Maureen R. Waller

Cultural and moral boundaries in the United States: Structural position, geographic location, and lifestyle explanations☆

Abstract Using the culture module of the 1993 General Social Survey, this study proposes a multicausal model to assess the determinants of moral and cultural boundaries in the American population. We find that structural position - education, income, class, and gender - affects the likelihood that individuals draw one type of boundary rather than another. Furthermore, geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters play an important role in supplying cultural repertoires that affect the drawing of boundaries. While both cultural and moral boundaries are predicted by structural position and geographic location, cultural boundaries are predicted by participation in high culture lifestyle clusters and moral boundaries are predicted by participation in religious lifestyle clusters. Geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters have a stronger effect on the boundaries of non-college graduates than on those of college graduates, suggesting that local cultural repertoires have a less important impact on the boundaries of individuals who share a homogenizing educational experience.

Family Man in the Other America: New Opportunities, Motivations, and Supports for Paternal Caregiving

This analysis draws on longitudinal, qualitative interviews with disadvantaged mothers and fathers who participated in the Fragile Families Study (a U.S. birth cohort study) to examine how issues related to mens employment, social support, skills, and motivation facilitated their care of young children in different relationship contexts. Interviews with parents indicate that while some motivated and skilled men actively chose to become caregivers with the support of mothers, others developed new motivations, skills, and parenting supports in response to situations in which they were out of work or the mother was experiencing challenges. These findings suggest that disadvantaged men who assume caregiving responsibilities take different paths to involvement in the early years after their childs birth. Policies that overlook paternal caregivers may not only miss the opportunity to support relationships that benefit at-risk children but also unintentionally undermine this involvement.

Viewing Low-Income Fathers’ Ties to Families through a Cultural Lens: Insights for Research and Policy

Policy makers have become increasingly interested in addressing the cultural dimensions of child support, “responsible fatherhood,” and marriage in poor communities. However, policy studies have primarily focused on identifying economic determinants of these issues, with a substantial amount of variation in their statistical models left unexplained. This article draws on in-depth interviews the author conducted with disadvantaged mothers and fathers to illustrate how a systematic investigation into the meaning of low-income men’s ties to families may fill in or provide alternative explanations for some important questions related to paternal involvement. In particular, it suggests that analyzing fathers’ relationships through a cultural lens may not only reveal new information about the meaning of their emotional involvement, informal support, care of children, and conflicts with mothers which future policy studies should consider but may also inform policy initiatives by reducing the risk that they will be misdirected or have unintended consequences for poor families.

Taxing the Poor: Incarceration, Poverty Governance, and the Seizure of Family Resources

In the last decades, the American state has radically enlarged the array of policy instruments utilized in today’s governance of the poor. Most recently, through a process of outright “seizure,” the state now exacts revenue from low-income families, partners, and friends of those individuals who in very large numbers cycle in and out of the nation’s courts, jails, and prisons. In an analysis of legislation, judicial cases, policy regulations, blog, chat-line postings, and survey data, we explore this new form of taxation. In doing so, we endeavor to meet two objectives: The first is to document policies which pressure individuals (mostly men) entangled in the court and prison systems to rely on family members and others (mostly women) who serve as the safety net of last resort. Our second objective is to give voice to an argument not yet well explored in the sizeable incarceration literature: that the government is seizing resources from low-income families to help finance the state’s own coffers, including the institutions of the carceral state itself. Until now, no form of poverty governance has been depicted as so baldly drawing on family financial support under the pressure of punishment to extract cash resources from the poor. This practice of seizure constitutes the very inversion of welfare for the poor. Instead of serving as a source of support and protection for poor families, the state saps resources from indigent families of loved ones in the criminal justice system in order to fund the state’s project of poverty governance.

Introduction to the Special Section

Although two of every five births in the United States now occur outside of marriage, family scholars are still working hard to understand ways in which infantfamily dynamics evolve in these “fragile families” led by unmarried parents (both those cohabiting and those living apart). Federal initiatives to promote healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood devoted significant attention to the status and quality of unmarried parents’ romantic unions over the past 10 years, but gave far less consideration to how mothers and fathers in fragile families build coparenting relationships. This was a significant lapse. Gradually, policy experts are beginning to recognize that if positive coparenting alliances can be encouraged, even outside of marital unions, mothers, fathers, and most importantly young children may benefit substantially. This special section features new perspectives on coparenting interventions for fragile families, fresh analyses of national survey data establishing characteristics and consequences of coparenting in representative samples of unmarried families, and original data from field studies of unmarried families where typically overlooked coparenting phenomena were examined qualitatively. The section opens with a review of interventions designed to support coparenting in fragile families, as well as those marriage and relationship enhancement (MRE) and responsible fatherhood initiatives that included any explicit targeting, strengthening, and assessment of fragile family coparenting in their designs. McHale, Waller, and Pearson (2012) examine results from Access and Visitation programs for nonresidential fathers, MRE programs for low-income, unmarried couples, and the first wave

Money, Time, or Something Else? Measuring Nonresident Fathers’ Informal and In-Kind Contributions:

Despite efforts to improve the measurement of low-income, nonresident fathers’ economic contributions to children in large-scale surveys, limited research has examined how survey measures of informal and in-kind support relate to other standard indicators of fathering. Drawing on data from a large sample of separated parents (N = 1,381) and matched nonresident father–child pairs (n = 846) in the Fragile Families Study, our results show that in-kind and informal support represent the same construct, and that this construct differs from both formal child support and fathers’ time with children. In comparison with formal child support, informal and in-kind support measures converged more strongly with indicators of the quality and quantity of time spent with children, consistent with recent conceptualizations of involved fathering. Informal and in-kind support measures were also more predictive of closeness in the nonresident father–child relationship, supporting qualitative research about its emotional significance in low-income families.