Assistant Professor Kevin Roy
Dept. of Family Life
University of Maryland

Q -How do researchers look at fathers these days? We think of fathers differently than we did 20-30 years ago. There are new ideals for men. We think of the new father as being the provider as well as the care giver - so somebody who is not just working all the time, but spending more and more time with kids. And we see more and more men able to do that. We also see more and more men disengaged completely from kids' lives. So there is much more diversity in men's experiences with kids than there has been in the past. I think we really need to make sense of that, and take a harder look at men's roles in kids' lives, as well as partners and as workers, and what that means we really want to see men doing in the coming decades.

Q - Your research looks at low-income fathers - primarily in the midwest. Many of them are unmarried. What does that research tell us about why things don't always work out for these men?

For the most part, these guys are coming out of pretty difficult educational situations, so they haven't completed high school, or are just getting their GEDs, and they're in their late 20s. That puts them on kind of a bad footing to get out there and get a job. And there aren't that many good jobs with family supporting wages for them right now particularly - I was in Indianapolis interviewing and in Chicago, and for low income men of color, young men, it is just very difficult to find a good job these days.

So a lot of it centers around jobs. A lot of them are dealing with experiences where they've been in the streets, with their peers, they've got possible gang affiliations, they've got some incarcerations... they got records - prison records, and that's hard to get through as well, that really happens in their 20s, so the period from 18 to 30 is just really, really difficult.

I think of it as kind of a window of time, where particularly young men of color, and these are the guys that I'm working with, are both very much targeted by gangs in the community and police and business folks and employers and families of people in the community as just being risky to get involved with in any way.

So they're very isolated and very much stereotyped in terms of who they are. And I think what you see a lot of is, for the fathers I'm working with, incarceration has become just as common as high school or an educational degree.

Q - You say these men are stereotyped - is that fair even when they come from very tough situations?

The expectations for these young fathers are not very high. They're expected to be absent, irresponsible, on the streets, having lots of kids. Whether that's true or not is another issue, but they face a lot of that when they go out to work.

I'll give you an example. Employers now talk about how they want to hire people with "soft skills." This is working in the service sector economy - you know how to dress, you know how to talk right and work with the people you are serving. The assumption is that a lot of these guys can't do that - that they are threatening, that they speak slang and they will not be hired. Employers often say these guys don't have "soft skills." Now whether that's a proxie for discrimination in the workplace, or whether it's saying these guys don't have skills is another issue.

I think that a lot of these men are very personable, and interact with folks all the time, but their stereotype is quite threatening to people in the community and businesses and storefronts.

Q - Yet despite everything, these men don't stop caring about their children, do they?

What really strikes (me in my research)... is that these men want to be with their kids, and there are barriers that keep them from being with them. One is that they don't have the resources to do so.

These are men who are quite motivated. Again, the assumption is that if they're not with their kids, they don't want to be. And that's not quite true.

Q - You've found that the moms also work hard to keep the dads in touch - even when they're in jail.

One would expect them to say, "This guy's in jail, I don't want him to have anything to do with my kids." But they still do - they still make efforts to keep men involved - whether it's bringing kids to come visit them (or) promoting giving them a call - "I'll pay for the call, I want you to at least make the effort to talk to the kids." And for the most part, I think research has shown that men... (who are involved) in marriage, or as a father or in work, will keep from getting... involved in crime.

We did a program where fathers read books to their kids - we were recording those books on cassettes - and as part of helping us out with the interviews, we'd send the child the book and the cassette, and they could play that and have their father read them a story at night - again and again if they wanted to. So that kind of innovative, creative thing doesn't have to be very expensive, but they are programs that keep men in their children's lives.

Q - Do you see immigrant labor as taking jobs from these men?

The men I work with in Chicago and Indianapolis were also doing lots of day labor, lots of cash-in-hand jobs at the end of the day, seasonal work, and lots of landscaping and construction. So a lot of that is very compatible. But I think there's a whole tier of jobs where there's a desperate need for men who have a little more training and skills attached to some kind of certification that is really being unmet, and those are not being filled by immigrants necessarily. And as long as we see construction jobs out there, there's always some kind of training out there for that. That's the perfect spot where these men could get the training.

Q - So what IS the "state of fatherhood" this Father's Day?

(laughing) I'd say it's up for grabs. It's confusing, but it's also exciting. If you look in the media, you see, as we were saying earlier, lots of movies and TV shows that show a lot of men who are bumbling and can't quite figure out what it means to be fathers. But then you have this great potential and a lot of examples of men who are just committed in ways we haven't really seen before.

So I think we need to support men, and we can do that within our own families and communities as well as through state and federal programs too, to take on more with their kids. And I think we've seen there are really important impacts on kids' lives if they are.

Other Father's Day Releases on Newsdesk

2005 - Maryland Expert's Put Fathers "Under the Microscope"
Are All Dads Equal?
African American Fathers Protect Their Young, UM Family Study Shows
24-Hour Economy Is Redefining Familes and Social Polices

Assistant Professor Kevin Roy Audio Interview - 2006
Complete Father's Day Experts List
Feel free to contact any of our experts directly.