect your relationship with her. "It didn't affect it at all. See, like, when the baby was born and we had a baby it seemed like things got a little better and stuff." 

So, here, you see men investing more with the birth of the baby. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, men have a powerful reason to disinvest, as well. Part of this is the deep mistrust they hold of women. So on the one hand they're working hard to solidify their relationship with the woman, in part, and maybe even mainly, to ensure access to their most precious resource, the child. They're hesitant to invest too much for fear that a woman's love only lasts as long as his ability to provide. 

Why invest if you're only going to fail? Thus, men's actions in the aftermath of birth often seem downright schizophrenic, and we'll get a taste of that in a second. Here are some quotes illustrating this deep mistrust men have with women, and these are very typical in the data. 

Donald says, "Yeah, their whole thing is, what can you give me, and what can I get from you and how fast can I get it, more or less money-wise. There's no commitment to a real relationship, particularly in black women. Their thing is, when things go bad, I am out of here. To me that was my experience, and I am not taking it anymore." 

Bill is a very interesting case. He has six children with the same women -- woman. Listen to what he has to say. "I hear a lot of people say that love is good, but I'm telling you, money will rule over a relationship real quick. Don't get me wrong. There may be only two relationships out of a hundred that will survive without money. Even if a man works part-time and he is doing what he has to do, he could be the greatest man in the world and a woman will overlook that for someone driving in a new car, a young guy." 

And by the way, this new car, young guy image comes up over and over in the data. "He might have a little bit of money now, but sooner or later down the line, he can wind up like I am at any time, no guaranties at all. Yo, that concerns me a lot. I love my girlfriend a lot. I call her my wife because we've been together for ten years on and off, and we have six kids." 

And, sure enough, Bill's girlfriend kicks him out about a month after this interview was conducted. So far we've argued that fears about ability to provide and tow the behavioral line lead to tentative, half-hearted investments in the couple relationship, however, the proximate causes of the break-up are often a complex set of relationship dynamics. 

Let's start out with Self. We ask him, how did the birth of your child affect your relationship with her. "It's crazy, man, because the birth of the child gave us so much more -- gave us more issues to approach. So that opened up the door to agree or disagree." What kind of issues? "Money. So I think after the child was born it created a certain bitterness in our relationship." 

Self's case shows how the birth of a child and subsequent entry into a real relationship force couples to consider important issues they had avoided before. Also basic incompatibilities that break up the romances of millions in the middle class all of the time are not yet fully considered. 
Until now. Remember, before, during pregnancy, the couple could dismiss trouble as a result of hormones. This excuse doesn't work so well now. When the pressures of real life come raging to the fore, couples have little glue to fall back on. Meanwhile, despite fantasies of forming an ideal family unit, men simply have -- are not emotionally prepared to play the role of family man, nor are they prepared for the increased monitoring that living together and spending a lot of time together affords. 

So the result for the couple is often a cascade of conflict and in the face of this conflict, men often don't have a significant enough investment in the relationship to work through these problems or change their ways very much. Instead, they respond by staying out all night, getting involved with other women, violence, drugs and drinking. Speedy break-ups are often the result. It is no surprise that the "Fragile Families and Child Well-Being" survey shows the typical couple breaks up in the first year.

Now, Bear is quite interesting. He goes down to comfort the grieving widow of his uncle -- actually, the uncle is not quite dead, yet -- and gets together with Amber and just after the uncle does die, Alice is born, so he becomes immediately not the father of one, but the father of four. A little bit later, the couple breaks up. They have a lot of problems. He goes into drug rehab. She visits him and, sure enough, nine months later, the couple has a new little miracle. O.K.? 

Bear is a perfect case of a guy who just isn't really emotionally prepared for the demands of fathering. "So I was like -- uh, I took over the head of the household role. Not too long after that I got involved in the drug scene." So he's talking about kind of the situation between the first and second kid. "Started doing some stupid shit. After Alice was born I started getting stressed out, because there's so much -- well, children mainly." 

Now, criminologists like Rob Sampson and John Laub chart the trajectories of young men like Bear and look to turning points that alter negative trajectories and allow young men to turn their lives around. Historically, we've been following delinquent men from the 1920s and looking at these turning points, and these have included entering into partnerships and parenting roles. For our men, however, such transformation seems stunted. O.K. 

