Rich dad, poor dad: The two worlds of fatherhood policy
Aug 26, 2026
Nathan Robbins
Bifurcated attitudes and policy towards American fathers
In the eyes of policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and the general public, there are two kinds of dads. One set is deemed unfit, and told they need to be more “responsible”: they receive legal orders, wage garnishments, and surveillance from agencies whose primary tool is enforcement, not assistance. The other set is told they should be even more engaged and involved: they’re offered parenting classes, encouraged to take a few weeks of unpaid leave, maybe given access to a peer support group or a co-parenting workshop.
Fathers are assigned to these sets based on their perceived ability to fill two main obligations to their families. The first is to provide financially, and the second is to be closely involved, physically and emotionally—a role often only allowed and/or expected after fulfilling the first. Two worlds of norms, expectations, and policies (or lack thereof) have coalesced over the years to ensure fathers deliver on these obligations. Lower income and disadvantaged fathers who are unable to provide for their families are marginalized, often navigating unstable relationships, impermanent residence and custody, and end up in a system based on extracting support rather than providing it. More advantaged fathers are expected to meet high levels of involvement and care and to find their own way to reach them, out of whatever their employer, their state, and/or their savings will cover.
Of course, the lived experience of fatherhood is more complex. Plenty of low-income fathers hold steady jobs and live with their children, and plenty of well-paid fathers live apart from theirs. Even in the “privileged” policy world, the pressures and stigma are a burden. In one sample 73% of men reported little workplace support for fathers, and 1 in 5 men feared losing their job if they took paternity leave. Working fathers are increasingly expected to be engaged, nurturing caregivers while still serving as providers in rigid work cultures and institutions. They are offered little to no family supportive policies to help them prepare for or execute the role of involved father. Meanwhile, disadvantaged fathers—especially Black and brown men in disadvantaged families—are often deeply invested in their children’s lives, yet are shut out of parenting decisions and pursued as debtors when they fall behind on impossible child support orders.
Fathers in both worlds experience their own version of being left to fend for themselves. Neither group has what it needs to thrive, and both suffer from a fractured approach to fatherhood that treats engagement as a virtue for some and an obligation for others.
We don’t need more pressure and shaming for the middle class and above, or more policing initiatives for the poor.
What we need is a shift in orientation from enforcement toward support, and a unified policy framework that sees all fathers as caregivers, co-parents, and contributors to their children’s wellbeing.
Two worlds, one broken system
After decades of treating men primarily as breadwinners and background figures in family life, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to bring fathers forward as focal and developmental figures in family well-being. Father involvement was conceptualized to include close engagement, being accessible, and bearing responsibility across everyday domains of caregiving. Research began to reveal the host of positive effects father involvement had in children’s lives, and efforts expanded to try to better understand the conditions that enable or prevent it. Policy has lagged behind for men from all backgrounds in providing the support fathers need in being there for their families.
The deficit model and responsible fatherhood
The first world is organized around provision. It runs through several loosely coordinated systems: child support enforcement, welfare administration, child protection, the criminal legal system, and the federally funded fatherhood programs alongside them. Fathers tend to arrive by way of a legal event rather than a choice, most often one that follows from living apart from their children. Much of it operates on a premise that Ron Mincy and Kevin Roy call a deficit model, in which the disadvantaged father is presumed to lack skills, commitment, or moral grounding, and is asked to demonstrate fitness through employment and payment before being treated as a parent.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 built much of the machinery, reorganizing child support around location, automation, and sanction. New hire directories and linked case registries made it possible to find a father who changed jobs or moved. License suspension and passport denial followed unpaid arrears. For families receiving public assistance, the state generally kept the child support it collected to offset the cost of that assistance, rather than giving the money directly to the family.
The federal funding structure carries the same priorities. States earn incentive payments on five measures: paternity establishment, order establishment, current collections, arrears collections, and cost-effectiveness. Nothing in the formula asks whether a child is better off, or whether a father is any closer to his children.
What this framework systematically misses is the structural argument William Julius Wilson had laid out years earlier. The collapse of urban manufacturing labor markets in the 1970s and 1980s, and the service-sector instability that followed, made the financial obligations imposed by the new enforcement regime impossible for many fathers to meet regardless of their intentions. Kathy Edin and Tim Nelson’s fieldwork confirmed this: disadvantaged fathers loved their children, provided informal support when they could, and visited as often as circumstances allowed. Yet the system treated them as risks to be managed rather than parents to be supported.
