Better Than My Father or Better Than His Absence: An Exploration of the Influence of Absentee Fatherhood on the Minds and Lives of Disadvantaged Black Men

This study explores the social complexity of the experience of growing up with an absent father. This research was motivated by two key questions: 1) How can we define absence beyond the residential status of fathers? 2) How can we understand how different types of absence lead to variation in how children internalize the experience of an absent father as adults? To answer these questions, I use the narratives and life histories as told by 35 low-income black men from Southeastern Michigan. I first argue that absence is a variegated experience that requires going beyond the residential status of the father to designate a father as absent. To begin, I introduce a typology of absence that contains four distinct patterns that effectively contextualize how respondents experienced absence during their childhood. I developed an absence scoring schema to better compare respondents and account for the different sequencing and durations of patterns they experienced during their childhood. Using this absence scoring schema, I explored how one’s location in the absence score spectrum influenced how men: 1) constructed knowledge of who their father was, and 2) constructed strategies to be better or more present than their fathers in the lives of their future children. First, I discovered was men who experienced less extreme absence had knowledge of their father and strategies for fatherhood based on first-hand experiences and interactions. Those who experienced more extreme absence had knowledge of their father and strategies based on second-hand knowledge and assumptions about their father. Last, this research introduces the idea of an “ecology of absence” that considers the influence of the communal pervasiveness of absence that all my respondents experienced. Previous cultural sociology research on this population has only examined the influence of the “culture of poverty”. This final piece of the research used a network analysis to demonstrate absence as a pervasive social reality among many in each respondent’s social networks. I further demonstrate how this “ecology of absence” correlates to a disassociation of fathering from partnering, where men did not see being together with the mother of their child as necessary for being the fathers they intended to be. This research expands our definition of absence and its influence on individuals and has implications for how researchers and policymakers define fathers as absent and how we encourage father involvement. Additionally, this research introduces absence an alternative mode of cultural inquiry into the lives of marginalized black men, which to-date, has been limited to the cultural influence of povertyPHDPublic Policy & SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/174646/1/mwalemu_1.pd