by Liz Plank
The truth is that many men would like to help their partners but can’t. And more parental leave could change that. My home province of Quebec isn’t only responsible for Justin Trudeau and my dad: it’s also become a riveting case study in showing the immediate effect of expanding parental leave on men’s participation in domestic work. When the province instituted a “daddy-only” quota of five weeks in 2006 and augmented how much fathers receive (they now get up to 70 percent of their salary through an insurance program), the number of men who took the leave increased by 307 percent. The men in Quebec took longer paid leaves and also spent 23 percent more time doing work around the house than fathers in the rest of Canada. Of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation. It is entirely possible that a bunch of French-Canadian dudes were enlightened all at once, but most likely, the very experience of taking daddy leave changes men. When we only or primarily provide parental leave for mothers, it sends a powerful message to men: childcare and housework is not your job.
Finally, parental leave is only one part of the equation when we talk about laws that contribute to fathers not being able to perform all aspects of fathering. Masculinity norms have a hand in both making it hard for men to be fathers and also making it hard for men to have fathers. One of the most profound ways it shows up is in the mass incarceration and the criminalization of black and brown fathers. It is impossible to look at the issue of parenting without addressing the massive sociocultural and economic structures that can make being a present father an uphill battle particularly for nonwhite men in America. Although there’s often a focus in the media on absent black men, the reason why many fathers aren’t making it home for dinner isn’t because they’re stuck at work but because they’ve been put behind bars. The way our criminal justice system disproportionately punishes men of color dramatically thwarts their ability to parent their children. It reinforces and in certain cases perpetuates a gender binary where women take care of children while men are absent by locking up millions of fathers. Although the fastest-growing prison population is female, men make up the vast majority of prisoners in the United States, 93 percent, to be exact. Many of those men are fathers. A chilling 92 percent of parents who are currently in jail are fathers, and according to the National Fatherhood Initiative, the number of children growing up with a father inside prison has increased 79 percent since 1991. Sadly, fathers who are incarcerated are more likely to have grown up without a father, perpetuating the cycle of fatherlessness. The prison industrial complex in the United States imprisons so many parents, disproportionately parents of color, that it’s really hard not to view it as a system that deliberately separates parents from their children.
Given that black people are five times more likely to end up incarcerated than white people, the ramifications on men’s economic and job opportunities are massive, which in turn affects the role they can play in the family. If you are a black man in America, you are twice as likely to be unemployed as your white counterpart. However, given the huge proportion of black men who are incarcerated, if we were to count those men as part of the unemployment rate, the unemployment rate for prime-age black men would be an astounding 19 percent. For comparison, it’s in the low single digits for white men (1.6 percent, to be exact). And this data doesn’t even account for local prisons. We can’t talk about absent black fathers without acknowledging how radically different their economic prospects are, given “The New Jim Crow.” Michelle Alexander describes in her book of the same name a deliberate system that ensures black people are locked up. “African-Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites,” she writes. “But they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.”
So while black and white fathers may engage in the same behavior, the way they are treated by our justice system differs and has real ramifications on their ability to father. And yet, as Alexander notes, the incarceration system is described by politicians in non-racialized ways, even though at the height of the war on drugs, 90 percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses were not white. The bias against black men exists at every level of our justice system, whether it is police officers, judges or juries who perceive men of color as more guilty, violent and therefore deserving of a punishment like incarceration or even the death penalty in states where it’s still legal. As Alexander notes, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”
But still, despite the fact that one in nine black children will grow up with a parent who is incarcerated at one point during their lives, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that black fathers are more involved in their children’s lives than non-black dads. But poverty organizations are often not so great at targeting or working with fathers, because they assume they are not involved. If a father has been incarcerated, it is much harder for him to get a job. If he’s not white, it’s even more challenging. Given that a white man who has been incarcerated has a higher likelihood of getting a job than a black man without a criminal record, many black fathers simply can’t even pay child support. And the data is clear that when fathers can’t contribute they are more likely to interrupt the relationship with the child. If providing financially is the root of male identity, when men can’t perform it they experience shame, which leads them to abandon or further isolate themselves from their family. The fatherhood crisis cannot be addressed without a fundamental disruption of the state’s intentional and alarming disproportionate incarceration of black and brown American men.
The justification for locking up so many men is inextricably tied to how we view masculinity. Politicians and policy makers often frame it as a way to punish bad behavior and reform men. This approach and obsession with “law and order” as a foundational part of American society is clear from the policies and the words that politicians use to speak about tackling crime. Donald Trump, true to form, is the least covert about it. He’s referred to the minority of immigrants who commit crimes as “animals” and “bad hombres” and he’s even committed to wanting to grow Guantanamo and “load it up with some bad dudes.”
