INTRODUCTION
In recent years, social scientists have produced a large and valuable body of work on a formerly
neglected topic: the parenting of resident fathers. Much of this research has been guided by the concept of
involvement. As defined by Lamb, Pleck, and co-authors’ (1987), involvement is a three-part construct
consisting of a father’s direct interaction with a child, availability for interaction, and responsibility for the
child’s care.
A small amount of research has asked whether involvement is related to fertility timing, or the age
at which men become fathers for the very first time. Several authors report that men who delay fatherhood
until an older age than average tend to be very involved in their children’s day-to-day care (Coltrane 1996;
Daniels and Weingarten 1982). One study, however, suggests the relationship is conditional; the authors
find that delayed fathers tend to be highly involved only if they have positive feelings about parenting
(Cooney, Pedersen, Indelicato, and Palkovitz 1993).
The unresolved question about timing seems to be whether it is associated with involvement for all
fathers, or only under specific conditions. This question is worth investigating because, in recent years,
transitions to fatherhood in the United States have been taking place at more widely varying ages. Among
participants in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a nationally representative data source, 25
percent of men who became fathers during the 1970s had done so by age 21, and 75 percent had made the
transition by age 26, meaning half of new fathers had their first child within a five year age interval.
1
In the
1980s, half of new fathers made the transition between ages 22 and 28.5 (a 6.5 year interval), and in the
1990s the range increased from ages 21 to 30 (a nine year interval). Among men who became fathers
within marriage, the dispersion grew similarly.
2
If the timing of the transition to parenthood increasingly
distinguishes fathers from one another, then it is worth gaining as full an understanding as possible of what
effects it has upon involvement.
This paper is part of a broader project about the causes and consequences of increasing diversity in
fatherhood timing. In this study, I investigate the effect of timing on one important kind of involvement:
1
See below for more information about the PSID.
2
The trend is virtually the same if one looks at standard deviation of the mean age of becoming a
father, rather than the inter-quartile range.
Convention