Unmarried Couples with Children

7. #1 Father of Fathering 101?: Couple Relationship Quality and Father Involvement When Fathers Live with Their Children

Chapter 7 #1 Father or Fathering 101?: Couple Relationship Quality and Father Involvement When Fathers Live with Their Children KATHRYN D. LINNENBERG F ATHERHOOD HAS become a hot button issue in the media, politics, and the general public recently. The focus has been on absent fathers, the assumption being that unmarried fathers fall into this category by default. Although there are plenty of examples of absent fathers when studying children from birth to age eighteen, research has now shown that unmarried men are typically present at the beginning of their children ’s lives. According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data, 83 percent of unmarried couples are romantically involved at the time of their child’s birth—half are cohabiting (McLanahan et al. 2001). In this chapter, I examine differences in father involvement among fathers who are living with a child and the child’s mother. How involved are these coresidential fathers with their children? Is that involvement affected by the father’s relationship with the mother of his child? Using qualitative interview data with fifty-seven couples, I look at fathering in the first year after birth to see how fathers in happy and unhappy relationships—some married, others cohabiting—differ in level of father involvement. The data come from the Time, Love and Cash Among Couples with Children study. I use wave one and two interviews to establish portraits of father involvement for married and cohabiting men in happy and stable relationships, happy relationships that have some problems, and those in relationships that are plagued with problems. 159 When children are small, mothers often hold primary responsibility for care work. This means that a father’s connection to his child is often mediated by his relationship with the mother of that child. For that reason, I am interested in looking at how relationship status and quality affect father involvement for coresidential couples. Are married fathers more involved than their counterparts? Are fathers in stormy relationships less tied to their children than those in contented unions? Relationship Quality Because there is so much variation, considering relationship quality is important as well. According to Carolyn Cowan and Philip Cowan (1992) when couple relationships are happier, parent-child relationships are more positive as well. They argue that “. . . the relationship between the parents seems to act as a crucible in which their relationships with their children take shape” (11, emphasis in original). They find this to be particularly true of the fathers. This means that men’s involvement with their children is influenced by the quality of their relationship with the mothers. In their study of parent-child play interaction, the Cowans found that low marital satisfaction during the pregnancy or current marital distress leave men more likely to withdraw or be cold with their child. They find that this is especially true of the father-daughter relationship. In effect, any negativity from the marital relationship spills over into the parent-child relationship. Other researchers have done work that supports the idea of spillover. Osnat Erel and Bonnie Burman (1995) performed a meta-analysis of sixtyeight studies on marital relationships and parent-child relations. They conclude that there is a positive relationship between marital quality and the quality of the relationship between the parent and the child. They claim that the stress from marital disharmony permeates the parent’s relationship with the child. Parents are not able to separate their experiences in their role as partners from their role as parents. Although Erel and Burman (1995) do not find any significant difference between mother and father’s experience of spillover, other researchers do. Spousal relationships influence fathers’ relationship with their children, whereas mother-child relationships seem separate from marital quality issues (Lindahl and Malik 1999; Belsky et al. 1991; Barber 1987). Jay Belsky and his colleagues theorize that this gender difference could be because women have a spousal role and a maternal role that are both clearly scripted by social convention. Men, on the other hand, may have a “general pattern of relating—actively involved versus disengaged—[that] is applied to spouse and child alike” (1991: 488). In a laboratory research project, Katherine Kitzmann (2000) had married couples discuss both a pleasant and a conflictual topic. After each conversation, she brought the couple’s six- to eight-year-old sons into the room and measured husbands’ and wives’ reactions to their sons in a tri160 Unmarried Couples with Children [18.116.118.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 16:20 GMT...