But it’s not just Trump—incarceration is often presented as a solution to fixing “bad men,” when there is actually very little evidence showing that it’s an effective way to reform them or reduce crime. In fact, the prison paradox, a term coined by Don Stemen, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago, highlights that despite a dramatic increase in the number of people who are incarcerated, it has not been followed by a decrease in crime rates. In fact, data shows a completely counterintuitive trend: increasing incarceration in a community can increase crime rates because it disrupts the family and social bonds that protect us from ending up in prison in the first place. It rips fathers away from their children, making those children more susceptible to being imprisoned, too. Incarceration does not heal men; it’s most often a system that further entrenches them into a cycle of harmful behavior to themselves and others.
But racism and toxic masculinity don’t just combine to rationalize the incarceration of black and brown men; it individually encourages men to participate in criminal activity in the first place. Research by Christoffer Carlsson, a professor in the Department of Criminology at Stockholm University, found that men who perceived themselves as failing to attain what was expected of them traditionally as men, like having and providing for a family or having a job, were more likely to see criminal activity as a means to financial independence and self-actualization. Conversely, men who viewed ceasing criminal activity as a way to demonstrate masculinity through self-control and determination were more likely to be successful at getting out of the system. But environments like prisons tend to reinforce tra
ditional male hierarchies rather than dismantle them. Researchers have described the prison environment as requiring that men wear a mask of “hypermasculinity.” As Corinne C. Datchi, an associate professor of counseling psychology at Seton Hall University, wrote in her research on incarceration published in The Journal of Men’s Studies:
Performances of “hypermasculinity” are strategies for coping with imprisonment, deprivation, and loss of social status that conflict with relationship satisfaction and engagement in family roles; in turn, low engagement in family roles and relationships may result in decreased family support and contact as well as reduced opportunities for accomplishing nondominant forms of masculinities.
Furthermore, the men who end up lining the walls of our prisons are men whom we see as perpetrators, but we forget that the vast, vast majority of them were often victims to begin with.
Masculinity professor, author and community organizer Jackson Katz sees the issue of incarceration and idealized masculinity as completely intertwined. “The prisons of the United States are absolutely filled with chronological adult men who are really little boys under the shell they’ve created. In part they’ve created this armor in defense against trauma and abuse they’ve experienced in their childhoods,” he told me. “Boys who have been abused, neglected and traumatized are ten times more likely to become abusive of others, not just girls and women but other men.” And as Katz noted, the trauma-to-prison pipeline is not just passed down to boys. “Girls who have been abused are much more likely to become self-abusive and put themselves in situations of further vulnerability.” Prison becomes another site of violence for men where instead of being healed they are put through further trauma, and then thrown back into the world to be retraumatized.
But while fathering is made more difficult by the industrial prison complex, becoming a dad can help them escape it. Datchi’s research found that present fathering has been shown to have a protective impact on men, decreasing their rates of recidivism. Men who maintain close links with their children while incarcerated are less likely to end up behind bars and more likely to have a job when they get out. Viewing fatherhood as a key role connected to ideal definitions of manhood was also correlated with a reduction in criminal activity. So in other words, idealized masculinity reinforces men’s rationalization of criminal activity, while positive masculinity can help them interrupt it.
Masculinity is a powerful vehicle that motivates behavior for men, too, and if it’s redefined in a positive way and framed as responsibility for others rather than domination of others the impacts can be tremendous.
Although being a dad can help men survive and potentially escape incarceration, the effects of their time spent locked up are passed on to their children and often become intergenerational. One researcher, Anna Haskins of Columbia University, decided to study the educational impacts of it on the children. She examined detailed data from five thousand children born between 1998 and 2000 and isolated the kinds of factors that could impact education advancement, like socioeconomic status and parental behaviors. What she found was heartbreaking: sons of incarcerated fathers were more likely to have educational delays and end up in special education by the time they were 9 years old. The data also showed that having an incarcerated father has the same impact as missing several months of school on children. Although the children weren’t delayed cognitively, it was their emotional and behavioral skills that were lacking in the sons of incarcerated fathers, things like attention, focus and the ability to control emotions. Interestingly, she found no sizable effect on daughters.
In addition to teaching us that nurturing children is not natural for men, outdated masculinity norms also makes us think that boys can’t be weak and that they require less coddling and support than girls when, in fact, the data suggests quite the opposite. Many parents, regardless of gender, even believe that too much support can be bad for a boy. That kindness will make him weak rather than righteous. For many parents, the fact that they raise boys and girls differently may be unconscious. Fathers in particular interact differently with their kids depending on their gender. Research demonstrates that fathers smile more at their daughters than their sons. They also sing to their daughters more, use more analytical language, have greater responses to their sadness and happiness and were generally more engaged. Conversely, the fathers of sons engage in more aggressive rough-and-tumble play and use more achievement-specific language. Men are simply replicating how their fathers engaged with them, preparing their children for the appropriate gender roles. Although often unintentional, gendered parenting can have wide-ranging consequences. When boys are raised differently than girls, with less support, affection and emotive engagement, it can stifle their emotional development. These differences in parenting, especially when they occur in the first five years of development, have lasting effects.
