Child's Biological Father Research Articles

Ambiguous-Father Families

Even though the traditional law in principle often treated biological paternity as determinative of legal paternity, in practice it did not, because biological paternity was not usually possible to determine. Regardless of the formal legal rule, the paternity presumptions established by social relations therefore usually prevailed where the social relations existed. The rule presuming that a married woman's husband was the father of her child was the most important, although not exclusive, example. In the absence of legal presumptions based upon social relations, paternity was not usually possible to establish. In the last two decades, however, scientific advances have allowed the unambiguous establishment of biological paternity in essentially all cases. The result is that the traditional focus on biological paternity can now yield new results. First, because it is now possible to learn that a child's firmly established social father is not, in fact, the child's biological father, legal paternity can be reassigned years after a child's birth. Second, biological paternity, and thus legal paternity, can be established, even years after conception and birth, for children who have had no social father. Because scientific advances make such results, once rare, now potentially common, they require the law to confront a question that it has in practice often ignored: whether legal paternity should necessarily be equated with biological paternity in such cases, here referred to as cases of ambiguous fatherhood. For marital families the question is of significant practical consequence, given the conventional estimates of professionals that approximately ten percent of children born to married mothers are not the biological children of their husband. The question also becomes important for the children born to unmarried mothers as government becomes increasingly persistent about collecting child support from the men identified as their fathers, who often have no social relationship with their biological child. This paper suggests that the formal law should be changed, where necessary, to preserve at least a portion of the pre-scientific practice, and thus the traditional alignment between social and legal paternity. It also suggests that our willingness to impose child support obligations upon biological fathers who are not social fathers is based upon policies which, when correctly understood, do not necessarily apply to all biological fathers.

Involvement of African American Fathers in Kinship Foster Care Services

The foster care population in the United States has increased considerably in recent years, from approximately 276,000 in 1985 to 468,000 in 1995. The number and percentage of African American children in this population also has risen substantially. Although complete national data on racial composition are not available, a 1996 study using data from 20 states, including the most populous, found that 46.8 percent of 306,914 foster children were African American, up from 39 percent reported in a similar study in 1990. This percentage is higher than that of any other racial or ethnic group (U.S. House of Representatives, 1996). In addition, several studies of local and state-level foster care have found that African American children remain longer in placement than white children by an average of as much as two years (Courtney et al., 1996). To prevent the unnecessary placement or retention of African American children in foster care and to meet the long-term psychosocial needs of those who must remain in care, social services staff must identify and develop all resources available to them. One potential resource is the child's biological father. Nevertheless, very little is known about the involvement of African American fathers in services on behalf of their children. Social work literature in general historically has paid little attention to fathers (Grief & Bailey, 1990), and child welfare literature has been conspicuously silent about fathers of color. With the exception of services for unwed adolescent fathers, the literature does not address whether or how African American fathers participate in social services interventions on behalf of their children. No published research considers the extent to which African American fathers have been involved in services to children and families provided by child welfare agencies, the roles that fathers have played in child welfare interventions, or the outcomes of paternal involvement. Descriptions of major child welfare programs such as family preservation and reunification often do not specify how such programs operate within the context of the African American family (Courtney et al., 1996) or differentiate approaches to working with fathers and mothers (O'Donnell, 1995). The lack of attention to African American fathers in child welfare research contrasts with a small but expanding literature on the ways many African American fathers are involved with their families and contribute to the well-being of their children. Much of the earlier literature about African American families either ignored the father or emphasized negative paternal attributes such as lack of involvement or psychosocial pathology (Allen, 1981; Bowman, 1988; Cochran, 1997; McAdoo, 1981). The current literature provides more positive views of African American fathers' involvement with their children than were reflected in the earlier literature. In addition, newer studies are often more sensitive to the environmental conditions that affect fathering in African American families and suggest a much greater variation in paternal behaviors among African American men than was previously reported (Cochran, 1997). One of the major themes in current research is the importance of the economic provider role to African American fathers. In contrast to the stereotype of the sexually predatory men who father children but feel no obligation to support them, studies have found that African American men view the provider role as an essential component of what manhood and fatherhood mean to them (Brown, 1983; Cazenave, 1979, 1984; Hendricks, 1981; Hunter & Davis, 1994). Moreover, some research suggests that the inability to fulfill the economic provider role may have important psychological and social consequences for African American fathers. Bowman (1985, 1988, 1990), for example, found that married African American fathers who reported having difficulty in fulfilling the provider role also tended to report lower feelings of personal happiness and family satisfaction, although the latter effect was sometimes offset by strong kinship bonds and religious belief. …