Becoming a father and entering into a partnership role don't seem to lead to the kinds of changes in trajectories and turning points that we might expect, looking at earlier cohorts of men. Instead, for our men these transitions are stunted or seldom last for long. Bear, it turns out, can't stay away from the easy money that selling drugs affords. This is even -- this is true even though Amber gets about $2,000 a month in social security death benefits because of her truck driver husband's death. 

So they don't really need the money. Others can't stop messing around with other women. Still others can't stay straight enough to keep a job. Seven tells us, "My baby's mother wasn't promiscuous, so the whole family really took to her." We asked, were you in love with her at this point. "Yeah, somewhat. I was out there, though, though I thought I could have my cake and eat it, too. I was out there when we moved in together.  She wouldn't tolerate that anymore." 

So this speaks to the increased monitoring and how guys have a really hard time adjusting to this. When was that? When did you movie in with her? "When my third son had come along." And this was, I believe, the -- O.K., I can't remember which mother this was, but, anyway. 
Tony tells us, "I love the girl. I still do. I think she is awesome. I was just -- it was just everything too soon, too fast. I would come home and we would get into arguments and stuff and I would end up just not coming home. I'd probably just go out and be with my friends and stuff, and then I started getting involved with drugs, and that was a whole 'nother thing. That was what pretty much broke us up." 

So what have we learned? Men outright reject the package deal notion. They seek a direct relationship with their children. Courtship is brief, exceedingly so, and the process of partner selection is more haphazard than discriminating. Who you end up with is the woman you happen to get pregnant. Pregnancy and the decision to carry the child to term galvanizes a bond that was neither casual nor serious into more of a real relationship. 

The father-child bond, however -- it is what is central, where the father-mother bond is contingent upon and flows through the man's relationship to the child. Birth introduces a sharp contradiction. On the one hand, the man is motivated to make things work, so that he can enact his desire to have a direct relationship with his child. But it proves more difficult than he had imagined for several reasons. 

First, after birth men must contend often for the first time with the fact that the glue that typically keeps couples together, shared interests and values, may simply not be there. Second, problems that emerge in pregnancy resurface, serious issues, drug use, domestic violence and so on, that can no longer be blamed on hormones. Third, the couple must contend, again, often for the first time, with the realities of family life that increase the scope for conflict. Suddenly, there's a lot more to fight about. Fourth, while men try to create the perfect family unit, they are exceptionally unprepared for family living. 

Bear at one point actually deals drugs out of the house while the four children are home and his wife is away at work.  He's actually carrying his baby around in a Baby Bjorn while he's dealing pot off the front stoop. For many men it is simply too much responsibility and too much monitoring. 

Fifth, the motivation to work hard in these relationships is low because confidence in their ability to play the partner role satisfactorily is low and their mistrust of women is high. Sixth, this renders their efforts half-hearted at best and downright self-destructive at worst. I promised you some statistics, and then we'll have some question and answer. This slide tends to be shocking to people. We asked men in both of our studies, think back to when you first learned she was pregnant, what was your first reaction to the news. 

Remember, the vast majority of these pregnancies are unintended. You would expect these men to be heading to the hills, running away as fast as they could. Look first at the bottom. These are the mothers in the TLC 3 study. Fifty-eight respond to the news with happiness or clear acceptance. Yes. O.K.? But 75% of their partners, and 77% of the men in Philadelphia and Camden respond with happiness and accept -- or clear acceptance. Let me give you a couple of examples to dramatize this point. 

Daryl says, "I lit up." Stan: "I wanted a kid real bad." Steve: "Deep inside I wanted to have a child." Bucket: "Shoot, I was happy, man." Wilbert -- this is touching: "I was so happy even though in the back of my mind I wondered, is it mine?" Oh, this is -- he was probably the roughest character in our study -- "I was happy. All the other girls killed my babies. I said, she's my first. I'm going to give her everything." Sorry about that, I should have warned you. Stephen -- this is very, very typical: "I was glad. It was no major obstacle." O.K., and here are the white fathers. O.K. 

