Public Policy and Couple Relationships: A Commentary on Cabrera et al. (2008)

Abstract

The Fragile Families Study is changing the way we think about fathers and mothers in lowincome communities. Other national family data sets have only relatively small numbers of lowincome, unmarried couples, and mostly they have produced a picture of absent fathers and single mothers. The Fragile Families Study has given us a nationally representative sample of urban couples recruited at the birth of the child and followed for 4 years. In their excellent article, Cabrera, Fagan, and Farrie (2008) use the Fragile Families Study to look at the missing side of fathering and couple relationships in urban communities: the active of many fathers and the endurance of many couple relationships. Although there are inseminate and leave fathers out there, they are not the majority, even in the most stressed communities (Carlson, McLanahan, & Englund, 2004). From both research and public policy perspectives, attention must be paid to fathers and couple relationships in fragile families. If the first generation of Fragile Families investigations established a baseline of father and couple relationships, the second generation of studies has used longitudinal designs to take a more complex, theory-based examination of predictors of enduring father involvement. In this case, Cabrera et al. ask a standard question in the fathering field-about the relationship between and subsequent with the child-and they go further to ask a new question, namely, what explains the association between pre- and post-natal involvement. They wisely focus on the couple relationship because we know that fathering is especially sensitive to the quality and endurance of the father-mother relationship (Doherty, Erickson, & Kouneski, 1998). But prior cross-sectional research has not been able to tease out the causal aspects of the relationship between father and the couple relationship. This study's most important contribution, then, is its demonstration of how the couple relationship impacts the father-child relationship over time, specifically, that the residential status of the father and mother is an important influence on the relationship between and postnatal father involvement. The authors conclude that a man who is prenatally involved appears to put himself on a positive trajectory with the mother and with his child. Specifically, if he continues to live with the mother or transitions into cohabitation or marriage, he is likely to be an active, involved father to his young child. I will make one scientific comment on the article and then focus on policy implications. Father has meant many things to many people in the fatherhood research arena (Hawkins & Palkovitz, 1999). In this case, the variable that the authors label prenatal involvement is assessed by summing three items: Were you present at birth? During me baby's mother's pregnancy, did you give her money or buy things for the baby? and Did you help in other ways, like providing transportation/doing chores? These items appear to tap the father's reliability and helpfulness: Was he around and did he help the mother in concrete ways? Similarly, the dependent variable, paternal engagement, taps a specific dimension of engagement: face-to-face interaction in activities such as play, reading stories, and physical affection. Other major dimensions of father were not assessed, for example, the father's accessibility to the child even when not interacting with the child and the father's responsibility for decisionmaking related to child rearing (Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, & Levine, 1985) or financial responsibility for the child. Thus, a grounded way to describe the study's first major finding would be as follows: Fathers' greater reliability and helpfulness during the pregnancy is associated with more positive face-to-face interaction with the child 1 and 3 years later. The second finding is that fathers who are more reliably helpful during pregnancy are more apt to be positively involved with their child if the father and mother continue living together or begin living together. …