Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by Kathryn Edin about unmarried fathers in low-income neighborhoods. She is the author of the book Promises I Can Keep which I have written about before and would recommend to anyone interested in poverty. She currently is a professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard, but is a trained sociologist. She conducts her work by combining ethnographic studies, qualitative data and quantitative data. With her unmarried mothers study, she moved into the low-income neighborhood of Camden, PA where she both raised her two young children, and conducted her research. She felt it was important to be a member of the community to fully understand the issues she investigated.
The findings she discussed the other day that I found the most interesting were that unmarried fathers tend to be incredibly excited about having children and tend to be intensively raising at least one child at any given time. In opposition to the idea that unmarried fathers impregnate women and leave, these fathers want these children and want to raise them. They idealize this experience and make a concerted effort to be a part of their children’s lives. In fact 80% of fathers come to the hospital for the child’s birth. Although fatherhood is of paramount importance in these neighborhoods, the fragile relationships between parents are often the downfall of a father’s relationship with his child. With the average unmarried couple in the area Edin studied becoming pregnant only 6-7 months into their relationship, the relationship falters during the first few years of the child’s life. However the need to raise children is a part of these men’s identities and throughout their lives they continue to raise at least one child at any given time whether or not this child is a biological child.
To see Edin’s powerpoint on this topic click below.
http://www.childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/calendar/jan09.html
In unrelated news, my Hasselblad is completely jammed. The shutter won’t open so it will soon be sent to the shop to be opened up and lubricated and hopefully returned as functional as it was for it’s first owner (back before I existed.) It is a bit of a bummer mainly because I want to start taking photographs and interviewing 20, 30, and 40 something new moms in the triangle.
Here is a lovely photograph Mark Schueler took of me while I was photographing in his home.
Amanda and her Hasselblad
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