Paternal Identity Among Urban Adolescent Males

Research studies addressing the distinctions between adolescent fathers and non-fathers' paternal role perceptual development and performance are scarce. As a result, our understanding of the antecedents of early paternity among African-American adolescent males is unclear and intervention strategies remain virtually untapped. This gap in knowledge represents a challenge to both social science researchers and intervention practitioners. The rising tide of early parenthood has become a centerpiece of public policy discourse. Media depictions of adolescent parenting among inner city African-American adolescents contribute to the societal perception of all African-American adolescent males and females as 'children having children.' In my recent study of urban, lower socioeconomic status African-American males, a number of the young men interviewed disclosed normative paternal role expectations. Their patterns of paternal role functioning as fathers, however, reflected inadequate normative paternal role performance (Johnson, 1993). It is conceivable that the disclosures about their paternal perceptual development may simply reflect their eagerness to provide expected responses in order to detract from their otherwise non-normative paternal perceptions and behavior. Previous research supports this contention given that adolescent fathers are typically characterized as " hit and run victimizers who father children without any commitment to paternal support" (Group for the It is also possible that the disjuncture between role perceptions prior to paternity and their subsequent patterns of paternal role behavior might be explained in terms of the adolescent males' concepts of possible selves, a cognitive component within the domain of self-knowledge (Markus and Nurius, 1986). Possible selves, in this perspective, represent the young males' ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming and thus provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation. Possible selves are the cognitive components of hopes, fears, goals, and threats to idealized paternal role functioning. They give the specific self-relevant form, meaning, organization, and direction of these dynamics. Possible selves, as a theoretical construct, provide a framework for exploring the relationship between the self-concept and behavior (Markus and Nurius, 1986). The concept of possible selves is derived from representations of the self in the past and they include representations of the self in the future (Markus and Nurius, 1986). They are different and separable from the current and now selves, yet are intimately connected to them. Possible future selves, for example, are not just any set of imagined roles or states of being. Instead they represent …