The norms and expectations of “father involvement” have changed rapidly within a generation, and yet, the labor force and state institutions have not supported low-income families in a way to achieve this. In this article, we examine the narratives of 138 socially and economically marginalized fathers to identify the frames that they adopt to represent themselves as fathers, tell a coherent story about their lives, and project an identity of themselves into their futures. Despite the political–economic forces that have dramatically increased inequality in an era of neoliberal capitalism, fathers rarely alluded to structural explanations for family instability, father absence, marital dissolution, and gender distrust in low-income communities. Instead, fathers attempted to adopt socially valued identities along three symbolic boundaries that distinguished themselves from their own fathers, from welfare frauds, and from the iconic deadbeat dad. They also adopted individualistic frames that took the form of therapeutic narratives and life-course transitional narratives. In general, despite harsh structural constraints, the men imagined themselves doing better, and, in nearly all cases, being engaged fathers was at the center of these hopeful constructions. Without structural change, however, these aspirational frames are likely to become little more than false hopes.

In this chapter, the authors look more closely at fathers’ lives on the streets, the ways in which the criminal justice system intersected with and shaped their lives, their experiences of relating with children and mothers while incarcerated, and their perspectives on fatherhood within the institutional interstices of the streets, police, prisons, and community reentry. Key contradictions are examined that challenge marginalized fathers, including reconciling masculinity on the streets with being available and present to children, as well as reconciling norms and expectations of being nurturing fathers with preparing children for living in violent social spaces.

In this chapter, the authors turn their attention to child support policies that were central to 1996 welfare reform, to the organization of Child Support Enforcement in Connecticut, and to Fatherhood Initiative programs that proliferated across the nation after 1998. They explore how low-income fathers made sense of and responded to this changing landscape, paying particular attention to their gendered locations in the family but also to their different racial experiences. Further, they examine how the reorganization of state welfare and child support enforcement was about “getting the money” in an era of state austerity but also about the institutionalization of symbolic power, through which the courts defined, stigmatized, and managed the lives of a marginalized population, reaffirming racial and class hierarchies.

The instability that neoliberal capitalism has sewn into the social fabric reaches across social classes, but its most incendiary effects reach deep into the communities, families, and relationships of lower income populations. Fragile fathers are caught in a web of contradictions shaped by the processes of racial and class marginalization. In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize these contradictions. Drawing on policy researchers, they also outline a broad scope of public policies that would be needed to address the adverse conditions for parenting on the social and economic margins. However, in the end, they argue for a movements-based political solution that draws on the theories and ideas of second- and third-generation feminists.

The era of neoliberalism has made it more difficult for low-income men to be fathers, at the same time that the expectations for them to be involved fathers has increased. The norms and expectations of “father involvement” have changed rapidly within one to two generations, and yet the labor force and state institutions have not supported low-income families in a way to achieve this. In this chapter, the authors examine how fathers have adapted to these changing circumstances. They consider how the casualization of the labor force has structured the casualization of family life; the essential and yet complicated role that kin play; the neotraditional formation of the family and the “new father” role; the efforts to father through generational family violence and to address toxic masculinity; and the contours of fatherhood as men age into second-generation fathers.