Why Should We Encourage Unmarried Fathers to Be Prenatally Involved?

Abstract

We appreciate the opportunity to write a rejoinder to the thoughtful and insightful comments of Professors Doherty and Marsiglio. Their comments place our findings in the context of research and policy and, as such, offer a springboard from which to think about current policy applications of our study and future data needs, especially longitudinal data that can enable researchers to examine causal explanations and trajectories of fatherhood. Doherty points out that a more specific way to frame our findings would be by stating that unmarried 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 and that fathers who are more reliably helpful during the pregnancy are more apt to be positively involved with their child if the father and mother continue living together or start to Uve together. We agree that these termsreliable, helpful, and face-to-face-interactionconvey the behaviors that the broad constructs of prenatal involvement and father engagement in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data set are designed to measure. These terms, however, do not convey some of the complexity and emotional connection that may be driving these behaviors (although the broad constructs fail at this, too). It is not just being reliable and helpful that leads fathers to more frequent faceto-face interaction with their children. Men who are prenatally involved seem to be motivated to commit to their partner and child and to be engaged in their lives, which lead to establishing or maintaining more committed partner relationships following the child's birth. We suggest that a father's reliable and helpful behavior toward the mother during the pregnancy has special meaning during the transition to fatherhood; for example, a man may begin to think of himself as a father (i.e., identify with the role) and reflect on how he will fulfill this new role. Thus unmarried fathers' prenatal involvement is meant to convey not only reliable behaviors but also a motivation to be committed to his partner and child, which may make them feel they have more control over the upbringing of their child (Weiss & Willis, 1985). And this leads us to Marsiglio's important point that the Fragile Families data do not provide the proper tools to assess these behaviors and motivations as men transition into fatherhood. The implications that Doherty draws for policy are equally important. Our research suggests that family structure matters; couples who live together (cohabiting or married) are more likely to be actively involved with their children during the first 3 years of life. The available research literature, however, has already established this association. Our contribution is to suggest that unmarried fathers' involvement with the mother during the pregnancy leads to couples establishing residential relationships when they did not previously, and it is the establishment of a residential relationship that partially explains why prenatal involvement is associated with higher levels of paternal engagement as the child grows older. We agree that at some level combining cohabiting and married couples is an apples and oranges phenomenon. We did, however, examine the effects of marriage versus cohabitation on later involvement and found no differences. It did not matter whether couples established marriage or cohabiting relationships after the child's birth; residence regardless of marital status mediated the association between father's early commitment and later father involvement. A cautionary note: We need to remember that in our study marriage and cohabitation were not static states; our variables assessed the transition to residential living arrangements. It is the decision that couples make to strengthen commitment and either stay married or move together that is important rather than status per se. Our study shows that in order to understand the meaning of marriage and cohabiting for how couples parent, we need to look at these variables in a dynamic way. …