| Summary: | This dissertation examines low-income fathers’ involvement with their young
children using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) data. Chapter 3
entitled, “He Said, She Said: Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father
Involvement,” compares mother and father reports of fathers’ frequency of involvement
in various activities and in measures of emotional involvement. This chapter finds that
fathers report spending 17.6 percent more time engaged in 11 activities with their young
children than mothers report the father spending. How parental disagreement is
measured yields starkly different results given the underlying distribution of these data.
Chapter 4 entitled, “Estimating the Impact of Child Support and Welfare Policies
on Fathers’ Involvement,” is a longitudinal analysis combining three waves of the FFCW
data with annual, state-level policy data on child support enforcement and welfare
policies. This chapter examines the impact of policies on fathers’ involvement over time.
Fathers’ involvement is operationalized as accessibility, responsibility, and engagement.
Using parents that are unmarried at the time of the focal child’s birth, this chapter finds that public policies do influence fathers’ involvement after controlling for individual
social and demographic characteristics. Policies may be operating in conflicting ways to
both increase and decrease fathers’ involvement. For example, fathers’ daily engagement
is positively affected by stronger paternity establishment policies but is negatively
affected by stronger child support enforcement collection rates and the welfare family cap
policy.
Chapter 5 entitled, “Two Dads Are Better Than One: Biological and Social
Father Involvement,” examines whether biological and social fathers are substitutes or
complements in a child’s life and how biological fathers and social fathers impact the
mother’s frequency of involvement. This chapter finds that resident social fathers
contribute as much time to the focal child as resident biological fathers. Factors that
increase the overall parental frequency of involvement include having: a resident
biological or social father, native-born parents, a biological father who had a very
involved father, and a positive relationship between the biological parents. Factors that
decrease overall parental frequency of involvement include: the father’s new partner, the
father’s incarceration, a mother’s other children, and the child’s increasing age. === text
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