Low-Income, Non-Residential Fathers:
...who fathered their children. Increasingly, legislatures are looking to child support payments from nonresidential fathers to keep lowincome motherheaded households off welfare and out of poverty. Welfare reform has been shaped by beliefs that mothers can remain dependent on welfare, supporting their families primarily on public moneys; they can or rise to selfsufficiency through entry into lowwage labor. It has also been affected by beliefs that fathers are not paying their fare share — and they can and they should.
This paper explores the work and residential status of lowincome, nonresidential fathers, men often portrayed as irresponsible deadbeats who ignore their responsibilities to the children they fathered. It represents the first level of analysis on a sample of 85 fathers. Future work will include more detailed consideration of fathers' budgets, as well as their parenting behavior. The researchers are also expanding the sample to include a greater number of young fathers, and future papers will include work with the expanded sample.
This project follows, and in some sense parallels our earlier work (Edin and Lein 1996, 1997) on the financial lives of lowincome, singlemother households. Through an intensive study of the lives of eighty-two fathers, we find that, in many ways, they are worse off than the women whose children they fathered. They struggle with irregular, lowwage employment. Many of them have faced periods of incarceration. They are affected by disability, illness, and dependence on alcohol or other substances. But economically and emotionally marginal as many of these fathers were, they still represent a large proportion of lowincome fathers who continue to make contributions to their children's households and to maintain at least a relationship with those children.
Through earlier work with lowincome mothers we learned that...
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