Good Dads: Religion, Civic Engagement, & Paternal Involvement in Low-Income Communitites

Executive Summary

While the last decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in research on civil society, this work has largely overlooked potential links between civil society and the family. This study begins to fill this gap by exploring the connections between religion, civic engagement, and paternal involvement. I focus on religion because of its longstanding ties to childrearing and its historic status as an anchor of moral convention in low-income communities. Using nationally representative data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), I find that residential fathers who are involved in religious organizations are significantly more likely to have dinner with their children and to be involved in youth-related activities such as the Boy Scouts or sports teams. Moreover, these findings do not appear to be artifacts of a father's more generic integration into the social order; statistical analyses that include measures of his nonreligious civic involvement do not eliminate the net effect of religion on these two dimensions of paternal involvement. This study also finds that the links between religious involvement and paternal involvement are particularly strong for lower-income fathers, probably because religious organizations tend to be pillars of moral and social order in low-income communities. Finally, I find that non-religious forms of civic engagement are also positively related to higher levels of paternal involvement. I conclude by calling for more private and public efforts to support and study the role that religious and non-religious civic institutions play in family life, particularly in low-income communities where declines in civic engagement have been most pronounced.

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