In recent years, there has been some progress towards less punitive policy. Federal rules now direct states to set child support orders based on ability to pay, and many states have stopped letting arrears build during incarceration. A few, like Illinois and Colorado, have stopped the recovery of welfare costs from child support and now send the collections to the children instead, though close to half of states still pass nothing through to the family. California and Maryland recently exempted low-income parents from driver’s license suspension, a penalty that remains standard almost everywhere else. The progress is slow and uneven, however, with most of the enforcement architecture still in place.
New fatherhood and DIY work-family balance
The second world is organized around involvement. It centers on norms around a new kind of father who is present, nurturing, and emotionally engaged. It emerged in the 1970s and 1980s alongside women’s increasing entry into paid work, and became the standard against which fathers are now widely measured. The problem is that the ideal puts the roles of providing and nurturing at odds with each other. Meeting the new ideal takes time, predictable work hours, and the ability to step away from work while keeping income and social standing. Fathers in the first world are often treated as being unwilling to provide, rather than unable. Here, fathers are seen as unwilling to nurture or be more engaged, rather than as being up against various structural barriers that prevent them from the level of involvement they desire.
Policy could lower these barriers directly, and the tools are well established across peer nations: paid parental, medical, and carer leave; flexible work provisions covering time, place, and load; child allowances; and childcare subsidies. However, what American fathers can actually assemble comes from what an employer offers, what a state has enacted, and what a family can buy, which means parental leave and flexible scheduling where employers provide them, a consumer market of books, apps, classes, and paid help, and public paid leave where the state offers it. It is a do-it-yourself arrangement where often only the most privileged can hope to find success. Salaried professionals are better placed to negotiate flexibility than hourly and shift workers, and access to flexible arrangements tracks occupation and education fairly closely. The design also assumes a stable partner and a formal employment relationship, so fathers bouncing between informal and formal work, managing child support debt or parole conditions, or sharing custody across unstable housing tend to fall outside its view, as do the self-employed and workers earning below program thresholds.
Here too there has been some real progress. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia now pay benefits under mandatory paid family and medical leave programs covering bonding, personal illness, and family caregiving, with more phasing in through 2028. Oregon and roughly a dozen cities have enacted fair workweek laws that give hourly workers their schedules in advance. The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit functioned as a child allowance for six months before it lapsed. There is growing evidence that fathers take up what is available to them. AIBM’s Anders Knospe and Richard Reeves find that fathers’ leave-taking has roughly tripled since 2019, with the largest gains in states that enacted programs.
We also know that punitive enforcement approaches can backfire. In my own research with Maureen Waller, Lenna Nepomnyaschy, and Dan Miller, we show that large child support debts are associated with worse physical and mental health among disadvantaged fathers, lower employment, and reduced involvement in children’s lives. The men who need support most are often the ones rendered least able to participate meaningfully in their children’s lives.
Finally, we know what works. Paid paternity leave—especially when it’s nontransferable and well-compensated—increases men’s long-term caregiving involvement. Parenting classes, when accessible and relationally framed, can benefit all fathers, not just those flagged by the courts. Social service agencies that treat fathers as clients instead of targets of compliance have greater success enrolling and retaining them.
Scholars like Rob Palkovitz, Brent McBride, and Kari Adamson have shown how fathering is not just a behavior but an identity. It is co-constructed in relationships, formed through practice, and deeply shaped by how institutions treat—or fail to treat—men as parents. When fathers are recognized as caregivers, not just providers or paychecks, they respond with increased presence, confidence, and commitment.
What a unified approach looks like
Unifying fatherhood policy doesn’t mean every program has to serve every father the same way. But it does mean rejecting a tiered model in which some men are expected to “step up” while others are forced to “prove it.”
What we need are:
Integrated parenting policies that offer all fathers access to leave, education, and developmental support.
Reformed child support systems that prioritize ability to pay, recognize informal contributions, and link financial responsibility to parenting rights.
Universal fatherhood programming, where the same agencies that serve low-income dads offer parenting resources to those returning from paternity leave—and vice versa.
Broader institutional support across workplaces, court systems, parenting councils, coalitions, and other state- and community-level programs that serve fathers.
Greater outreach to fathers in education, health care and other public services.
