The Census Bureau has demonstrated that complicated family relationships can be measured when we decide they are worth measuring.

But America has spent decades making enormous policy decisions about fathers while too often measuring fathers indirectly through mothers, households, child support cases, marriage records, birth certificates, or children’s primary addresses. These data sources are valuable. But none, standing alone, constitutes a full measure of fatherhood.

We don’t believe there’s a shortage of fathers in the data; we believe there’s a shortage of questions capable of describing them.

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

New federal data on immigrant generations reveal why we must stop turning household categories into conclusions about fatherhood.

In 2020, when the last U.S. Census was being conducted, Fathers Incorporated spent months telling Black men something simple: Make sure you’re counted.

Through our Black Dads Count campaign, we worked with Fair Count and community partners in barbershops, neighborhoods, churches, and public forums because we understood what an undercount would mean. When men disappear from the numbers, communities can disappear from allocated resources, representation, policy priorities, and public concern. At the time, as many as 67,000 Black men in Georgia were estimated to be at risk of being missed in the Census.

Six years later, I find myself thinking about a related question: What happens when Dad is counted as a person, but the data don’t see him as a father?

That question came back to me while reviewing the Census Bureau’s newly released 2025 Current Population Survey tables on the foreign-born population by generation. The tables allow us to examine first-generation Americans who are foreign-born, second-generation Americans who have at least one foreign-born parent, and third and higher generations whose parents are both U.S. natives. They provide information on household type, education, employment, occupation, income, earnings, poverty, health insurance, and homeownership.

Finding Fathers in Census Data

For Fathers Incorporated, there’s a great deal worth studying here in the new tables from the Census Bureau.

We should look at how household formation changes across immigrant generations. We should examine whether economic security rises or falls across generations, what happens to marriage and family households, whether families rent or own, how educational attainment translates into employment, and where poverty persists even as families become more established in the United States.

These questions matter because fatherhood exists within these economics. A father’s ability to provide, maintain housing, travel between homes, pay child support, take time away from work, secure child care, or stay close to his children often depends on the economic conditions surrounding the family.

But there distinctions we must make:

• A male family householder isn’t automatically a father.
• A male householder with no spouse present isn’t automatically a single dad.
• A household containing children isn’t automatically a household containing that man’s children.
• And a child who doesn’t live with their father isn’t automatically a child without an involved father.

These may sound like technical distinctions, but after more than two decades of working with fathers and families, I’ve learned that technical distinctions have human consequences.

The Census Bureau itself gives us the language necessary to understand the problem: 

• A “householder” is essentially the reference person associated with the ownership or rental of the housing unit. A family household requires at least one other person related to that householder by birth, marriage, or adoption. That relative might be a child. It might also be a parent, sibling, grandchild, niece, nephew, or another relative. That means when we see “male householder, no spouse present” in a table, we can’t simply translate that category into “father.”
• The Census has another term that gets us closer: “own children.” In CPS terminology, own children are sons and daughters of the householder, including adopted children and stepchildren. That measure gives us substantially more information about parenting relationships within a household.

So when Fathers Incorporated prepares its analysis of these new generational tables, we should pair household data with CPS or American Community Survey tables identifying children, own children, and family relationships before making claims about fathers.

That isn’t statistical nitpicking. It’s statistical integrity.

Dangerous Assumptions About Father Absence

For years, the responsible fatherhood field has watched something troubling happen to family data. 

A source measures household residence, then someone translates that into parental absence. Another person turns parental absence into paternal abandonment. By the time the statistic reaches social media, the finding has become a declaration about millions of fathers the original survey never actually measured.

That’s one of the reasons we’ve spent the past year developing our forthcoming white paper, Deconstructing “Fatherless: How Data, Policy, and Public Language Misrepresent Father Presence.”

The central argument is straightforward. Marriage is a family structure. Residence is a living arrangement. Presence is a behavior. Engagement is a relationship. Those things can overlap, but they’re not interchangeable.

Our research found that household surveys are generally very good at answering the question they were designed to answer: Who usually lives here? But they’re much less capable of answering another question: Who’s parenting this child across all the places and relationships that constitute the child’s life?

This difference becomes especially important in an America where children may move between two homes, spend weekends or summers with Dad, communicate with a nonresident parent daily, receive transportation to school from one parent and medical care from another, live with grandparents for periods of time, or maintain important relationships with parents separated from them because of military service, incarceration, hospitalization, immigration circumstances, employment, or family court arrangements.

The Census Bureau needs a primary residence. A child only gets counted once.

But children’s relationships don’t obey that rule.

Our white paper describes the blind spot plainly: Census, ACS, and CPS household data are strong measures of usual residence and economic characteristics, but they can miss the second household, shared care, informal support, nonresident contact, and the emotional relationship between parent and child.

This is why I keep returning to a statement I’ve used for years: There’s no such thing as a fatherless child. The question isn’t whether the father exists. The question is where he exists.

