In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.

About the Author

Jennifer M. Randles is Chair and Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America.

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1. Knowing What a Father Is
2. Being There Beyond Breadwinning
3. Resources for Responsibility
4. Making a Case to Mothers
5. New Fathers and Old Ideas
6. Teaching the Essential Father
7. Having It Better

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Pregnancy and Parenthood in the Field
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Essential Dads is an important intervention into the parenting literature, bringing a powerful voice to underrepresented fathers in an important social and policy arena, and adding their perspectives—expertly analyzed and contextualized—to an ongoing national dialogue on what it means to be a father."—Philip N. Cohen, author of Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible

"Jennifer M. Randles’s book is an incredibly important study that helps us to better understand the vast array of competing social structures, forces, ideologies, and discourses that shape the kind and quality of access marginalized fathers have to being seen and seeing themselves as 'good dads.'"—Tristan Bridges, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Awards

William J. Goode Book Award Honorable Mention 20211 2021, American Sociological Association Family Section

Media

Author Jennifer Randles gives an inside look at Essential Dads

About the Book