Relational framing of fatherhood in policy: fatherhood is not a status to earn or a responsibility to enforce, it is a vital component in children’s lives.
Universal paid parental leave is the single most consequential reform, and the greatest benefit is found after fathers take at least 1-2 months off. Leave that is paid, available regardless of employer size or sector, and structured in a way that incentivizes men to take as much time off as possible (i.e. full wage replacement, job protection, etc.). Related structures like daddy quotas or “use it or lose it” months in Norway are the most studied natural experiments in this literature (see: Cools, Fiever, & Kirkeboen, 2015; Hart, Anderson, & Drange, 2022; Kotsadam & Finseraas, 2011), with documented increases in fathers’ caregiving, child outcomes, and family harmony all a result of earmarked paternal leave.
Child support should reflect what parents can realistically pay and adjust automatically when their circumstances change. States should also stop keeping child-support payments to reimburse welfare costs. Full pass-through sends money to children rather than to state welfare reimbursement.
Parenting time should be established when support is established. Federal Parenting Time Opportunities for Children grants tested this in five states, setting parenting orders alongside new support orders with safety screening built in.
Fatherhood programming should be open to every father. Supporting Father Involvement, built around couples and co-parenting, produced significant gains in father involvement and reductions in family conflict in a randomized trial.
Community organizations have built culturally grounded curricula that public agencies rarely offer at any income level, among them the National Compadres Network’s healing-centered model and 24/7 Dad, now running in more than 430 organizations across 45 states. The challenge is connecting these into a system rather than leaving them as demonstration projects.
In short, the effects of paid sick, parental and caregiving leave, flexible work policies, child allowances, subsidized childcare, and parenting courses hold across income levels, making them all candidates for universal application. But whatever the specific policies and programs are, and regardless of which populations they serve, each should be built around a unified purpose of encouraging father involvement, improving child outcomes, and building strong families.
The path forward
Fatherhood is not a fixed institution. It is a social role, shaped by culture, policy, and opportunity. As Michele Lamont has argued, who we see as deserving of help and dignity is not a fact of nature, it’s a reflection of social norms and institutional design.
We don’t need to choose between responsible fatherhood and engaged fatherhood, or between enforcement and aspiration. We can support both responsibility and presence by building systems founded in mutual care, connection, and healthy development, systems that offer all fathers the tools to participate in their children’s lives.
Nathan Robbins
Robbins studies the challenges and barriers fathers face in their involvement with their families, and the policies that help and hinder their efforts.
CommentaryFatherhood & Family
Rich dad, poor dad: The two worlds of fatherhood policy
Bifurcated attitudes and policy towards American fathers
In the eyes of policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and the general public, there are two kinds of dads. One set is deemed unfit, and told they need to be more “responsible”: they receive legal orders, wage garnishments, and surveillance from agencies whose primary tool is enforcement, not assistance. The other set is told they should be even more engaged and involved: they’re offered parenting classes, encouraged to take a few weeks of unpaid leave, maybe given access to a peer support group or a co-parenting workshop.
Fathers are assigned to these sets based on their perceived ability to fill two main obligations to their families. The first is to provide financially, and the second is to be closely involved, physically and emotionally—a role often only allowed and/or expected after fulfilling the first. Two worlds of norms, expectations, and policies (or lack thereof) have coalesced over the years to ensure fathers deliver on these obligations. Lower income and disadvantaged fathers who are unable to provide for their families are marginalized, often navigating unstable relationships, impermanent residence and custody, and end up in a system based on extracting support rather than providing it. More advantaged fathers are expected to meet high levels of involvement and care and to find their own way to reach them, out of whatever their employer, their state, and/or their savings will cover.
Of course, the lived experience of fatherhood is more complex. Plenty of low-income fathers hold steady jobs and live with their children, and plenty of well-paid fathers live apart from theirs. Even in the “privileged” policy world, the pressures and stigma are a burden. In one sample 73% of men reported little workplace support for fathers, and 1 in 5 men feared losing their job if they took paternity leave. Working fathers are increasingly expected to be engaged, nurturing caregivers while still serving as providers in rigid work cultures and institutions. They are offered little to no family supportive policies to help them prepare for or execute the role of involved father. Meanwhile, disadvantaged fathers—especially Black and brown men in disadvantaged families—are often deeply invested in their children’s lives, yet are shut out of parenting decisions and pursued as debtors when they fall behind on impossible child support orders.