That statement isn’t a defense of irresponsible fathers.

Some fathers abandon their responsibilities. Some are inconsistent. Some refuse to provide financially when they have the ability to do so. Some create conflict that harms the mother of their children and, ultimately, their children. Some fathers must be kept at a distance because of abuse, violence, coercive control, or credible threats to safety.

Dad-centered can’t mean Dad-defensive, but we must hold ourselves accountable to accuracy:

• If a father abandoned his child, say that.
• If he hasn’t contacted his child in two years, measure that.
• If he’s incarcerated, say that.
• If he lives three miles away and has the child every weekend, capture that.
• If he lives in another household but attends every parent-teacher conference, knows the pediatrician, pays his support, buys clothes, coaches soccer, calls every night, and is available when his child needs him, residence alone can’t tell us whether that man is present.

Likewise, sharing an address with a child doesn’t automatically make a man an engaged father.

A Better Way to Measure Fatherhood

Our forthcoming paper proposes moving beyond the binary categories of “present” and “absent” by measuring fatherhood across multiple dimensions: biological or parental identity, legal status, residence, parenting time, contact, caregiving, accessibility, responsibility, financial contribution, co-parenting, barriers to involvement, safety, relationship history, and the child’s own experience of the relationship.

Imagine what federal family data could tell us if even a small version of that framework were incorporated into recurring surveys:

• Is this man the child’s biological, adoptive, step-, legal, or social father?
• Does he live with the child full time, part time, or elsewhere?
• How many nights did the child spend in his care during the previous month?
• How often do they speak, text, video chat, or see each other?
• Does he attend medical appointments or school activities?
• Who arranges child care?
• Who handles transportation?
• Does he make decisions about education or health?
• What financial support occurs outside formal child support payments?
• What keeps him from spending more time with the child?
• How would the co-parent describe the relationship?
• How would the child describe it?
• Are there safety reasons why contact should be supervised, restricted, or prohibited?

These questions don’t make every father look better; they make every father easier to see.

And better measurement might actually strengthen accountability. When we know what Dad is doing, we can also see what he isn’t doing. We can distinguish the father who can’t pay from the father who won’t pay. We can distinguish the father prevented from seeing his child from the father who rarely tries. We can distinguish the dad working two jobs who calls every night from the man who shares an address but barely interacts with his children.

Precision doesn’t weaken standards for fatherhood; it gives us better standards.

Our own experience at Fathers Incorporated has repeatedly reinforced this lesson. Years ago, our What About Dad? training urged human service organizations to include fathers in routine data collection and statistical reporting instead of allowing the mother-child relationship to become the sole lens through which a family is understood. More recently, researchers examining father-supportive policies across all 50 states identified better measurement of father engagement as an explicit national need.

Our direct service work teaches us the same thing from the other direction. When we improve the questions we ask fathers, we discover needs that broad demographic categories can’t reveal. We’ve changed intake practices to better identify returning citizens, and our evaluations have shown why context-sensitive measures matter when fathers face legal or custodial constraints affecting their ability to answer traditional parenting questions.

The newly released foreign-born tables create an especially valuable opportunity to get this right.

Immigrant and multigenerational families can have complex family networks:

• Some households are multigenerational. 
• Some fathers migrate before their children. 
• Some children migrate before a parent. 
• Some families send money across national borders. 
• Some grandparents perform substantial caregiving. 
• Some fathers are separated temporarily by immigration processes or employment. 
• Other families settle together and build extraordinary stability across generations.

The Census data can help us understand these household and economic patterns, but we should resist the temptation to make the data say more than they say.

If the variable is household type, call it household type. If it’s male householder, call him a male householder. If the data establish that his own children live with him, then we can begin talking about resident fatherhood. If we want to understand fathers who live somewhere else, then we need to ask additional questions.

That last point may be the most consequential.

Improving Data Collection on Fatherhood

America has spent decades making enormous policy decisions about fathers while too often measuring fathers indirectly through mothers, households, child support cases, marriage records, birth certificates, or children’s primary addresses. Those data sources are valuable. None, standing alone, constitutes a full measure of fatherhood.

Federal surveys should begin routinely collecting data on biological or adoptive parenthood, residence, parenting time, caregiving responsibility, financial and in-kind support, co-parenting conditions, and contact with children who live elsewhere. Where appropriate, we should hear from fathers themselves, from co-parents, and, developmentally and safely, from children.

The Census Bureau has demonstrated that complicated family relationships can be measured when we decide they are worth measuring. Its own CPS definition of “own children” proves that relationship-specific distinctions are possible. The National Survey of Family Growth has gone further by asking men about children who live with them and children who live elsewhere and about the parenting activities they perform.

We don’t have a shortage of fathers in American data; we have a shortage of questions capable of describing them.

In 2020, Black Dads Count was our demand that fathers not disappear from the count. The next chapter of that work is more ambitious:

Count Dad.

Then ask enough about him to know who he is.