James: "I planned it. I said I want" -- he was 14, by the way, when he had his first kid, or he conceived his first kid. "I planned it. I said I wanted to have a kid. I wanted to get my girlfriend pregnant and have a baby. Nobody made me that way. That's just how I came up. I just wanted a kid." 

Little E: "I just wanted to be a dad." Monte: "I was ready to have a kid." George: "I said, I love you, you know." This is one of the few "I love yous" prior to conception. "I'd love to have a child with you." Giani: "I thought, ah, sweetie, I'm going to be a daddy. That was my feeling. If I could have bottled in and kept it, I would have." 

And I have hundreds more of these to show you. Here are the rates of accidental pregnancy in the two studies. You can see that very few in either study are actively planned or actively avoided. Instead, most are in this in-between category. Men know very well where babies come from, by the way. Sex education is not the problem. O.K. 

As one young man told me, "Are you kidding me? In my high school the condoms are hanging from the ceiling." Now, there's a lot of sex education activity in many of these high schools. O.K.? But still, there's a desire to have a child, but no real planning, and this leads to unprotected sex and the Russian roulette that leads to an unplanned pregnancy. 

About seven in ten of these pregnancies are neither planned nor avoided, and this is consistent with national data for men in this education and marital status grouping. This is just a little taste of what I can come and talk to you about next year if you'd like. This is about what happens to father involvement in the wake of these break-ups, because although fathers believe their relationship with their child has nothing to do with their relationship with the mother, this does not tend to be the case. 

First of all, we look at father-child contact by the time the child reaches five years of age. Those in the daily category are living with their kids. About a third of these couples are stable. And that's important to remember. About a third of these couples are stable. O.K.? 

And the majority of fathers are involved two to three times weekly. So there's a lot of father involvement. It really starts falling out after this point. But part of that is because there's often still a romantic bond with the father and the mother. Very few fathers are not involved at all with their children. This is, again, nationally representative data from the "Fragile Families and Child Well-Being" survey. 

But look at the impact partner break-up has on these statistics. This is the number of years since break-up. The four pluses are those 20% of couples who are already broken up when the child was born and they've got a lot of problems. O.K.? You can see that with each subsequent year since the mother and father together there is a rapid fall-off in father involvement, and in another work we show that this is due to many factors, but probably most centrally to men's unemployment, incarceration and especially mother's gate-keeping behavior. 

There's substantial evidence now that mothers swap daddies. They're looking for more attractive partners to father their children, and when they get them, they shut bio-dad out of the picture. There's some evidence that when men take on new partnerships this crowds out their father involvement, especially when they take on a social or biological father role, but it's much less intense than the gate-keeper mom phenomenon we've documented from "Fragile Families." 

I also wanted to give you one more piece of information. I think this is really important as you work with young fathers and not so young fathers who are unmarried in your communities. This is work done by Robert Lerman and Elaine Sorensen at the Urban Institute. This is drawn from the "National Longitudinal Survey of Youth" and this is absolutely stunning. 

What this table does is look at whether fathers at any -- young men who've ever fathered a child -- that's out of marriage -- at a given point in time are intensively fathering at least one of their children, either -- non-marital children. O.K. If you look at that bottom little box, you see that two thirds are actively, intensively involved, and this means several times weekly, with at least one of their non-marital children. 

Because a lot of what's going on, here, right, is serial fathering. They're kind of fathering one child at a time and often times quite intensively. The upper box includes those who are fathering a marital child, because 72% of those who ever have a non-marital birth eventually marry, but we can see that of the one third who are not intensively involved with at least one of their non-marital children, half of these are married to another mother, and two thirds of these are living with a marital child and intensively fathering that child. 

So, it's not that these men are not fathering, it's just not that they're not fathering all of their children. They're fathering their children in sequence and then dropping out. And we can talk more about the dynamics of that in the Q&A. So I wanted to end with a few pictures of our men fathering, because it's really hard for many people in our audiences to envision what this looks like. Here's one of our dads from Camden in front of the beautiful glass shard mural. 