Fathers in both worlds experience their own version of being left to fend for themselves. Neither group has what it needs to thrive, and both suffer from a fractured approach to fatherhood that treats engagement as a virtue for some and an obligation for others.
We don’t need more pressure and shaming for the middle class and above, or more policing initiatives for the poor.
What we need is a shift in orientation from enforcement toward support, and a unified policy framework that sees all fathers as caregivers, co-parents, and contributors to their children’s wellbeing.
Two worlds, one broken system
After decades of treating men primarily as breadwinners and background figures in family life, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to bring fathers forward as focal and developmental figures in family well-being. Father involvement was conceptualized to include close engagement, being accessible, and bearing responsibility across everyday domains of caregiving. Research began to reveal the host of positive effects father involvement had in children’s lives, and efforts expanded to try to better understand the conditions that enable or prevent it. Policy has lagged behind for men from all backgrounds in providing the support fathers need in being there for their families.
The deficit model and responsible fatherhood
The first world is organized around provision. It runs through several loosely coordinated systems: child support enforcement, welfare administration, child protection, the criminal legal system, and the federally funded fatherhood programs alongside them. Fathers tend to arrive by way of a legal event rather than a choice, most often one that follows from living apart from their children. Much of it operates on a premise that Ron Mincy and Kevin Roy call a deficit model, in which the disadvantaged father is presumed to lack skills, commitment, or moral grounding, and is asked to demonstrate fitness through employment and payment before being treated as a parent.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 built much of the machinery, reorganizing child support around location, automation, and sanction. New hire directories and linked case registries made it possible to find a father who changed jobs or moved. License suspension and passport denial followed unpaid arrears. For families receiving public assistance, the state generally kept the child support it collected to offset the cost of that assistance, rather than giving the money directly to the family.
The federal funding structure carries the same priorities. States earn incentive payments on five measures: paternity establishment, order establishment, current collections, arrears collections, and cost-effectiveness. Nothing in the formula asks whether a child is better off, or whether a father is any closer to his children.
What this framework systematically misses is the structural argument William Julius Wilson had laid out years earlier. The collapse of urban manufacturing labor markets in the 1970s and 1980s, and the service-sector instability that followed, made the financial obligations imposed by the new enforcement regime impossible for many fathers to meet regardless of their intentions. Kathy Edin and Tim Nelson’s fieldwork confirmed this: disadvantaged fathers loved their children, provided informal support when they could, and visited as often as circumstances allowed. Yet the system treated them as risks to be managed rather than parents to be supported.
In recent years, there has been some progress towards less punitive policy. Federal rules now direct states to set child support orders based on ability to pay, and many states have stopped letting arrears build during incarceration. A few, like Illinois and Colorado, have stopped the recovery of welfare costs from child support and now send the collections to the children instead, though close to half of states still pass nothing through to the family. California and Maryland recently exempted low-income parents from driver’s license suspension, a penalty that remains standard almost everywhere else. The progress is slow and uneven, however, with most of the enforcement architecture still in place.
New fatherhood and DIY work-family balance
The second world is organized around involvement. It centers on norms around a new kind of father who is present, nurturing, and emotionally engaged. It emerged in the 1970s and 1980s alongside women’s increasing entry into paid work, and became the standard against which fathers are now widely measured. The problem is that the ideal puts the roles of providing and nurturing at odds with each other. Meeting the new ideal takes time, predictable work hours, and the ability to step away from work while keeping income and social standing. Fathers in the first world are often treated as being unwilling to provide, rather than unable. Here, fathers are seen as unwilling to nurture or be more engaged, rather than as being up against various structural barriers that prevent them from the level of involvement they desire.
Policy could lower these barriers directly, and the tools are well established across peer nations: paid parental, medical, and carer leave; flexible work provisions covering time, place, and load; child allowances; and childcare subsidies. However, what American fathers can actually assemble comes from what an employer offers, what a state has enacted, and what a family can buy, which means parental leave and flexible scheduling where employers provide them, a consumer market of books, apps, classes, and paid help, and public paid leave where the state offers it. It is a do-it-yourself arrangement where often only the most privileged can hope to find success. Salaried professionals are better placed to negotiate flexibility than hourly and shift workers, and access to flexible arrangements tracks occupation and education fairly closely. The design also assumes a stable partner and a formal employment relationship, so fathers bouncing between informal and formal work, managing child support debt or parole conditions, or sharing custody across unstable housing tend to fall outside its view, as do the self-employed and workers earning below program thresholds.