The irony is that while there’s an assumption that boys are more self-sufficient, they’re actually more vulnerable to their environment than girls are. While girls absolutely do benefit from adult involvement and input, their success in school is less dependent on it. Boys are more vulnerable when they’re raised in a one-parent home than girls and show more signs of disruptive behavior. This effect is magnified by racial disparities. One of the largest studies on income inequality shows that black boys have worse outcomes than white boys in 99 percent of the country. Even when black boys are raised by actual millionaires they are as likely to end up incarcerated as boys raised with a yearly household income of only $36,000. The fascinating (and potentially hopeful part) of this research is that one thing seemed to protect black boys from this distressing fate: seeing black fathers present inside the home. Indeed, in areas where there was a high presence of fathers living with their children, black boys didn’t fare worse than the white boys.
Now this could signal that there are more opportunities for black men in those communities, but it also points to the power of being able to see what you can be. Research shows that positive role models have protective effects on children who have been exposed to adverse life circumstances. Research shows that if you’re a young African-American boy, having a role model means you’re less likely to be depressed or have anxiety; if that role model is male, you are less likely to engage in problematic behavior. Of course, mentors can’t be the be-all and end-all, but their power in changing our society is undeniable. Although boys benefit more from male role models, adult men are less likely to volunteer than women to join mentorship programs. Perhaps this would be a great place for men to start.
The future of boys is riding on the current behavior of men. It’s not just about helping fathers be present parents; it’s also about ensuring that all men take radical responsibility for the next generation of boys. Too much is at stake for them not to.
Young boys and men of color are expected to fail.
—MAURICE M. OWENS
AMUSE-BOUCHE:
Mau’s Story
Maurice stopped counting how many friends he lost to gun violence when he hit twenty-five. Not twenty-five years old, twenty-five friends.
Being raised in the poverty-stricken borough of the Bronx with a single mother is not an obvious path to the White House, and yet the combination of his mom’s persistence and his own grit landed him a job in the Bush presidency, and then to a seat in the Situation Room under President Obama. Sadly, that’s not what he felt society expected of him. “When you grow up in the inner city, you have three avenues: be a rapper, be an entertainer or be a basketball player,” Mau said. “I chose basketball.” Due to his rigorous practice schedule and dedication to the sport, his hard work was rewarded with a spot on Furman University’s Men’s Division 1AA basketball team. And thereafter, he enlisted in the US Air Force and applied for a special-duty assignment at the White House, in his fourth year of service. Despite having paved a successful path for himself, Mau is all too familiar with the challenges that men of color grow up battling within the United States that set them up for fa
ilure. “The circumstances are simply conducive to failure,” he explained. “In the inner cities, there is no access to jobs to produce income, healthy food choices and zero health care options. I had a chipped tooth until the age of twenty-five.” Mau says that without access to the appropriate care, he couldn’t get it fixed and that stifled his confidence when applying for jobs. “I hid behind basketball. In many ways, basketball was my security blanket because of my chipped tooth.”
Mau is no longer in the White House, but he has remained tied to former President Obama through his work for his initiative My Brother’s Keeper, Obama’s MBK Alliance initiative actively working with communities and organizations to scale ladders of opportunity for young boys and men of color, through an emphasis on growing mentorships and lowering youth violence. Having been so affected by his own male mentors, he’s dedicated to helping young black men do the same. “I want to change the narrative of what it means to be a man of color,” he explained. He had strong male role models in his neighborhood growing up, but he knows those aren’t always available to all kids. “Young boys and men of color are expected to fail. The law of expectation, the law that says 90 percent of people do what’s expected of them, is very serious; if society expects young boys and men of color to be successful and be great and amazing at things they explore and share, they will do just that, I guarantee! What kid doesn’t try and fulfill expectations of him or her?”
When I asked him how mentorship changed his life, he confided that it allowed him to become what he didn’t know he could be. Knowing that someone was betting on him made Mau bet on himself. “Looking back, when I realized that someone believed in me made it a duty to believe in myself. It was my duty to take on that challenge.” Some of his most meaningful role models were his upstairs neighbors, who both happened to be star basketball players: Billy and John Goodwin. They took a liking to Mau and would offer him guidance and advice about applying for college and how to maintain his high school GPA to get a basketball scholarship and the kinds of groups to stay clear from to protect his road to success. “Only hang out with people with goals like ours,” Mau remembers being told by them as a form of protection from the harm of other, more negative influences in his neighborhood. One of the most memorable yet simple character traits that Mau remembers taking away after spending time with John Goodwin was how educated every choice was for him. “I would realize that he would be thinking before he spoke,” he said. “In these underserved communities, you have a lot of things that happen abruptly, because of how intense and unfiltered someone’s emotions erupt. In a split second, people have arguments and regrettable instances where someone gets hurt and/or gets taken to jail, respectively. People are on edge because of the adverse incidents and trauma of living in these neighborhoods.”