They're all over Philadelphia. This is kind of a Philadelphia art form. He loves this kid. Here's another one of our dads from Kensington with his teenage son he's very involved with, after a period of non-involvement. And here's one of the Puerto Rican dads. I didn't talk about the Puerto Rican dads today because it -- they have some patterns that are distinctive, but his little son's nicknamed Bear and he loves wearing this little bear coat around. 

This is the West Kensington section of Philadelphia, the largest Hispanic neighborhood. This is Geoffrey "Lefty" Gant. You'll see in a minute why he's called "Lefty." He, a couple of years ago, won Camden's father of the year award for his intensive involvement with PTA. He was disabled and receives SSI, which makes him quite desirable in Camden, because he can't get in very much trouble and he brings home a steady paycheck. He has six children with the same woman. This is one of his little daughters. 

Here's a daughter who he's helping to read, something he does every night, helps the kids with their homework. There he is playing in the vacant lot next to the couple's home. You can see he's missing lefty right there. That's another one of his sons. There's he's playing basketball with his oldest son and I'm about to show you something amazing. You can actually smoke and play basketball at the same time. 

And here he is with all six of his kids. So I'll end there and welcome your questions. There's going to be a mike going around, so, hopefully, the mike will get to you. So we'll let the lady with the mike direct the questioning.

Question: Do many of these fathers actually obtain visitation (inaudible)?

Dr. Edin: That's actually a real problem. Right? Because in order to go and get visitation through the court you've got to have money, at least in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and most of the jurisdictions we studied, visitation is not adjudicated at the time of a child support award. Many of these men aren't even there when their child support award is made. This is one of the biggest complaints fathers have. Fathers want to be fathers. They do not want to be paychecks. Now they're willing to be paychecks if they can be fathers, but many of them do not -- and even if they have then they feel they can't enforce them.

Question: It seems like for them to really have a relationship even (inaudible) the mother, they would need to have visitation.

Dr. Edin: That's right. Another problem, however, is they don't have a place to host the child, so overnight visits are difficult. Often times their living situations aren't stable enough to have the child stay overnight, so in all of the communities we studied, jobs are a huge problem. They're now becoming a problem for how -- you know, we call this a man session because it's so affected unskilled men. So, this is going to become the situation in more and more men, just having no place to take your child that's not in the mother's home. Good question. This is the fewest number of hands I've ever seen. There they go.

Question: You talked (inaudible) times about this deep distrust that these fathers have for women. Is that something that occurs because they've been through so many relationships, or does that stem from their own mothers?

Dr. Edin: Ah. This is interesting. Probably not from their own mothers. They often talk about their own mothers -- it's sort of, you know -- as kind of saints for putting up with their own fathers, or raising them without their own fathers. As you can imagine, there's a lot of intergenerational father absence, here. I -- this is interesting. One of my former graduate students who's now a professor has been looking at your relationship skills, education in your high schools, and there is a lot of cynicism among the very young, even prior to entering into relationships. 

Men often have their experiences confirmed by  experiences with mercenary women. Women, you know, to sort of give them a shout out, have to support the kids. So it's not too surprising that they would be a little impatient with men who couldn't provide. But for their point, men really feel -- and this is partly because of how the state treats them. We really treat men as paychecks and not as caretakers. Right? In terms of our policy. So there -- you know, they feel that their fathering and their caring role is devalued and they're really angry about that, and they really see the women as almost in league with the state and treating them as just a paycheck and not as a man, in some way.

Question: My first question is, the pictures that you showed mostly were of fathers with their sons, so how is the gender of the child impacting (inaudible) men?

Dr. Edin: I think the research to date shows a -- the research is inconsistent. Right? This -- that's an accident of fate. In our data the fathers are, you know -- there is some slight evidence for son preference, but many men say, oh, I really wanted a daughter, and I'm really involved with my daughter and so on. But I think the statistical evidence indicates either no relationship or maybe a slight, tiny, almost substantively insignificant preference for a son.
Question: That's what I (inaudible), thinking it was anyway. (Inaudible.) And are the -- do the men who are dealing drugs -- are they saying that they are doing that to provide for their families?

