![handle is hein.cow/anamacp0635 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION
Young
Disadvantaged
Men: Fathers,
Families,
Poverty, and
Policy
By
TIMOTHY M. SMEEDING,
IRWIN GARFINKEL,
and
RONALD B. MINCY
This introductory article opens this special
issue of The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science on young dis-
advantaged men by explaining the purpose of the
conference and its overall contribution to our
understanding of poverty and disadvantage. We
start by explaining how young men are doing in
the face of low educational achievement, job-
lessness, out-of-wedlock childbearing, incar-
ceration, and in the face of the Great Recession
as a way to frame the problems that this volume
addresses (see also Peck 2010).
We begin with the fact that by age 30, between
68 and 75 percent of young men with a high
school degree or less are fathers (see National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth [NLSY], U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics 1997; National Survey
of Family Growth [NSFG], U.S. Centers for
Disease Control 2002) (see Table 1). Becoming
a teen father reduces the likelihood of a high
school diploma and GED receipt instead of a
normal degree but has no positive effect on
net earnings (Fletcher and Wolfe 2010). Only
52 percent of all fathers (21 percent of black
fathers) under age 25 were married at the birth
of their first child.! Men among this group who
become fathers at older ages are more likely to
be married by age 30. Sixty-five percent of all
NOTE: The authors thank several sponsors, while dis-
sociating all of these organizations from the conclusions
and analyses presented in this article. We thank the
Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, operating under funding from the
Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation at the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We
also thank the Columbia University Population
Research Center and the Center for Research on
Fathers, Children and Well-Being, also at Columbia
University, for financial and staff support. Special
thanks are given to Callie Langton, Becky Pettit,
Andrew Weinshenker, and Ty Wilde for help with data
preparation. We also thank Deborah Johnson for edito-
rial assistance and Dawn Duren for graph and table
preparation. We assume full responsibility for all errors
of omission and commission.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716210394774
ANNALS, AAPSS, 635, May 2011
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