Here too there has been some real progress. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia now pay benefits under mandatory paid family and medical leave programs covering bonding, personal illness, and family caregiving, with more phasing in through 2028. Oregon and roughly a dozen cities have enacted fair workweek laws that give hourly workers their schedules in advance. The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit functioned as a child allowance for six months before it lapsed. There is growing evidence that fathers take up what is available to them. AIBM’s Anders Knospe and Richard Reeves find that fathers’ leave-taking has roughly tripled since 2019, with the largest gains in states that enacted programs.
Fathers need support, not enforcement
There is no empirical justification for maintaining these two worlds. We know that involved fathering benefits children—in areas ranging from school readiness to adolescent well-being— regardless of marital status, income, or race. We know that fathers’ early engagement predicts long-term involvement.
We also know that punitive enforcement approaches can backfire. In my own research with Maureen Waller, Lenna Nepomnyaschy, and Dan Miller, we show that large child support debts are associated with worse physical and mental health among disadvantaged fathers, lower employment, and reduced involvement in children’s lives. The men who need support most are often the ones rendered least able to participate meaningfully in their children’s lives.
Finally, we know what works. Paid paternity leave—especially when it’s nontransferable and well-compensated—increases men’s long-term caregiving involvement. Parenting classes, when accessible and relationally framed, can benefit all fathers, not just those flagged by the courts. Social service agencies that treat fathers as clients instead of targets of compliance have greater success enrolling and retaining them.
Scholars like Rob Palkovitz, Brent McBride, and Kari Adamson have shown how fathering is not just a behavior but an identity. It is co-constructed in relationships, formed through practice, and deeply shaped by how institutions treat—or fail to treat—men as parents. When fathers are recognized as caregivers, not just providers or paychecks, they respond with increased presence, confidence, and commitment.
What a unified approach looks like
Unifying fatherhood policy doesn’t mean every program has to serve every father the same way. But it does mean rejecting a tiered model in which some men are expected to “step up” while others are forced to “prove it.”
What we need are:
Universal paid parental leave is the single most consequential reform, and the greatest benefit is found after fathers take at least 1-2 months off. Leave that is paid, available regardless of employer size or sector, and structured in a way that incentivizes men to take as much time off as possible (i.e. full wage replacement, job protection, etc.). Related structures like daddy quotas or “use it or lose it” months in Norway are the most studied natural experiments in this literature (see: Cools, Fiever, & Kirkeboen, 2015; Hart, Anderson, & Drange, 2022; Kotsadam & Finseraas, 2011), with documented increases in fathers’ caregiving, child outcomes, and family harmony all a result of earmarked paternal leave.
Child support should reflect what parents can realistically pay and adjust automatically when their circumstances change. States should also stop keeping child-support payments to reimburse welfare costs. Full pass-through sends money to children rather than to state welfare reimbursement.
Parenting time should be established when support is established. Federal Parenting Time Opportunities for Children grants tested this in five states, setting parenting orders alongside new support orders with safety screening built in.
Fatherhood programming should be open to every father. Supporting Father Involvement, built around couples and co-parenting, produced significant gains in father involvement and reductions in family conflict in a randomized trial.
Community organizations have built culturally grounded curricula that public agencies rarely offer at any income level, among them the National Compadres Network’s healing-centered model and 24/7 Dad, now running in more than 430 organizations across 45 states. The challenge is connecting these into a system rather than leaving them as demonstration projects.
In short, the effects of paid sick, parental and caregiving leave, flexible work policies, child allowances, subsidized childcare, and parenting courses hold across income levels, making them all candidates for universal application. But whatever the specific policies and programs are, and regardless of which populations they serve, each should be built around a unified purpose of encouraging father involvement, improving child outcomes, and building strong families.
The path forward
Fatherhood is not a fixed institution. It is a social role, shaped by culture, policy, and opportunity. As Michele Lamont has argued, who we see as deserving of help and dignity is not a fact of nature, it’s a reflection of social norms and institutional design.
We don’t need to choose between responsible fatherhood and engaged fatherhood, or between enforcement and aspiration. We can support both responsibility and presence by building systems founded in mutual care, connection, and healthy development, systems that offer all fathers the tools to participate in their children’s lives.
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