Dr. Edin: Many times -- now, I will say that especially -- Philadelphia and Camden -- we actually did the father study in three other cities. I didn't talk about them here because it's the subject of a different book. But in those cities the ubiquity of the drug trade was much less intensive. So this in part is a Philadelphia effect. Right? Philadelphia's had a failing economy since 1950. You know, it was the first city -- major northern city in the United States to experience de-industrialization, 30 years before the rest of the country. And, historically, it's had a very, very rich heroin trade, so it's kind of got a tradition of being a drug town. 

That said, a lot of guys a lot of places do deal drugs to basically smooth income between jobs. And most of the drug convictions among the sample, which are pretty common, are for men who are dealing drugs sort of to smooth the income during hard times. In the case that we talked about here, Bear, he had been working in a silkscreen factory and had just lost his job. Now, he was only selling pot, so he justified it in that way, but his house was such a notorious drug house, and he and his friends would congregate there, that the neighborhood watch got together and alerted his girlfriend Amber of his activities just to get him out the neighborhood. So, he was luxuriating in his unemployment a bit. Right? 

Now, but, on the other hand, he was, you know, 19. So, in some ways, age, you know -- 19-year-olds are 19-year-olds. And if we could get people to wait longer, some of û we know that the strongest correlation between -- you know, the strongest crime correlation is age and gender, right? So as many age, they age out of these kinds of behaviors as well.

Question: And are they saying that men (inaudible) with the kids because I'm here? (Inaudible.)

Dr. Edin: They didn't -- in general they do not see that they're putting their kids at risk. Right. And, of course, the mother would never do this. This might be in part socialization. It might be in part that they didn't have fathers. Bear's -- Bear has a very, very strong stepfather relationship, but his stepfather dies right before this. But a lot of guys, you know, don't really have a role model. They don't know how to be a dad in some sense.

Host: I think we've got one more question.

Question: In the fathers who are actively serial parenting their children, but the child they have currently selected to parent, did your study pick up the factors on that? Is that related to the mother of the children who are not being cared and her attitude, or is it father factors, or hosting site factors, or -- what makes it factors of the child currently being (inaudible)?

Dr. Edin: Well, usually it's the child in the relationship the father's currently in, because it's easier. But I will say that as kids age it becomes harder and harder to father in part because, you know, the child can reject you, too. We had this poignant story of this father who'd gotten out of jail, hadn't seen his daughter in three or four years, and saved up money to buy her a Barbie Dream House, not realizing she was 14. So, it's -- you know, I think, it's difficult for guys as kids age, and then the guy -- the kids are angry. 

"Where were you, daddy, for three years?" "Well, I don't want to say that I'm in prison. Or I don't want to say that I was keeping myself away from you because I was addicted and getting my life together." So, fathering becomes painful as children age, and men, you know, with very weak self concepts find it almost impossible to deal with that level of criticism, given the fact they don't feel very good about themselves in the first place. 

So, the younger children are easier. Now, the easiest relationship in the world is the social father relationship, because there you're not really obligated, and every dollar you give is like a windfall. Right? You're a superhero if you give $100 to a kid you're not the father of, versus if you give $100 to the kid you are the father of. "Wow, you owe me $1,000. You're still a chump." Right? 

So there are a lot of dynamics that lead to this fatherhood churning. Fathers need to and want to feel successful. Then, they're also determined to get it right, because, you know, for middle class guys, being a parent is pretty meaningful, but there are a lot of things that fill their lives, and for these guys, this is kind of it. Right? 

There's really not much else out there. They failed in their marital -- or, in their girlfriend relations, their romantic relationships. You know, even their own mother sometimes won't take them in and they're looking to this child to give them a sense of validation. So they're desperate to get it right. And it's this desperation to father that's the fuel behind these extraordinary rates of multiple partner fertility we're seeing, this family complexity that I described to you earlier. I will say in closing, and your question was a perfect set-up, that the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative has paid very, very careful attention to these dynamics and it really tried, I think in more ways than any other state in the nation -- to try to work these insights in to their service delivery. 

So, if you have a chance to go and observe a class, see what's going on, I encourage you to do so. No program is perfect, but they've got a tough job, as you can see, and what's exciting about the program is how bought in to these classes the men are. They love them. They really do. And they feel really empowered by them. So, just a little plug for what's going on over at public strategies.