Contagion in Family Affection: Mothers, Fathers, and Young Adult Children

Data on matched triads of 428 biological mothers, their husbands, and a young adult child interviewed in the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households are used to examine affective relationships from the perspective of both parent and child. The analysis examines the ways each dyadic relationship depends on relationships with the third member of the triad and whether these processes operate differently for mothers and fathers, for fathers and stepfathers, for daughters and sons. Results show that parents' affect is related significantly to marital quality and the partner's relationship with the child. Children's affect for mothers and for fathers is related to their feelings toward the other parent but not to their parents' marital quality. An important exception is that the child's warmth toward the father is related to the mother's marital warmth. Overall, gender effects are minor, and mothers and fathers are embedded similarly in the family affective system. Stepfathers and stepchildren report significantly lower levels of warmth toward one another than biological fatherchild dyads, but these relationships are not more dependent on the mother than in biological families. The mother's relationship with the child is, however, more independent of her partner when that partner is not the child's biological father Key Words: affect, fathers, marriage quality, mothers, parentchild relationships. Any dyadic relationship in the family can be understood fully only if we understand the family system in which it takes place. For the most part, however, we have lacked the data, the conceptual tools, and the statistical sophistication to implement this insight (Emery & Tuer, 1993; Sabatelli & Bartle, 1995). Too much of our research about families is really about dyads, and, despite important improvements, too much of our research about parents is really about mothers or is based on mothers' reports (Marsiglio, 1993). As a result, our understanding of the interdependencies among mothers, fathers, and children is still rudimentary. Yet, such an understanding is central to many of the questions that drive current research and policy concerns. Are fathers peripheral to the family? Are they dependent, even in married biological families, on their children's mothers to mediate between them and their children? How does marital quality affect mothers' and fathers' relationships with children? Are children's relationships with fathers, even in two-parent biological families, more contingent than their relationships with mothers? Answers to these questions would not only help us understand general family dynamics but would establish an essential baseline against which to assess postdivorce and noncustodial relationships between parents and children. I develop a framework for thinking about the interdependence of family affective relationships and assess it using independent reports on relationship quality from 428 matched triads of mothers, fathers, and a randomly selected young adult child. In addition to establishing gender and generational differences in the family system, the analysis explores whether relationships in stepfamilies are more or less independent than in biological families. BACKGROUND Conceptual Framework The general framework for this study of family relationships is provided by systems theory. This perspective conceives of the family as an interacting set of subsystems (dyads, triads, and so forth), each affecting and being affected by the other subsystems, as well as by systemwide properties (e.g., world views). Although relationships among all subsystems are interdependent and reciprocal, a central assumption of the theory is that subsystems are arranged in a hierarchy of power and influence (Whitchurch & Constantine, 1993). In healthy families, the marital subsystem is assumed to have greater impact on parent-child systems than the parent-child system has on the marriage (Emery, 1988). …

"They Think You Ain't Much of Nothing": The Social Construction of the Welfare Mother

KAREN SECCOMBE Portland State University DELORES JAMES University of Florida* KIMBERELY BATTLE WALTERS Azusa Pacific University* Welfare reform is in the forefront of the political and social agenda in the United States. This research examines the ways that women on interpret use. From in-depth interviews with 47 women who received cash assistance in 1995, we examined the theories behind their accounts of the stigmatizing of recipients and why they, and other women, use the system. Although the respondents tended to blame the social structure, the system itself or fate for their own economic circumstances and use, they often invoked popular and mainstream individualist and cultural victim-blaming theories to explain other women's reliance on the system. Many women believed popular constructions of the mother as lazy and unmotivated and evaluated their own situation as distinctly different from the norm. The hegemony of the individual perspective is a strong and stubborn barrier to dealing constructively with poverty and reform. I've had people who didn't know I was receiving assistance, and everything was just fine. But when people find out you're receiving assistance, it's like, why? Why did you get lazy all of the sudden? Leah, a 24-year-old mother Key Words: inequality, policy, poverty; TANE welfare. Approximately 39 million people are poor in the U.S., according to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1997a). Within this large segment of the population are the approximately 3.5 million families, mostly mothers and their dependent children who receive cash assistance, which until recently was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). President Bill Clinton signed monumental reform legislation, which became federal law on July 1, 1997. P.L.104-193 abolished the AFDC program and replaced it with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Turning many of the details of law over to the states, it sets lifetime payments at a maximum of 5 years, and the majority of adult recipients are required to work after 2 years. Twentyfive percent of recipients in each state must be working by the end of 1997. By the year 2002, 50% must be employed. Other changes under this reform include child-care assistance, at least 1 year of transitional Medicaid, the identification of the children's biological fathers, and the requirement that unmarried recipients who are minors must live at home and stay in school in order to receive benefits. AFDC and are virtually synonymous with the word in the minds of most people. In the larger sense of the word, could also encompass schools, parks, police and fire protection, as the term, welfare state, popular in most of Western Europe, implies. However, in the U.S. generally brings to mind the cash assistance programs of AFDC and TANF, and therefore, welfare, AFDC, and TANF are used interchangeably here for ease of discussion. Although was originally created to serve primarily White widows and their children, welfare's recipient base has shifted over the years to mostly divorced and never-married women with children. Many people think that cash programs provide benefits to a large number of never-married, young, African American women and their children, a stereotype that has undoubtedly contributed to the growing sentiment against (Pivan & Cloward, 1993; Quadagno, 1994). Yet, African Americans constitute only 36% of recipients (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 1996). AFDC is criticized as an extravagant and costly program that is spiraling out of control and is responsible for a sizable component of our federal deficit, but it approximates only 1% of federal spending (Congressional Digest, 1995; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 1996). …

Medical and Legal Developments in Paternity Testing

Recently a front-page article in the New York Times reported on a new method of blood-testing for paternity determination which is “revolutionizing the way courts determine the identity of a child's father in paternity cases.” The HLA (Human Leucocyte Antigen) test represents a significant advance over the standard red blood cell antigen tests for paternity. The large number of genetically determined factors in the HLA system makes it possible, by typing the blood of mother, child, and accused father, to either 1) rule out the possibility that the man could be the child's biological father in a large number of cases where the man is falsely accused; or 2) show that the accused man has a high probability of being the child's biological father, where the possibility of paternity has not been ruled out. Red blood cell typing, because of the much smaller number of factors examined, could only exclude a falsely accused male in a relatively small number of cases.