Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City

Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as “deadbeat dads.” Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly―without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship’s demise. They offer keen insight into a radical redefinition of family life where the father-child bond is central and parental ties are peripheral.

Drawing on years of fieldwork, Doing the Best I Can shows how mammoth economic and cultural changes have transformed the meaning of fatherhood among the urban poor. Intimate interviews with more than 100 fathers make real the significant obstacles faced by low-income men at every step in the familial process: from the difficulties of romantic relationships, to decision-making dilemmas at conception, to the often celebratory moment of birth, and finally to the hardships that accompany the early years of the child's life, and beyond.

• Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd Edition with an Update a Decade Later
• Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, with a New Preface
• The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change (Second Edition)
• The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family
• The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
• Public and Private Families: A Reader
• Divided by Borders
• The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
• The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope With Mental Illness
• Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin