A number of researchers have tried to understand how father abandonment happens, most importantly Kathryn Edin
and Timothy J. Nelson, who moved to Philadelphia and Camden, N. J., immersed themselves in the neighborhoods there and produced an amazing account, “Doing the Best I Can.”
Pregnancy is rarely planned among the populations they studied.
You meet guys who desperately did not want to leave their children, who swear they have tried to be with them, who may feel unworthy of fatherhood
but who don’t want to be the missing dad their own father was.
Why Fathers Leave Their Children -
Millions of poor children and teenagers grow up without their biological father,
and often when you ask them about it, you hear a litany of male barbarism.
Buried in the rigors of motherhood, the women, meanwhile, take a very practical view of what they need in a
man: Will this guy provide the financial stability I need, and if not, can I trade up to someone who will?
You hear teens describe how their dad used to beat up their mom, how an absent father had five kids with different women and abandoned them all.
He believes in fatherhood and tries it again with other women, with the same high hopes,
but he’s really only taking care of the child he happens to be living with at any given moment.
