We Are All Responsible for Responsible Fathering: A Response to Walker and McGraw

Abstract

If vigorous critique is a sign that the original work is taken seriously, then we feel flattered by Alexis Walker and Lori McGraw's (current issue) response to our article. We have prepared a spirited response. To fully appreciate this exchange, we urge readers to pull the May 1998 issue of this journal and reread our article on responsible fathering, rather than relying only on Walker and McGraw's characterization of its purpose, scope, and content-or our defense of it (Doherty, Kouneski, & Erickson, 1998). We will use Walker and McGraw's organization of their critique in our response. WHAT Do CHILDREN NEED? We begin with a point to be repeated frequently in our response. Our article explicitly stated that we were not focusing on the effects of fathers' involvement on children's well-being, and we did not review the copious literature on the effects of active fathering. Instead, our work focused on the factors that influenced active, responsible fathering. Early reviewers of the manuscript justifiably asked us to state our assumption about why it is important to promote active, responsible fathering. In response, we wrote the two sentences that Walker and McGraw objected to: . . an assumption behind this article-and our value stance-is that children need and deserve active, involved fathers through their childhood and adolescence. The prime justification for promoting responsible fathering is the needs of Walker and McGraw read into that statement a full-fledged position that children can be raised successfully only by parents of both genders. We intended no such global assertion. In fact, in the Conclusion section of the article we stated: Nor do we take a position on whether there are essential characteristics of fathering versus mothering or whether having parents of two genders is necessary for the well-being of children. The growing literature on gay and lesbian parenting suggests that these kinds of questions are more complex than many scholars assumed in the past (p. 289). Again, our purpose was to say that the main goal of promoting responsible fathering is for the sake of the children. WHICH FATHERS MATTER? Walker and McGraw objected to our decision to limit our review to biological fathers. Our response will be brief. As with all authors, we reserve the right to delimit our review, and we clearly stated its purview. We spent more than a year reviewing a huge amount of literature on responsible parenting by biological fathers, and we felt we could not do justice to the complexities of other kinds of father circumstances and keep our work and our manuscript manageable. We also referred readers to good reviews of the literature on gay fathers. MOTHERS' GATEKEEPING, FATHERS' RESISTANCE Walker and McGraw believe that we exaggerated mothers' gatekeeping and minimized fathers' resistance to active involvement with their children. We note that much of Walker and McGraw's criticism is aimed at an article by Allen and Hawkins (1999) that was published after our article. We refer those criticisms to Allen and Hawkins for a response. For our part, we can see that our choice of a vague word, many, to characterize ambivalent mothers was problematic. We should have said some, because, although the phenomenon has been documented in some families, the actual extent of the maternal gatekeeping is not known. We also agree with Walker and McGraw's contention that we should have addressed fathers' resistance more explicitly. Their criticism is valid. FATHERS AND FINANCIAL SUPPORT Walker and McGraw believe that we minimized the role of fathers' financial support for children's well-being. As noted before, we were not primarily addressing the impact of various forms of father involvement on children's lives; rather, we focused on influences that lead fathers to be involved. We did define economic support as one of the four core aspects of responsible fathering (following Levine and Pitt, 1995), and we paid considerable attention to explaining why some fathers provide economic support and others do not. …